Give England’s mayors more power over services, says think-tank

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

England’s regional mayors should be given more influence over health, policing and education policy, with greater powers to commission, design and implement projects, according to the Labour Together think-tank.

Greater involvement of these elected officials in public service delivery would help drive the improvements promised by the Labour government, even when funding was in short supply, the study said.

“Getting this right will set the government up to make meaningful progress quickly,” said Sam Freedman, the report author, and lay the ground for a “public service agenda that will undo years of damaging over-centralisation”.

Labour Together was led by Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff appointed on Sunday after Sue Gray stepped down from the role, and was closely associated with the UK prime minister’s rise to power. Its current chief executive is former shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth.

The report, released on Monday, comes ahead of the Budget on October 30 with public services in crisis and public finances constrained by many competing demands.

The number of mayoral combined authorities has increased, becoming an increasingly important tier of government across the country over the past 25 years. There are now 11 mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) in England.

But each has divergent powers and little if any control over health, policing and education policy in most places. The MCAs sit above a local government network that has been severely hit by a funding crisis.

Labour has promised to make further devolution central to its programme of national renewal. But rather than a big bang approach, it should set off with five principles to drive better decision-making in the short term while underpinning longer-term decentralisation, the study said.

“I wouldn’t start from here,” said Freedman, of the complicated system that governs the regions. “But there are immediate benefits that can be drawn by including them [regional mayors] more.”

Freedman, author of the book Failed State: why nothing works and how we fix it, said that within existing structures mayors can already take greater control over areas such as policing, as Greater Manchester has for example, by absorbing police commissioner roles.

MCAs should also be given first refusal on delivering one-off, centrally determined schemes such as school improvements, the paper added.

It also argued for public service delivery to be included as a separate part of funding settlements, replacing an existing system where regions compete ad hoc for financing pots from different government departments.

The regional structure of public services should share the same geographic boundaries as regional authorities to facilitate strategic oversight, the report added. Currently in areas like education and healthcare, this is often not the case.

“There is an overall principle underlying the drive for devolution which is that decisions are better taken the closer they are to the people they affect,” said Oliver Coppard, mayor of the South Yorkshire combined authority, who supported the report’s findings.

He said South Yorkshire was developing a record that made this case with the establishment of health and diagnostic centres within town centre redevelopments.

Authorities like his would be asking not only for more money from central government but for more control and flexibility over how they used and ultimately raised funds, he said.

“If we get people back into work, paying taxes into the Treasury and off benefits, there is a double benefit to the whole of the country,” Coppard noted, adding that regional authorities had the “ideas, intelligence and insight” to know how best to go about this.