Author Archives: Roger Shelley

Great to see William Wallace’s recent critique of the elected Mayoral system   This creeping assault on local democracy by the usual unholy Labour-Conservative alliance is now gathering pace, with the new Labour government committed to its expansion.  

William is right that the Mayoral system is a mess, but so too is local government as a whole, weakened by decades of underinvestment, now undermined further by the mayoral expansion process.

England currently has a chaotic patchwork, with largely the north being used as a ‘test bed’ for the mayoral system.  I use the term advisedly, and note Liz Kendall’s call last week that ‘we need to experiment to get evidence’. Quite.  Where is the empirical evidence that Combined County Authorities, like the ‘East Midlands’ one, just imposed on Notts and Derbys, are going to work efficiently, let alone democratically, in improving people’s lives?  As a district councillor on the only non-Labour or Tory led authority in the new Mayoral authority area, I feel I am entitled to some proof, on behalf of my residents.

I am concerned that the LGA, and for that matter, think tanks with a role in public policy analysis, seem at best uncritical, at worst supine in their acceptance of this false devolution. I’ve tried hard and cannot see who is providing essential critical analysis of the democratic deficit and effectiveness of delivery or projects, targets and growth that these Mayoral authorities actually give – and crucially how ‘Metro Mayors’ are performing compared to the Combined County Authorities.

I can sort of understand that cohesive predominantly urban areas like Greater Manchester and London might achieve some improved delivery, in for example, public transport, but where is the evidence that this is working in diversely dispersed combined urban-rural authorities?  I would like to see our new overwhelmingly southern MPs wake up to this issue, before it is presumably rolled out inexorably across their counties.

Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire’s new EMCCA has a desultory budget of £38m over the next 30 years – unless it raises extra through higher local taxation, or where a lucky few councils may succeed in bidding for extra central government grants, filtered through the Combined Mayoral Authority, in a divisive competitive race.