Local Democracy in Crisis?

28/11/202426/11/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Peter Hetherington

Battered by fourteen years of austerity, is local government losing its once-proud standing and status? Probably. For a start, It’s no longer as ‘local’ as it should be. And it certainly isn’t ‘government’ as we once knew it.

These days, we sometimes tend to lump ‘democracy’ and ‘crisis’ together in a global context, forgetting that close to our doorsteps – in countless civic centres, town and county halls – there’s another crisis: restoring faith in local democracy, while sustaining councils literally facing insolvency.

At a hybrid event, organised by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Newcastle University, we asked a simple question at the start: Do we need a new, positive direction for once-powerful towns and communities where meaningful democracy has disappeared as local government has withdrawn?

We attracted a great range of speakers putting, broadly, two cases: first for a new local government structure in England based on economic geography embracing combined authorities for big city areas alongside large county-wide single purpose unitary authorities, underpinned by a more equitable funding formula; and, secondly, for varying degrees of town and parish governance, sustained by participatory democracy, including citizens assemblies, with powers – parks, libraries, leisure facilities for instance – devolved from existing larger authorities. Often, such an asset transfer is born out of necessity because larger councils can’t afford to keep them anyway and parishes/towns can raise money through a council tax precept while sometimes creating stand-alone community interest companies.

The case for a genuine new ‘localism’ appeared strong. That’s because, currently, a continuing process of abolishing councils to create larger units with few, if any, local roots has created a sense of powerlessness, a collective loss of identity with little or no attachment to people and places. Fifty years’ ago England had almost 1200 councils, from the smallest urban/rural district to the largest city. “We were run by our own,” recalled the writer, broadcaster and ultimate polymath Melvyn Bragg, in his 2022 memoir ‘Back in the Day’. Born in Wigton, Cumbria, his small town had a rural district council (which I knew well): “We could challenge the elected councillors who made the decisions” Bragg continued. “They were not a separate cadre…they were just people you had been to school with…(approach) on the street…to whom you could write a personal letter knowing it would be read, considered, answered.”

No longer. His council disappeared in 1974. Today, after several rounds of ‘reorganisation’ under the dubious label of efficiency – although there’s little concrete evidence of cost saving – that number has been reduced to 317, with little if any public debate. A forthcoming devolution White Paper is expected to advocate more reorganisation and even fewer councils in a country where local authorities already cover much larger areas than in mainland Europe.

Against this background, it’s probably no surprise that Carnegie UK, in its recent ‘Life in the UK’ index, reports that a lack of trust in politics and government is undermining collective well being. Three-quarters of people, says Carnegie, feel they can’t influence decisions. Surely reconnecting them begins locally. But how local?

If the government’s approach so far is a broad definition of ‘taking back control’, could an over-arching contradiction be emerging? Will the apparent obsession with more all-purpose councils, the prospect of an all-unitary England – similar to the structure in Scotland and Wales – make people feel even more distant from power, disaffected? Carnegie insists that restoring faith in democracy should be the Government’s ‘mission of missions’.

If that’s one challenge, there’s another, interlinked: the crisis of financing local government, with 7 councils theoretically insolvent and many more heading that way; legally, they can’t go bust and have been forced to borrow the equivalent of pay-day loans on a mega-scale to stay afloat, adding to a debt mountain. Now Conservative-run Hampshire has said issuing a section 114 notice – prelude to technical insolvency – is “almost inevitable”, with a sting of others close behind. And as Prof Andy Pike, and Jack Shaw have outlined in their recent excellent, but chilling paper (‘The geography of local authority financial distress in England’) 96% of English councils won’t balance their books by 2026-27.

Of course, alongside that unparalleled financial crisis in local government, we’re also facing an alarming democratic challenge nationally with the lowest turnout ever recorded in the recent general election; almost half the electorate didn’t vote! Surely, the place to renew trust in the democratic process begins at the grass roots, perhaps reviving some of the 10,000 town and parish councils, some of which want to take over functions from larger authorities (some are obliging out of necessity). Could this – call it double devolution – provide one small way forward?

I’m aware there’s a danger that events, like the latest one at CURDS addressing the crisis in local democracy, can produce a combination of hand-wringing and hot air. But, hopefully, we concluded with a practical, positive outcome. As Professor Jane Willis, geographer and champion of community empowerment – now in Cornwall- noted: “It’s not all gloom and doom – there is good news.” In her county, communities are taking back control, again out of necessity – a really positive story and a lesson for elsewhere? Willis advocates a new social contract under a layered system of local government to “re-franchise” people.

