Size matters in English devolution

Good morning. The Labour government has unveiled its new white paper on English devolution, in what represents the biggest change to local government in England in half a century. (Jen Williams and Jim Pickard had the inside scoop on its contents on Saturday.)

With the exception of the NHS and, increasingly, schools, almost everything that really touches most British lives runs through local government — bin collections, policing, and so on. So this overhaul — the most dramatic since the 1974 Local Government Act — has the potential to have huge ramifications, and I expect therefore to write a lot about them. For now, some broad thoughts on some of the measures the government is proposing.

Growing pains

The big headline measure in the planned reorganisation of English local government is to create a single tier of councillor-run local government across the country, by merging areas with “two-tier” local authorities (ie a district council and a county council) and expanding some unitary authorities. The government wants these authorities to be sufficiently large so that they are “the right size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks”, according to its white paper, ie creating councils that have at least 500,000 residents.

This size has a lot to recommend it, not least because it means that they ought to be big enough to actually build things and not be too beholden to 400 or so voters who object to infrastructure projects or to noise in their city centres. Whether you want to grow the night-time economy or build more homes, this is a good thing.

But the size also has a major drawback, which is closely linked to that advantage, which is that the new councils are going to feel quite remote to most residents. Scotland has operated with one-tier of local government since 1996, but these proposed authorities are a lot larger than Scotland’s.

One problem with “levelling up” was that it conflated two important things for governments: improving the economic performance of England’s core cities and towns, and the broader agenda of regenerating local high streets, villages, town centres and so on. As a result, the government made little progress on either. Labour’s proposed bigger local authorities are going to remodel local government to make them better optimised to improve England’s cities and towns’ economic performance, but at a cost to parts of what local government can do well, at least in theory. Whether voters react against that will be fundamental to whether these plans succeed.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Caterina Schembri’s debut album Sea Salt and Turpentine while writing my column. This is another discovery courtesy of Radio 3’s excellent Night Tracks (which I am listening to as I type as it happens). I cannot recommend it highly enough as pre-bedtime listening, whether you are listening live or on BBC Sounds.

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