As Parliament approaches the summer recess, the government is pushing out announcements to set the agenda for the autumn. An ‘English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill’, 300 pages long, was published on July 10th, which according to the Local Government Association ‘signals a significant shift of powers from Whitehall to local leaders – making it one of the biggest changes to local government in 50 years. It will have a profound impact on all tiers of local government’. The government is about to publish a White Paper on Election Regulation, in preparation for the Elections Bill it will bring forward in the next parliamentary session. Both have major implications for British democracy; both take us away from a Liberal approach. Last week the ‘UK Government Resilience Action Plan’ was also published, setting out measures to respond to future epidemics, disasters and domestic emergencies.
Looked at together, these three embody Labour’s approach to Britain’s democracy: a deep commitment to the two-party system, a focus on delivery rather than participation, and an assumption that ‘local’ government is about delivering central government’s priorities. Liberal Democrats will want to argue for a much more open democracy, for relying on local activity to respond to local problems and crises, for allowing and encouraging local initiatives and experimentation in providing public services, and in drawing local citizens in as far as we can to participate in public life.
Liberal Democrat local councillors will have strong views on the weakening of local democracy over the past 30-40 years. Reorganisation has decreased the number of elected councillors and Councils, increasing the gap between ‘local’ government and the people it serves. Council taxes have remained the main source of revenue; transfers from central revenues have been cut back and repeatedly altered from one set of conditions to another, while obligations placed on local authorities have increased. What the Bill now proposes is to extend the elected mayoral model across the whole of England, leading ‘strategic authorities’ which will deliver government priorities, with a single tier of local government below them. There will be fewer local elections, and fewer Councils; ‘local’ government itself will become more remote from England’s towns and villages.
The Elections White Paper will reverse some of the damaging aspects of the Conservatives’ 2022 Elections Act. We expect some tightening of the rules on political finance, although Liberal Democrats will press for these to go much further. The voting system for elected mayors that the 2022 Act changed to First Past The Post will be returned to Jack Straw’s ‘supplementary vote’ in the English Devolution Bill, in the hope of getting it in place for the 2026 elections; the Elections Bill is unlikely to offer any concessions to the transformation of the UK’s political landscape, with ‘the two major parties’ failing to retain the support even of half the electorate between them. There will be nothing to address the depths of popular disillusion with Westminster politics.
The Resilience Action Plan is a list of top-down measures to cope with emergencies in which public engagement and active citizen involvement should be fundamental. It has a short section on the importance of ‘civil society’ and local government, but the emphasis is on professional training and central direction, working to safeguard a largely passive population.
Labour has told us repeatedly that the answer to public disengagement and mistrust is better public service delivery. Elected mayors (each allowed to appoint up to seven ‘commissioners’ to assist them in specific areas, while councillors come to occasional meetings and are otherwise superfluous) will be key to delivery. This (Kath Pinnock warns me) will effectively mark the death of local democracy. Unitary authorities with 500,000-1,000,000 voters each will struggle to connect with the people they represent, and will be subordinate for many purposes to mayoral combined authorities covering several million people.
These Bills will go into effect. The Conservatives are strong supporters of elected mayors, and deeply ambivalent about local government. The depth of Labour and Conservative commitment to the Westminster two-party system is evident in the privileges ‘the official opposition’ has in PM Questions and the allocation of debating time, as well as the 21 new peers the Conservatives have been allowed to nominate since the election (we have been allowed 3). Liberal Democrats in both Houses will do our best to modify what they propose, but will be up against the vested interests of both the established parties. We want to build an active democracy, in which power and representation are distributed as widely as possible and in which citizens are encouraged to participate in public life. But the mindset of both Labour and Conservative politicians is strongly against this, and we will have to campaign as hard as we can to reverse this centralist direction.
* 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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9 Comments
A move back to the Supplementary Vote system for electing majors may actually work for us considering how weak Labour and Conservatives have become – any Liberal Democrat coming second behind Reform would likely go on to win. Not as good as STV but a lot better than the current system.