In the meantime, the chair of the event urged those present to make their views known to MPs, and the government, as the forthcoming devolution White Paper foreshadows a pre-legislative consultation process. As Professor Andy Pike, of CURDS, noted in summing up, one leading question needed answering above all: “What is local government for, and how to fund it?”

All we know so far is that the White Paper, according to the Treasury, will include …“working with councils to move to simpler structures that make sense of their local area with efficiency savings from council reorganisation helping to meet the needs of local people…”. Contradictory or otherwise – will more larger councils “make sense” of local areas? – we must surely intensify a campaign for a genuine new ‘localism’, embracing places, communities, towns and some cities now without any form of local government. That doesn’t necessarily mean sidelining the case for a new – and/or revised – local government structure in England tied to a ‘needs’-based funding formula. The current one favours the richer parts of the country and penalises the poorest with the lowest tax bases.

But the time for national government to act is during the first year or so of a new administration. It assuredly won’t go down well with the ‘middle England’ target readership of – say – the Daily Mail. There’ll be howls of protest. But it must be a priority to bring a sense of fairness to a deeply unequal country and, equally importantly, deliver some hope to voters in the so-called ‘red wall’ seats who either returned to Labour at the last election or voted for an ascendant Reform. We live in a fragile democracy. Restoring faith in government, local and national, begins in community, neighbourhood parish and town. We need the Labour government to think big and act local. We haven’t much time.

Peter Hetherington is a British journalist. He writes regularly for The Guardian on land, communities, and regeneration. He is also a vice-president, and past chair of the Town and Country Planning Association, former regional affairs and northern editor of The Guardian and the author of the 2015 book, Whose Land is Our Land? The use and abuse of Britain’s forgotten acres, and the 2021 book, Land Renewed: Reworking the Countryside.

When paradiplomacy becomes a performative act: Istanbul’s Imamoglu and his quest against competitive-disharmony

19/11/202419/11/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Dr. Ahmet Cemal Erturk & Dr. Nur Sinem Kourou

Paradiplomacy involves multi-level actors in global politics and allows for local governance even within strict unitary state borders. These borders are sharper when regional or sub-national entities diverge from the central government’s policy position. Moreover, political constraints can be intimidation tactics, with authoritarian measures tightening control over municipal autonomy. Therefore, sub-national entities may adopt various strategies to bypass these limitations. Paradiplomacy could become a way out. Sub-national actors may take paradiplomacy as an outlet to counter political pressure and push back against central government authoritarianism. The opportunities created through paradiplomacy also bring local leaders to the forefront of foreign policy. Post-2019 Turkey stands as a benchmark for analysing this issue.

It would not be wrong to describe paradiplomacy as the lifeline of some local governments not aligned with Turkey’s ruling party after the 2019 local elections. Let us look at the background of the situation. AKP’s leading position in national and local governments since its first elections (2003 national, 2004 local) was shaken by the loss of metropolitan municipalities such as Istanbul and Ankara to the main opposition CHP in the 2019 local elections. Since then, a competitive-disharmony phase has opened between the CHP municipalities and the AKP government. In a pattern of competitive-disharmony, local leaders turn foreign relations into a political performance on stage. By strategically communicating and leveraging foreign ties for political gain, sub-national entities can demonstrate their ability to fulfill the needs of both domestic constituents and international partners, thereby positioning themselves to compete with the central government effectively.

The most notable politician in this respect has been Ekrem Imamoglu, the Mayor of Istanbul. This is not only because İmamoğlu is a skilful leader. In the absence of the backing of the national government to run a Megapolis like Istanbul, he has had to pursue other possibilities, making him the actor of paradiplomacy. Disharmony naturally emerges in these relationships, driven by state officials viewing sub-national authorities as existential threats. In centralized and authoritarian contexts, paradiplomacy within competitive-disharmony emerges in two critical areas of foreign policymaking: economic and political. Local leaders build reputations by overcoming these constraints while forging their path through diplomacy. In a sense, they endeavour to become actors in the game to avoid appearing as mere recipients of international actors. By doing so, they become the legitimate, albeit unofficial, government representative in the vacant areas.

