Why everyone is wrong about English devolution

It's about social services. Until you resolve funding for care, no reorganisation or devolution will make local government better

This picture is my grandfather (with grandma stood behind him in the hat) as the last Chairman of Penge Urban District Council before the tragedy of its abolition in the desire for grand and huge unitary councils.

One of the elements of Keir Starmer’s ‘missions’ for government is the devolution of power in England. As the Centre for Cities describe, the proposals make the right noise:

“The report explicitly rejects the so-called “Old Britain” model of wealth being generated in London and the South East and redistributed around the country to poorer places by a highly centralised state. Prosperity must come from within local economies: from production rather than subsidised consumption, from growth in private sector rather than public sector jobs, and from new rather than old industries.”

It is difficult to take issue with this conception of devolving power in England although, like so much thinking about the economy, there is far too much belief in the role of government as an economic stimulant. It is, however, absolutely true that since the 1960s more power and control has shifted from local to national. Prior to the 1972 reforms of local government in England much of that local government was entirely self-funded and self sufficient.

If you wander round Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and Manchester you can see the evidence of how powerful local government was in times past. From the grand town halls, municipal libraries, museums and galleries to more mundane but important things such as reservoirs and sewage works, the councils of these cities delivered for their residents. Today, as we’ve seen with the sorry tales of Croydon, Thurrock and Nottingham, local government lacks the skills and the capacity to do anything like the developments we saw from councils of the 1960s and 1970s, let alone the grand projects built by Victorian city governments.

What changed wasn’t the desire of councils and their councillors to make cities and districts better places but rather the wish of central government to direct what those councils were able to do, and the collapse of a funding model designed to deliver visible services and palpably unable to provide social services at scale. As a result, local government is being pushed into larger structures in order to cope with the pressures from social care and a broken public pensions system.

If you exclude education and policing from local government spending (the former is under the aegis of Police & Crime Commissioners not councils and for the latter councils acts as a bag of money working to a national formula), social care costs amount to over half of council expenditure. For county councils which don’t have housing, planning and refuse collection functions, the proportion is even higher reaching 70% for the most exposed councils. This, not the desire for better government, is what drives devolution proposals in England and is why we see the setting up of huge, unwieldy unitary councils (I hesitate to call them ‘local’) like North Yorkshire.

Meanwhile the appallingly named Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities continues to promote the idea of elected regional mayors as their big idea in reformed local government. The latest of these is a restructured mayoralty for the North East that will stretch from Chester-le-Street to the Scottish border - describing this as local government is, in my view, a joke. But the government insists that these ‘combined authorities’ represent a better model than those old-fashioned municipalities. You know, the ones that built the reservoirs, tram networks, libraries, colleges and water works. That these dull old councils managed to build thousands of council houses, restructure town centres and construct highway networks is ignored as we charge into a future of elected mayors. Mayors who will be accountable to a handful of council leaders rather than a body of elected councillors.

In their criticism of Labour’s plans for English devolution, Centre for Cities reveal their expected preference for the influence of cities to be embedded in devolved government:

“Labour’s report does not advocate a reorganisation of local government boundaries, and this is a bottleneck on reform. The sheer fragmentation and variation of councils ensures that local authorities rarely match local economies, which in turn makes it challenging for any Government to grant clear economic duties to them.”

The problem here is that the issue for local government in England isn’t boundaries or scale, the issue is social services (and to a lesser extent pensions). Unless a resolution for social care funding is found there really isn’t any point at all in reorganising local government or electing new mayors. The first thing a new unitary like North Yorkshire will do is to extract cash from the budgets of what were District Councils to feed the monster of social services costs. There will be some fig leaves used to cover up this fact (most notably a sort of moral pressure on parish and town councils to use their uncapped precepts to fill holes in those old district council budgets) but the process will continue whereby local councils become, in effect, social care providers for the old, disabled and children.

Everybody knows this fact. Every time councils go to see ministers they tell them they can’t afford to fund social care provision and will be forced into further cuts to non-statutory services by the need to sustain the barest minimum statutory provision in social care. The Health Foundation estimates that councils will need up to £14 billion more to maintain current provision by 2030. This represents a 50% increase in spending over current levels and reflects the current estimate of a £7 billion gap between the amount available to local councils and the amount needed. No devolution scheme aimed at economic development can function if local government services are broken by the growing demand for their social care services.

