While we are all campaigning in this year’s local elections, Liberal Democrats need to be aware of the implications of the ‘English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill’, which has already passed the Commons and is now close to completing its passage in the Lords. It’s designed to complete the project the Conservatives began of imposing elected mayors and ‘Combined Authorities’ all across England, with larger unitary authorities to replace remaining district and county councils.
As the Liberal Democrat group’s Cabinet Office spokesman, I had not intended to get actively involved in the Bill beyond its constitutional significance for the governance of the United Kingdom – which is almost ignored in the Bill. Sitting alongside our Bill team as we moved from Second Reading through eight days of committee and two days of voting on amendments at report stage (one more to come on April 13th), I’ve become more and more appalled – like my colleagues – of what it means for local democracy.
Its title itself is fraudulent. It’s about decentralization, not real devolution, and it empowers mayors, not communities. Its underlying assumption is that the minimum size for efficient local administration is a ‘community’ of half a million people, with ‘strategic’ decisions taken above that level by mayors in ‘Combined Authorities’ responsible for 1-2 million or more. Just for comparison, there are two sovereign European states with populations of half a million – Malta and Iceland, each with subordinate tiers of democratic government. Luxembourg is slightly larger. The larger combined authorities cater for populations approaching those of the Baltic and Nordic states. They are to be governed by executive mayors, who will appoint a substantial number of ‘commissioners’ as responsible for specific areas – Parliament is still contesting how many they may appoint. Councillors from the unitary authorities below them will have limited powers of scrutiny.
London is both a model and an exception for this reform. Its 32 boroughs (plus the City of London) range from 150,000 to 390,000 people, with an elected Assembly to counterbalance the executive Mayor and his appointed deputies. But there are murmurings that ministers and officials regard London boroughs as ‘outdated’ and wish as soon as possible to shrink their number to some 6-8.
LibDem local councillors have done their best to promote competent local government over recent decades, as funding for local councils has been squeezed and squeezed and central demands have tightened. Some have come to the conclusion that the binary system established half a century ago is no longer sustainable. But the implication for public engagement and trust in politics ought to worry us. Opinion polls have long shown that voters trust local representatives and government more than national, and that public trust in government as a whole is continuing to sink. ‘All politics is local’ is one of the wisest political principles. When ‘local’ is defined as a city region – and outside the cities as the artificial sub-regions for which a new group of mayors will be responsible – popular participation in democratic debate unavoidably shrinks. I admire our councillors in West Yorkshire authorities like Bradford, doing their best to present and get to know local communities within wards of 15,000 voters or more. I’m appalled by the shrinking of local representation across the vast extent of North Yorkshire, where historic local authorities like Richmondshire and Harrogate have given way to a handful of councillors on the new unitary authority.
Behind this reform is a mindset – which has come across in the debates on this Bill – that what matters in politics is delivery, not representation, that elections and local democracy are costs that need to be limited, and that economies of scale demand strategic management. As a Liberal I see citizen engagement in public life as essential to democratic life – as against the passive acceptance of what government provides in this model. Fewer elections, and fewer elected representatives than in any comparable democratic state, can only breed popular discontent.
Liberal Democrats intervening on this Bill have argued for parish and town councils everywhere to provide at least a closer link between citizens and public decisions. I’ve listened with amazement as Tory and Labour peers have cracked jokes about whether Norwich or Weston-Super-Mare is currently the largest parish council, while agreeing that their ability to impose precepts on rates must be strictly limited. (Potholes are matters for higher authority, of course.) We’re conscious that town councils most often exist in prosperous areas, leaving neglected former council estate areas without any significant contact with political representation or participation, and we are trying to amend the Bill. But we are not getting much support from Labour of the Tories.
There are two constitutional elements in this reform. Real devolution requires some counterweight to Whitehall, Westminster, and the UK Treasury. The Housing and Local Government ministry now convenes an informal mayoral council, but resists making it statutory. Things work OK with a Labour government and a preponderance of Labour mayors, but will ministers still want to hold meetings when most mayors represent other parties? Relations with the three devolved nations are now managed through the Council of Nations and Regions, in which England is represented by all ‘strategic’ elected mayors. The Scots have accepted that with a handful of elected mayors for major cities, but will they still when over 30 turn up? Ministers have refused to engage with such questions.