The most recent example of this occurred last summer. President Erdoğan’s decision not to attend the 2024 Paris Olympics provided a diplomatic opening for İmamoğlu, who has consistently expressed his desire to host international events like the Summer Olympics. Riding the momentum of his victory in the March 2024 local elections, İmamoğlu travelled to Paris with nearly all CHP district mayors, supporting the national athletes and carving out a new space for diplomacy as he sets his sights on bringing the 2036 Olympics to Istanbul. Imamoğlu’s intention and diplomatic endeavours are also physically present in Paris under the name ‘İstanbul House.’ ‘İstanbul House’ was founded to showcase Istanbul’s sporting and cultural heritage and share the city’s future vision with the world. İmamoğlu’s high-profile involvement in the Paris Olympics and the opening of ‘Istanbul House’ was criticized as a ‘wasteful’ effort by people in Turkey who have struggled with the current economic crisis, yet from a diplomatic perspective, it was another step in the paradiplomacy he has been pursuing in since 2019.

Since the beginning of İmamoğlu’s tenure, instances such as the example of Paris have been evident. Economically, his first term has been marked by a persistent pursuit of external funding, with a focus on leveraging foreign sources such as Deutsche Bank and the French Development Agency. This strategy was designed to bypass the obstacles imposed by domestic funding authorities. Politically, İmamoğlu has also tested the limits of competition with the central government. In a highly unprecedented move in Turkish political history, he appeared as a guest speaker at the 2022 Munich Security Conference, where he outlined an agenda that directly challenged the government’s official foreign policy stance. His speech highlighted the growing democratic regression both domestically and globally, transforming his address into a cautionary narrative for those in attendance.

Although İmamoğlu still has four years remaining as Istanbul’s mayor, experts widely agree that his ambitions extend far beyond his current position. These aspirations are clearly reflected in his approach to paradiplomacy. While the volatility of Turkish politics leaves little room for certainty, one expectation remains clear: the longstanding tension between Erdoğan’s increasingly centralized government and İmamoğlu’s municipality is unlikely to dissipate. Considering the ambitious goals of both parties—one driven by a quest for power, the other by an insatiable pursuit of total hegemony—it is reasonable to expect that competition between the two will persist over the coming half-decade.

This blog post is based on Ertürk, A.C. and Kourou, N.S., 2024. Unlocking pathways in constrained local governance: exploring paradiplomacy under competitive-disharmony through the case of Istanbul. Local Government Studies, pp.1-22. Available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03003930.2024.2377223

Dr. Ahmet Cemal Erturk is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Istanbul Kultur University. He completed his Bachelor of Science degree in International Relations at Middle East Technical University, followed by a Master’s degree from the the University of Manchester and a second Master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Dr. Erturk further pursued his academic journey by obtaining a Ph.D. from the European Institute of Marmara University. Dr. Erturk’s research focuses on pivotal areas such as EU-Turkey relations, sustainable transport policies within the EU framework, and the process of Europeanization in Turkey.

Dr Nur Sinem Kourou is a lecturer at Istanbul Kültür University. She conducts research on the relationship between gender and politics, gender opposition, and women’s political participation in Turkey. Kourou completed Ph.D at Boğaziçi University in 2022. During their doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at Yale University. In 2022, Kourou received the Dicle Koğacıoğlu Article Award from Sabancı University’s Center for Gender and Women’s Studies Excellence, ranking first. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher on a research project supported by the British Academy

We have to talk about OFLOG

02/08/202425/09/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Jason Lowther

It’s been an exciting month in government, nationally and locally, since the General Election on 4th July. As the new Labour administration finds its feet, somewhere on Ministers’ “to do” list will be local government performance and (the department formerly known as) DLUHC’s attempts to improve this through the establishment of OFLOG, the Office for Local Government.

The election marked the exact anniversary of Michael Gove’s statement setting up OFLOG through the policy document, Understanding and supporting local government performance. Its remit was “to provide authoritative and accessible data and analysis about the performance of local government and support its improvement”.