Any system that, at a minister’s whim, takes
1) a county council and
2) its six districts which had 84 county and 246 district councillors
and drives through
3) the chaos of splitting it into two unitaries with a third of that number of councillors,
and then three years later proposes a further round of chaos where
4) a single party hack is made a local figurehead,
5) given absolute power over all strategic matters,
6) the power to fill his cabinet with all his mates (usually) and
7) with no means of getting rid of a corrupt or incompetent leader even when his own party realise it
is hardly redeemed by tiny change back to a third rate in no way proportional voting system solely implemented by Angela Raynor to give Labour a slight chance of avoiding a total whitewash by Reform when the mayors come to be voted on.
It is a shambles.
Pity Cumbria and all the others like it.
While the headlines here are devolution downwards, we do seem to be setting the stage for devolution the other way.
For example in response to the Casey Review the government has announced an intention to transfer taxi licensing to mayoral combined authorities. (The review actually recommended something different and more effective: an end to routine out of area working by private hire vehicles. Moving to combined authorities will do nothing for this).
Another is in terms of emergency planning preparedness. Many of the partner agencies and forums are already county-wide. Here we have a joint Sheffield and Rotherham Emergency Planning shared service and joint committee (which I am currently the chair of). New public safety duties for the mayor suggest this may get subsumed.
In each case there may be a certain logic. The Mayoral Authorities are shiny and new and that seems to be the main appeal. Councils on the other hand have some democratic maturity and depth and that is not something to be lightly detached from all the decisions. When most of these Labour metro mayors lose to Reform next round this may become painfully obvious.
Still all started with Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of the GLC/Met Counties in 1985, since then successive governments have battered local government with “reform”, resulting in the erosion of anything resembling local in our councils.
Would it be opportune for the party to form a commission into all aspects of local government, ie tiers, population, number of Cllrs, financing (LIT even!), powers, responsibilities, and so on? Assume elections would be by STV.
To most electors this is hardly a major issue, but getting our democracy (particularly locally) working for people is. The Labour and Tory parties aren’t interested in good local government, just what’s good for them, I’m guessing Reform would be any different,
Predictive text strikes again.
Opening words should be: “It all started with” !
Here in Sheffield we’re concerned about the *requirement* to change governance to leader and cabinet. In 2022, following the trees scandal, there was a referendum here which decided in favour of a committee structure, and the city council switched. Now the Bill, if passed, will ride rough-shod over the democratically-expressed wishes of the people of our city.
Looking through the bill now there seem to be some planning and transport powers that will at the very least trample on local authorities. There is a also a power for mayors to levy CIL, which will in practice be a cash transfer from local authorities.
Agreeed. Labour’s devolution plan is less a genuine transfer of power than a reorganisation of the English state to accelerate infrastructure and housing delivery. It creates directly elected regional mayors with sweeping executive authority, including the power to override local planning decisions. In practiced, these mayors operate within a national framework, with funding and strategic direction controlled by the Westminster – Treasury agents, if you will.
The plan also restructures local government into unitary authorities, streamlining administration but weakening local democratic oversight. Of course, by centralising executive capacity at the regional level while retaining fiscal and legislative control in Westminster, the government niftily shifts responsibility for implementation without ceding real autonomy.
This means we should object to it. The model prioritises speed and efficiency over subsidiarity, enabling national objectives to be pursued through localised agents. While branded as devolution, it more accurately represents a state-led consolidation of authority—replacing fragmented local governance with politically accountable regional administrators tasked with delivering centrally defined outcomes under conditions of limited local constraint.
Effective governing is full of compromises. It must be not so large that it lacks flexibilty and seems remote and not so small that it lacks sufficient resources. Cooperative working is one solution. This depends on good will with each part feeling valued and respected. So we should be aiming for a local government devolution that has the flexibility and resources to deal with specific objectives. Central government’s role is to ensure there is a degree of fairness in the round.