How will Labour’s plans for devolution actually work?

Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and still the darling of her party, is a restless woman. Having only last week launched a set of radical reforms to England’s planning rules, she is now announcing the biggest shake-up of local government since at least the 1990s. It will force many smaller district councils into larger units, and encourage existing historic counties such as Essex, Kent and Norfolk to combine and create larger territories overseen by powerful “metro mayors”.

The idea is to have a system of “devolution by default”, and in particular, to devolve planning decisions to this more regional and “strategic” level of decision-making. Rayner says: “Our English Devolution white paper will be a turning point when we finally see communities, people and places across England begin to take back control over the things that matter to them; when our proud towns and cities are once again given the powers they need to drive growth and raise living standards as part of our plan for change.”

At a time when many local councils fear bankruptcy, it’s fair to say there’s some doubt about that...

As the government’s briefing paper puts it: “Greater devolution is a key way to kickstart economic growth, put more money in people’s pockets, and put politics back in the service of working people.”

It’s by no means obvious. Successive governments have reformed the structures of local government every couple of decades, and there’s no evidence, via serious econometric studies, of any impact on “regional gross value added”.

There’s some sense that governments can’t resist the urge to meddle, born of a suspicion, justified or not, that local government can’t be trusted. Either way it’s disruptive.

Indeed. The very process of restructuring and reorganisation is costly and confusing, the only certainty being that the bureaucratic pendulum of fashion will swing back again one day. To give an example, the reorganisation of 1974 was an exercise in creating mostly bigger units. It scrapped many historic smaller counties and old city councils, and merged them into larger combined city-plus-county authorities, and, in the UK’s major conurbations, new metropolitan “regional” authorities, such as Merseyside, Strathclyde, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.

In the 1980s and after, this was reversed. The large metropolitan authorities, including the Greater London Council (known as the GLC, and dominated by Labour) were abolished by the Thatcher government, and new district councils, along with restored city and borough councils, were brought in under John Major in 1996.

Then the fashion for merger and amalgamation returned. Under the governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, larger city regions and metro mayor units were devised, with directly elected mayors, following the example of the revived Greater London Authority in 1998. Hence, for example, the creation of mayors with ever-expanding powers in Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire and, latterly, North Yorkshire, the East Midlands, and the vaguely sinister-sounding Greater Lincolnshire.

On the whole, no. Most past reorganisations that have created larger administrative units have generated “losers”, exacerbated local rivalries, and sacrificed much-loved local identities along with a sense of connection between residents and local councillors and officials.

Even though county councils will survive, they will be subsumed into much larger units, and these will be given the powers over areas such as planning or transport that are currently exercised at a much more local level, where traditional councillors can have some direct, democratically accountable control over decline.

In a metro region, and particularly with a “presidential” style mayor (based on the US and French examples), power will be exercised more remotely than at present. The elected mayors will tend to be the focus of power, sucking in additional responsibilities not just from Whitehall but also from the old districts and counties. The problems arise where people don’t want to be part of a larger unit, or where they tire of the elected mayoral system and reject it, as in Bristol.

There’s some talk of scrapping them, given that the councils may not survive much longer, meaning that the existing councillors would soldier on until the new arrangements are in force. The precedent is the abandonment of the 1985 elections to the GLC in readiness for its demise in 1986. However, it looks like Labour is dodging some difficult contests next May.

To a quasi-federal UK split into nations and English regions, albeit with “asymmetric” devolution – Scotland being the most independent of Westminster, followed by the moderately strong regions such as Greater London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, through to the smaller English combined authorities, such as, say, Devon and Torbay.

It is clearly a more successful route to such a system than the first efforts, pioneered by John Prescott in the early 2000s, to elect regional assemblies as an additional tier of governance.

In due course, these new regional units could form the basis for a reformed House of Lords, which seems to be the current, if fuzzy, Labour plan. As an assembly of barons from the old shires and modern-day urban marquesses, the new “democratic” House of Lords would, oddly, have some quaint similarities to Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265.

But it won’t do much for economic growth. If administrative and constitutional change acted as a booster for growth, the UK would be the richest country in Western Europe.