Gove was at pains to stress “this is not about recreating the Audit Commission”. With that point at least, I agree. Whereas the Audit Commission was fiercely independent, often willing to criticise government policy where it was a factor in poor performance, OFLOG was established as an office of the department within the DLUHC department itself. Whereas the Audit Commission developed comprehensive performance measures which were rigorously audited to assure consistency, OFLOG picked 27 PIs and published these. Whereas the Audit Commission provided detailed national studies to inform best practice in local services, sometimes leading to wholesale systems change such as around youth justice services, with the local implementation of recommendations then supported by local specialist value for money auditors, the nascent OFLOG offered to “continue a programme of webinars to share best practice”.

An early product of OFLOG, in July 2023, was its “Local Authority Data Explorer”, which now brings together PIs on waste management, planning, adult social care, roads, and corporate and financial issues. For each service, users can select three comparison councils to produce scatter charts like Figure 1, which compares my local council’s waste management with that of three other big cities. This led to some rather uninformed press commentary and a response from the LGA. One may also say this is perhaps not the most compelling presentation of data in the world, arguably significantly less clear or flexible than the LGA’s excellent Inform tool which has been freely available for several years and includes thousands of published metrics.

Caution should be applied to OFLOG’s position within a ministerial setting and the potential for politicians to be selective in how they use data for judging local authorities that are not of their political persuasion. Whilst some may argue that the former Audit Commission may have been too powerful, it did provide a greater degree of transparency and objectivity at interpreting performance data.

Figure 1: Waste management

As my colleague in Inlogov, Dr Philip Whiteman, has recently argued, the new government should ensure that OFLOG is independent of government with a remit to focus on:

Working with the sector to identify councils at risk of failure to ensure that support can be provided from within the sector, minimising the need for government intervention.
Collecting, analysing, and reporting data to enable individual councils, groups of councils and the sector nationally to make progress with shared priorities agreed with government.
Developing intelligence from on-going engagement with councils.
Supporting improvement in local services and councils’ contribution to national outcomes through researching, synthesising, and disseminating good practice.
Working with academic institutions such as Inlogov to incorporate key lessons from existing and future research.

We can be confident that local government performance overall is strong, and sector-led improvement has demonstrated our collective commitment to continuous improvement. But with so much of the new government’s ambitious “Missions” depending on highly effective local government, we need to take a fresh look at how OFLOG can be further developed to identify and propagate good practice across the sector.

Jason is Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham and was employed by the Audit Commission from 1994 to 2004. This article was first published in the August 2024 LARIA Newsletter. Email [email protected]

INLOGOV’s new report, Equipping Local Government to Deliver National and Local Priorities, is available here.

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ELECTED MAYORAL GOVERNMENT – SOME INLOGOV ANGLES

29/05/202428/05/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Chris Game

This blog was prompted partly by Vivien Lowndes’ and Phil Swann’s recent INLOGOV blog giving “Two cheers for combined authorities and their mayors”. Substantively, anyway, although the decisive stimulus was the realisation that most, if not all, of those present at the relevant ‘Brown Bag’ session would probably have been unaware that seated among them was the co-author of almost certainly the most comprehensive examination of this topic by any INLOGOV colleague over the years.

I refer to the appropriately labelled ‘long-read’, also masquerading as an INLOGOV blog and entitled Briefing Paper: Elected Mayors, published shortly before the 2017 elections of what I think of as the second generation of elected mayors – and produced by Prof Catherine Staite and a Jason Lowther.

Catherine, nowadays an Emeritus Professor of Public Management, had recently stepped down as Director of INLOGOV, in which capacity she had, among numerous other initiatives, both launched and regularly contributed to our/her blog. And, while I certainly recalled reading the Briefing Paper, I confess that, with his name meaning little to me at the time, I’d forgotten her co-author. Apologies, Jason.

He claimed, moreover, that he himself had “forgotten” it (email, 14/5), which I didn’t, of course, believe … until, a few days later and following some ‘research’, I discovered one of my own INLOGOV blogs, on the Magna Carta and 800 years of Elected Mayors, which I really had totally forgotten. Whereupon I realised too that I couldn’t actually recall much of what Catherine, I and other colleagues contributed to that decade of debate on elected mayoral evolution.

So, the remainder, the structure, and – I fear – the length of this blog were prompted, yes, by much of the media coverage of this month’s elections, and the sense that the spread and substance of mayoral government over the past decade aren’t fully recognised even by those who supposedly follow these things; and also by the notion that it would be a pleasing mini-tribute to Catherine to do so by identifying and italicising particularly some of her and colleagues’ INLOGOV blog contributions on these mayoral matters over the years.