A healthy democracy is one in which citizens feel that they are listened to, and in which there are multiple links between local, regional and national representation and government. This reorganization and reduction of local government places British democracy at risk.
* William Wallace is LibDem peer, a former vice-chair of the Federal Policy Committee and convenor of the party's 1997 manifesto team.
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7 Comments
Scottish devolution resulted in the creation of a national legislature – “English devolution” appears to be creating directly elected mayors and larger council areas.
If I were English I would feel unhappy that England was the only country of the UK without its own national legislature.
Such a timely wake-up call, thank you. The previous Tory administration assumed that it would always have the majority vote in the shires. The rural mayors would consolidate the party’s grip because small towns would have to be compliant or lose precious funds. Mayoral elections share the failings of the Police Commissioner story because the electorate have no idea who the candidates are or what they have achieved. My mayor (York and North Yorkshire) has a shop in town and failed when he tried to get elected to the council. He was picked by Labour and with the massive backlash against the Tories, became county mayor with responsibility for a budget of over £20 million pa. The disengagement of the state from serving its electorate and instead managing them to serve party interests is a real threat that LibDems should be challenging publicly.
Joan: An English legislature would outbalance the devolved administrations, and reinforce the dominance of London within England. Liberals have king argued for devolution to regions within England. Prescott’s botched attempt to set up a North-East region was defeated in a referendum in which Dominlc Cummings cut his teeth as a populist campaigner. Yorkshire local councils gave strong support for a ‘One Yorkshire’ model for regional devolution, bu9t the last government insisted on imposing 4 sub-regions.
@William Wallace
“An English legislature would outbalance the devolved administrations”
Thanks for your reply but England ‘outbalances’ the other 3 countries of the UK whether it has its own legislature or is split into several regions. I just think it makes more sense that laws that affect England alone should be debated and decided in a legislature that just represents England, rather than – as at present – being debated and decided by MPs representing the whole of the UK.
Cynicism about politics and politicians has been common for as long as I can remember, but we seem to have reached a new phase, where the sense of detatchment and alienation from politics is so profound that people are finding themselves drawn to the fringes, where charletans and undemocratic forces reside.
Local politics, the politics of your town or village, afford an opportunity for meaningful involvement. As William says, “citizen engagement in public life is essential” to democracy. We need to create the institutions that allow citizens to be active in their communities. And if Liberals do not advance this cause , who will ? Yet no one talks about Community Politics any more. We are focused on winning seats in a system that much of the public has lost faith in. Another election leaflet telling voters what we will do for them. At least we used to add a section asking people to join our campaign, in my parts we don’t even bother with that. The turn out will be barely more than 30%, Reform will do depressingly well, we will be irrelevant in vast swaths of the country. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but we will have brought it upon ourselves. Time to break open the Greaves and Lishman.
The problem is that our (much praised by some) policy making process is far too unwieldy to deliver anything punchy at all, and as for speedily, forget it.
For over 40 years, the government of the day has taken an axe to the structures of local government, always for party political gain, usually to centralise power of the political machine by abolishing balanced councils and always to make being a councillor more difficult with bigger wards. Effectively to destroy the very habitat that sustains Liberal Democracy.
However over all those years we have done nothing about it. Indeed all we hear is Lib Dem councillors saying ‘We can make this work,’ but in fact all we do is apply a plaster to a growing wound.
Until we stop fetishising over beautifully wordcrafted policies, that appeal to intellectual libdem sensibilities but totally ignore the real problems faced by most people in the UK, we will find that the gains of recent general and local elections prove to be as transient as the morning mist and without the cover of the old local government environment, disappear when the light of the day is shone upon them.
While strategic considerations and economies of scale matter, the electorate is mostly concerned with whether they feel their views matter especially on local matters. If localism is channelled through smaller councils then they must have some influence over the larger ones. At the very least certain decisions by principal authorities should be subject to a majority vote by the smaller one affected by that decision.