A few years ago we estimated that 60% of Bradford Council’s budget was spent providing services and support to just 14,000 out of the city’s roughly 500,000 residents. It isn’t that those 14,000 people weren’t in need of support but rather that a growing council tax burden is placed on householders for which they receive less each year (or until they find themselves in the unfortunate position of needing social care support). At present places in Bradford, local communities that don’t have a parish or town council, receive fewer visible services - less frequent bin collections, less tidy parks, fewer flowers in the local centre, streets swept less often - while paying higher charges for these non-existent services. I’m not picking on Bradford here because the same goes for every unitary and county council in the country. Spending on important services like highways management, even with intermittent splurges of cash for potholes (usually just before elections), are operating on the basis of managed decline and have done for perhaps two decades.

So when I look at ‘solutions’ proposed to fix the economic gap between London and the rest of England (and especially the North), I always start by looking to see whether these lovely ideas for devolution recognise the problem with council finances and that fixing social care is essential to curing that problem with finance. So far nobody, not a single think tank, political party or learned academic has made the link between the lack of attention to economic development and that pushing 60% of council spending is now going on supporting the most vulnerable 5% of local residents.

The second thing I’m going to look for in devolution proposals is the extent to which the great minds of London appreciate what local government is for. A while ago Rachel Wolfe, who used to work in Downing Street and now helps run research company, Public First reported on some work looking at civic pride and observed that:

“People are deeply proud of where they live, and it is the primary source of their identity. They feel embarrassed and angry about what is happening to their towns. Shops are closed, the cenotaph has graffiti on it, people often feel unsafe. The pandemic has accelerated an existing decline.  When the town opens up again, what will there be to do? In a lot of places, there’s an event — a local fireworks display; an event in the park; a well-known market — that has disappeared. No one knows why. People can’t park in the centre and the buses are an expensive, irregular joke.”

What Wolfe describes here is the essential function of local government: reflecting local pride. You want your council to clean the streets, plant floral clocks in the parks, provide kids playgrounds and take away your rubbish. People genuinely care (even if some of it is nostalgia for times long gone) about their city and town centres and do want their councils to do the Leslie Knope thing of fussing and bothering about events and activity, about the place looking and feeling good. In the spirit of Ms Knope, here’s a poem I wrote (stop laughing at the back there, I wrote this poem in 2010 before Leslie was real):

We brushed up the broken glass

Gingerly picked up the condom some youth left at the bottom of the slide

Tried to get the swing gate back on its hinges

And wondered…

…do we just give up?

We stepped round the spit and sick

Shook our heads at the fresh gum on the tarmac beside the benches

Picked up the crisp packets and the beer cans

And wondered…

…maybe we did give up?

Glass smashed in the phone box

The swing twisted, broken – no use to local kids

That skateboard park the youngsters petitioned for…

…burnt

We come back.

We mend, we clean, we tidy…

So good kids can play, mums can chat and nice folk sit in peace

Or play bowls

…we didn’t give up.

If we want better local government in England, it has to start with why we don’t have enough money to keep our parks clean and safe, not with why Leeds doesn’t have a tram. Public transport systems are a luxury not an essential. The essentials are best encapsulated in some research done by the Knight Foundation which showed that the places with the best social capital, where people were most in love with where they lived, these were the places with the greatest resilience and with the best economic prospects:

“In its first year, the study compared residents’ attachment level to the GDP growth in the 26 communities over the past five years. The findings showed a significant correlation between community attachment and economic growth. The second year reinforced these findings, and found that nationwide economic troubles did not have a notable impact on attachment locally. In the third year of the study, researchers analysed the connection between community attachment and economic growth and found that cities with the highest levels of attachment had the highest rate of GDP growth.”

So if you want places to get better, to ‘level up’, you have to start with ending the collapse in local services. Some of this is about a decade and more of austerity but most of it is because it has suited Whitehall - probably since the 1970s - to treat local government as a convenient agent for government schemes and a whipping boy for when those schemes fail. Above all the failure to recognise that the relative uncontrollable spending on social services represents an ongoing existential crisis for local government and is the biggest reason for England having such poor local services.

If we want devolution for local government it should be a quid pro quo with national government rather than simply taking the scraps of cash doled out by ministers on the basis of politicised competitions. Instead the national government should take over social services provision and funding (plus education funding) allowing councils to do the things councils used to be best at - making places look great and feel great to residents and visitors. We also need to give councils real borrowing powers, within limits, allowing for more of those grand projects currently only funded through Whitehall programmes to be done directly by councils.

Currently every proposal for devolution fails these two tests. They don’t resolve social services funding and they place emphasis on city-regions and transport projects rather than on restoring the basics of local government - good visible services.