We start, however, for the benefit of comparatively late arrivals, at the beginning of not the blog, but the concept. Mayoral government is a postulation you might expect to have found a supportive, even enthusiastic, reception in an Institute of Local Government Studies and it mainly did, albeit with perhaps a certain reservation. Directly elected mayors (DEMs) had played a fluctuating role in the Blair Government’s local government agenda from the outset. London, noted in Labour’s 1997 manifesto as “the only Western capital without an elected city government”, would have a “new deal”. Which took the form in 2000 of the creation of the Mayor-led Greater London Authority – in the manifesto, so no referendum required. Probably no reminder required either, but they’ve been: Ken Livingstone (Ind/Lab; 2000-08), Boris Johnson (Con; 2008-16); Sadiq Khan (Lab; 2016- ).

The Local Government Act 2000 then provided all English and Welsh councils with optional alternatives to the traditional committee system. Chiefly, following a petition of more than 5% of their electorate, they could hold a referendum on whether to introduce a directly elected mayor plus cabinet. There were 30 of these referendums in 2001/02, producing 11 DEMs – plus Stoke-on-Trent’s short-lived mayor-plus-committee system – three in London boroughs, but most famously Hartlepool United’s football mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, aka Stuart Drummond (Indep).

Ten referendums over the ensuing decade produced a further three mayors, prompting the now Cameron-led Conservatives to pledge in their 2010 manifesto to introduce elected ‘Boris-style’ mayors for England’s 12 (eventually 11) largest cities, with significant responsibilities including control of rail and bus services, and money to invest in high-speed broadband.

These DEM referendums eventually took place in May 2012 – three months after the launch of the INLOGOV blog – and provided a natural topic for early blogs by Catherine and colleagues (Ian Briggs). The referendums followed protracted Whitehall battles over mayoral powers (CG) – as revealed by the then Lord Heseltine in a UoB Mayoral Debate (CG) – a combination of ministerial indecision and interference (CG) against a backdrop of opposition from most of the respective councils’ leaderships, with Bristol the only one of the 12 cities voting even narrowly in favour (Thom Oliver).

Birmingham voted 58% against, despite Labour’s having in Liam Byrne a candidate raring to go, and Coventry 64% against. There was speculation over whether the addition of a well publicised mayoral recall provision (CG) might have swung some of the lost referendums. But it was what it looked: an overdue, and to some welcome (Andrew Coulson), end of an episode (Karin Bottom);arguably “the wrong solution to the wrong problem” (Catherine Durose).

Since then, the referendums successfully removing elected mayors (Stoke-on-Trent, Hartlepool, Torbay, Bristol) have exceeded those creating new ones (Copeland, Croydon) – though, in fairness, those four removals were more than matched by five retention votes.

A ‘mayoral map’ at the end of that first decade would have looked something like the inset in my illustration of in fact the first 20 years of referendum results – numerous splotches of red for Reject, a few smaller green specks for Accept, and overall a patchy, somewhat arbitrary, experiment that on a national scale never really took off.

The mayoral concept, though, had also generated interest outside local government – the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), for instance, advocating Mayors for Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and Liverpool City Region to take the required ‘big’ decisions on housing, transport, and regional development. Prime Minister David Cameron too was a ‘city mayors’ fan, although what scale of ‘city’ wasn’t initially clear, until in 2014 what became known as the first ‘devolution deal’ (Catherine Needham) was announced with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Headed by an elected ‘metro-mayor’ (CG), comparable to the Mayor of London, the GMCA would have greater control over local transport, housing, skills and healthcare, with “the levers you need to grow your local economy”.

New legislation – the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 – was required, allowing the introduction of directly elected Mayoral Combined Authority or ‘Metro Mayors’ (Vivien Lowndes & Phil Swann) (+ Catherine Staite) in England and Wales, with devolved housing, transport, planning and policing powers.

The Combined Authority elections were held in May 2017 – not coinciding with the General Election (CG) as PM Theresa May had contemplated but, in contrast to Rishi Sunak, chickened out of – with perhaps usefully split results (CG). Elected were Andy Burnham (Lab, Greater Manchester), Steve Rotheram (Lab, Liverpool City Region), Ben Houchen (Cons, Tees Valley), Andy Street (Cons, West Midlands), Tim Bowles (Cons, West of England), and James Palmer (Cons, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough) – followed in 2018 by Dan Jarvis (Lab, Sheffield City Region). The map had started to change – even within the first hundred days (CG) – stutteringly under the less committed Theresa May and/or in several cases where groups of local authorities failed to agree – but eventually dramatically, as evidenced in the larger illustrated map. The Staite/Lowther ‘Briefing Paper’ was well timed.

A few years on, mayoral devolution has trailblazed across the country (CG) to a greater extent than even some commentators on this year’s local elections seemed to have difficulty grasping. As of March 2024, devolution deals had been agreed with 22 areas, covering 60% of the English population – most recently, in late 2022, North of Tyne, Norfolk/Suffolk, East Midlands, York & North Yorkshire; in 2023 Cornwall, Greater Manchester and West Midlands (‘Trailblazers’), Greater Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Hull/East Yorkshire; and so far in 2024 Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire and Surrey.

From next year, if you draw a straightish line from, say, Ipswich in South Suffolk up through about Alvechurch in South Birmingham, heading for Shrewsbury, at least five-sixths of the bits of England to your north will be under mayoral devolution. Which, to me anyway, seems pretty dramatic news, and considerably more interesting than the endless General Election Date speculation that passed this May for ‘Local Elections’ reporting.

Picture credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_Quimby

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan. He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Two cheers for combined authorities and their mayors

16/05/202415/05/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Vivien Lowndes and Phil Swann

There are reasons to be cheerful about the fact that the newest component of English local government, the mayoral combined authorities, were in the headlines this spring. There were also reasons for caution, however, most notably the particular focus on two of the mayoral elections, in Teesside and the West Midlands, as a guide to the popularity (or not) nationally of Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party.

This fact that combined authorities were in the news is a prompt to take stock of their development and impact with some thoughts stimulated by the discussion at a recent INLOGOV Brown Bag[1] session.

The media attention was attributable to the mayoral elections, with many of the incumbent candidates having established a national profile by, for example, challenging the government’s approach to Covid (Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester), defying political gravity and weak governance (Ben Houchen in Teesside) or crafting a new brand of active, compassionate Conservatism and challenging the government’s pruning of HS2 (Andy Street in the West Midlands).

The mayors have also disrupted the escalator assumption of British politics in which ambitious politicians use local government as a stepping stone to parliament and government. Burnham, Liverpool City Region’s Steve Rotherham and the new mayor of the East Midlands Claire Ward have each moved in the opposite direction.

The metro mayors undoubtedly have higher profiles than most council leaders. They have demonstrated impact beyond their statutory remit through soft power, particularly their ability to convene discussions and galvanise action on issues such as public health and homelessness.

Doubts remain about the sense of vesting so much power in a single individual. Only three of the twelve metro-mayors are women, showing the danger of equating ‘strong leader’ with ‘strong man’. More effort is needed on the part of political parties to diversify their mayoral candidate selection.

It is also valid to question whether, for example, an elected mayor in the West Midlands would have added more value as part of the city council’s governance rather than that of the wider city region. Some would argue that the city would benefit from the type of focussed political leadership that Mayor Jules Pipe provided in Hackney. Experience in both Liverpool and Bristol suggests that having a mayor at both city and city region level causes confusion.

There has been very little discussion about the role of council leaders as key players in the governance of combined authorities through their membership of the mayors’ cabinets. As one council leader in Greater Manchester is quoted[2] as saying: “We have to work with a mayor we did not want while he has to work with a cabinet he did not chose”.

The Greater London Authority model is very different, with a separately elected London assembly as well as a mayor. While this may seem more democratic, public awareness of the assembly is far lower than that of the mayor[3]. Perhaps it is time for a comparative review of these two very different sets of governance arrangements. In both cases, there is a strong argument for greater public involvement outside of the electoral cycle, both in setting up new combined authorities and to inform ongoing priorities.

The role of council leaders is inevitably linked with the wider question of the relationship between the combined authorities and their constituent councils. To date this has proved to be remarkably smooth, particularly given the often toxic precedent of county-district relations. The next period may be more testing. To date, councils and metro mayors have been united in coping with austerity, but difficult decisions about priorities will have to be taken should a new government make limited additional resources available. The increased interest of combined authorities and mayors in strategic spatial planning and housing will also raise challenging and potentially divisive issues.

The jury is out on the extent to which the establishment of combined authorities has led to substantive devolution of power from central government, although progress has been made in areas such as adult education, transport, health (in Greater Manchester) and mental health (in the West Midlands). While the new ‘trailblazer deals’ in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands promise a single funding settlement with central government, other combined authorities find themselves still bogged down in competitive bidding for relatively small pots of money.

One important feature of combined authorities is the way they are creating opportunities for innovation and testing new ways of working at a local level. To fully exploit the potential of this development it is important that arrangements are put in place to capture this learning and share it between combined authorities, and especially with newcomers like East Midlands, North East and York and North Yorkshire. There is also potential for metro-mayors to speak with a stronger collective voice in challenging and informing central government on issues affecting local and regional governance.

Finally, it is important to remember that combined authorities did not begin with a blank sheet of paper. The GLA and many of the combined authorities have similar boundaries as the GLC and metropolitan counties which were abolished by Margaret Thatcher in a fit of political pique in the 1980s.

Harold Macmillan pioneered regional arrangements for devolved delivery with regional boards to promote industrial productivity during the second world war and regional housing production boards to help meet his 300,000 a year housing target in the 1950s. Neither were well-received in Whitehall. John Prescott followed with his regional development agencies, abolished by Cameron’s coalition government, and his failed bid to create regional assemblies. What marks out combined authorities is the lack of a ‘one size fits all’ approach, with size, functions and governance arrangements varying around the country.[4] Indeed, only 50% of England’s population live in combined authority areas (so far).

Given this rocky terrain, it may be rash to vest too much hope in combined authorities and their mayors. But they clearly have the potential to disrupt our centralised politics and join-up aspects of regional governance after decades of damaging fragmentation.

Vivien Lowndes is Professor Emerita in the School of Government, University of Birmingham.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD at INLOGOV in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Birmingham, on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations.

Picture credit: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/sir-keir-starmer-walsall-pledges-29162669

[1] INLOGOV’s Brown Bag sessions are informal monthly discussions on events in and around local government bringing together academics, researchers, students, practitioners and alumni. For further details please Phil Swann ([email protected])

[2] Blakeley, G and Evans, B. 2023 How metro mayors are getting things done – even if they have limited money and power. The Conversation June 28 2023.

[3] According to London Elects (londonelects.org.uk) in January 2020 58% of people were aware that a mayoral election was taking place compared with 32% for the assembly election (down from 40% in 2016).

[4] Durose, C. and Lowndes, V. 2021. Why are designs for urban governance so often incomplete? A conceptual framework for explaining and harnessing institutional incompleteness, Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654421990;

Durose, C. and Lowndes, V. 2023. The pros and cons of messy devo (themj.co.uk) Municipal Journal

Europe’s Largest Local Authority – It’s NUTS!

28/03/202428/03/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Chris Game

It’s little consolation to the ‘powers that were’ in Birmingham Council House, but the past several months’ headlines about “Europe’s Largest Local Authority” going bankrupt have done wonders for my personal online social networking. From the BBC and Financial Times to the World Socialist International Trotskyists, that headline has made us Brummies suddenly globally famous as citizens of ELLA.

I’ve been emailed by erstwhile colleagues and ex-students I’ve not seen or heard from for years, now back home in Australia and South Africa, Japan and Kazakhstan, wanting to know whether Birmingham really is Europe’s Largest Local Authority – like it boasts on its Website Awards page – and, if so, why didn’t I make more of it while they were students here.

Yes, they’re curious about the bankruptcy bit, which I also have to try to explain, but it’s the ELLA boast that really fascinates them – because they recall their travels around Britain and Europe, and clearly blame me for their not having been able to boast about temporarily residing in the continent’s LLA. The clever-dick ones even add, “What about Kent?” Or “Didn’t you say it was East Lindsey in Lincolnshire?”.

And they’re not wrong, of course. Take the real ‘biggies’. In population, Kent is nowadays just one of the ‘Big 3’ of the 36 non-metropolitan or shire counties – its 1,858,000 fractionally behind Essex and Hampshire, and all roughly half as large again as Birmingham City Council’s 1.15 million. However, those counties’ local governments are, of course, two-tiered – counties and districts, each responsible for different functions and services. And – spoiler alert – it’s single-tier or unitary authorities, responsible for providing all principal local government services in an area, that count here.

County councils provide services covering the whole county – education, adult social care, waste disposal, etc. More local services, like refuse collection, environmental health, and leisure facilities, are provided – as I’d certainly have pointed out – by, in Kent’s case, 12 smaller district councils.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s anything but, and, if you were a class of students, I’d have had to at least mention the bizarre distinctions between ceremonial and historic counties, Lord-lieutenants (Lords-Lieutenant?) and High Sheriffs. Suffice it here to stress that it’s the two-tier structure and the ‘county’ bit that bar these bodies from challenging Birmingham’s status as ‘Largest’.

We do, of course, have a West Midlands Combined Authority, headed currently by Mayor Andy Street, but that’s entirely different and its 18 local authorities cover a far larger regional area than the old West Midlands County Council that Margaret Thatcher abolished in 1986. It’s an increasingly important, and influential, regional and national voice, but definitely not a local authority.

And East Lindsey? I honestly can’t remember ever mentioning this. If I did, I’d guess it was to encourage some overseas students to visit Skegness, as somewhere ‘different’ but inherently English and off the proverbial tourist track. It’s a pleasant seaside resort with a rather splendid clock tower – which tells the time, unlike, for apparently a further several weeks, the UoB’s Old Joe – that probably happened then to be the largest town in England’s geographically largest local government district – East Lindsey – and five or six times the area of Birmingham.

We’ve fully established, then, that Birmingham’s ‘Europe’s Largest Local Authority’ claim has nothing to do with either population or geographical size, but everything to do with the UK’s uniquely large-scale, or ‘non-local’, local government structure and the gradual disappearance of devolution to more local units of government.

Put another way, it’s a question of NUTS. Yes, there’s plenty about our local government system that doesn’t make much sense – not least its sheer non-localness – but here we’re actually talking about the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, which both sounds better in the original French and produces an easily memorable acronym.

It’s statistical shorthand for the EU’s hierarchical way of standardising the different ways in which the hugely varying EU states administratively structure their sub-central governments – regardless, if necessary, of the institutional reality. A statistical harmonisation exercise, therefore, rather than an aid to serious cross-national local government comparison.

The NUTS classification subdivides every member country into three principal levels, NUTS 1 to 3, to which large countries can add further levels by subdividing NUTS 3 into LAU (Local Administrative Units). Very roughly, then, the currently 92 NUTS 1s are major socio-economic regions or groups of regions of relatively larger states – Germany’s 16 Länder, France’s 14 Régions, Poland’s 7 Makroregiony. And the UK, were we still EU members, would have 12: West Midlands and the eight other English regions, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The 240 NUTS 2s are basic regions or regional groupings for the application of regional policies – Austrian Bundesländer, Belgian, Dutch and France’s former Provinces – and in the UK 40 conveniently grouped counties, London ‘districts’, and in the West Midlands its seven boroughs.

The 1,164 NUTS 3s tend to be sub-divisions of regions, provinces, counties, or groupings of municipalities for specific purposes, rather than individual local authorities. But such is the UK’s exceptional non-local scale that it takes nearly one-sixth of that total (174), with many councils qualifying for their own, including all seven West Midlands boroughs.

Even forgetting the UK’s large slice, that 1,164 doesn’t sound that many for a whole continent, does it? Hence those Local Administrative Units – over 92,000 of them which constitute the overwhelmingly biggest columns in the main NUTS table. In our case LAU 4s would be the upper tiers of our traditionally two-tier system of county and district councils, and LAU 5s the lower tiers – or, rather, would have been, the two levels having since been merged.

I hate that LAU term. It’s misleading bureaucratese: a seriously disparaging label for what most European countries’ residents would first think of when asked to identify their elected local governments. To pick some examples: France’s LAU 4s were/are its nearly 35,000 Communes, Germany’s its 10,775 Gemeinden, Italy and Spain their 8,000 Comuni and Municipios – with, obviously, what we would consider mostly modest-sized populations to match.

At which point I admit my age and recall Mr Spock’s immortal response to Star Trek’s Captain Kirk: “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it”. And yes, I know it was from a later song, rather than the TV series, but it fits. Because for a Brit those sizeable NUTS/LAU numbers could easily be described as representing “Real Local Government, Jim, but not as we know it.”