Andy Burnham’s premiership will be shaped by how successfully he can turn his ambition for a less centralised model of English governance into reality. Owen Garling and Prof. Michael Kenny explore the leadership, knowledge and institutional capacity needed to make devolution work— and improve the economic prospects and opportunities of the regions it serves.
Andy Burnham became prime minister promising to take power out of Westminster and transfer it to “every postcode in the country” — a declaration of radical intent, though one which leaves hazy the question of whether the country in question is England or the UK. In the announcement, he set out a number of plans to achieve this goal: significant further devolution to already established Strategic Authorities in England — most of which are in the North and Midlands — and notably to those areas where the governance model had not yet been agreed, which mostly lie in other parts of the country.
These plans also included the adoption of a “local first” principle, requiring ministers to justify why powers should remain in Whitehall rather than being devolved; as well as a significant new funding model, including plans for a portion of Income Tax to be retained by each authority.
The first challenge to those plans will be completing the map of English devolution in England. The Government says it intends to introduce the Strategic Authority model everywhere, including in those places without a major urban core. The one institutional variation it will permit is to allow bodies proposed by local authorities that do not want an elected mayor. Beyond this welcome flexibility, there is clearly a risk that this turns out to be a two-tier model which favours some of the existing top-tier authorities with stronger local economies.
Burnham’s announcement also sets out a far more radical approach to the question of fiscal devolution than the small steps envisaged by the Starmer administration. The retention of locally generated revenues — initially business rates followed by Income Tax — is a particularly bold move. It comes with several challenges, such as where to draw the limits to devolved autonomy — a question thrown into relief by Ben Houchen’s argument for the right to provide local tax rebates. It will also need to keep in mind the technical, and highly consequential, question of what kind of fiscal equalisation model is needed to guide regional funding allocations as devolution spreads.
Other less politically salient but no less important issues of institutional design also need to be considered. As we have shown elsewhere, the potential of English devolution has been significantly hampered by the unusual amount of cross-cutting and misaligned boundaries between English jurisdictions. Greater alignment between, at the very least, local authorities, public services such as police and health, as well as planning mechanisms — such as the forthcoming Spatial Development Strategies and the Local Growth Plans produced under the previous administration — would help clear the path towards better administrative coherence and policy coordination. Tidying up the opaque and confusing messiness of conflicting jurisdictions may well go some way to making local bodies feel more meaningful and important to their local publics.
The question of how to ensure that these authorities have a viable mix of local knowledge and analytic capacity is one of the most underplayed, yet significant, factors affecting their prospects. It is essential that authorities are equipped with sufficient strategic capacity, sustainable funding, strengthened data and analytical capabilities, as well as a real understanding of the localities they oversee. These attributes will make them much more likely to develop the kinds of forward-looking economic growth plans which the Burnham administration hopes to see emerging locally.
Furthermore, if these authorities are to acquire legitimacy, they will need to make clear, locally informed decisions about priorities, and to navigate through the inevitably difficult policy trade-offs this will involve. Central to this will be the need for them to make use of the convening — or soft — power potential that comes with being a directly elected leader. The clear preference for directly elected mayors, who are a visible point of accountability to local electors, is a notable aspect of the current version of English devolution: one that was, even a few years ago, deeply unpopular in Labour circles.
Successful mayors like Burnham and Andy Street, who put great efforts into being visible to their local publics, have benefitted from it. But low election turnout rates, including a turnout of just over 25% for the election of Burnham’s successor as Mayor of Greater Manchester, suggest that awareness of most other mayors and local leaders remains low. This should be of real concern as these bodies and their leaders become more powerful.
There are also some notable deficits in the local democratic accountability of these bodies. Although being bolstered, Mayoral scrutiny committees are often highly circumscribed, and the precipitous decline of local and regional journalism has left a worrying vacuum of local knowledge and accountability around them. There is also much more to be done to strengthen “outward accountability” — accountability to local citizens and communities — in a system that has predictably been much more geared to establishing an upward line of accountability to Whitehall and Westminster.
Burnham’s time as a very successful elected Mayor means he brings to this agenda his experience of the constraints within which devolved leaders are currently operating; and an independent body of reflections, some of them unusually radical for a British political figure. These include a gesture towards the German constitutional idea of “equivalent living conditions” for all regions within the state. Rather than pitching an argument for an implausible, and probably unworkable, form of state-directed equalisation from above, he may do better to consider some of the ideas associated with the notion of a “Universal Basic Infrastructure.” This would get local and devolved policymakers to reflect upon what forms of infrastructure are required, and in what quantity and combination, to ensure a minimum level of services and amenities for their localities. This in turn would inform thinking about how their stretched resources might be best deployed, as well as highlight those gaps in local infrastructure that hold back the local economy.
In addition to the issues of funding and capability, the implications of Burnham’s plans for central government will also need to be carefully thought through. One of the key historical lessons of the establishment of devolution to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is that neglecting the question of how the centre itself needs to change to meet the challenges of devolution can have damaging consequences. Getting Departments to internalise the idea of the smaller, more strategic state — the goal proclaimed by the new Government — will be key.
Careful thought needs also to be given to the implications of creating, de facto, a new element of English governance — with the devolved authorities overseen by No. 10 North. While the rhetoric is about UK-wide devolution, the new Government will quickly learn that devolution outside England works entirely differently and will throw up some very different kinds of political challenges. The Government would be well-advised to consider putting the Mayoral Council for England established under Keir Starmer on a more systemic and visible footing, and develop a more strategic approach to the Council of the Nations and Regions: the only body which includes all the devolved leaders across the UK.
Andy Burnham’s premiership will to a considerable extent be defined by how well his Government can deliver on his conviction that the time has come to break with the centralist caste of English governance. Delivering in this area will mean addressing a host of different political and institutional challenges. It means, in particular, bringing together a productive mix of knowledge, capability and leadership within these Strategic Authorities. Doing so makes it much more likely that they will make a genuine difference to the economic prospects of their regions and the opportunities and outcomes of the publics they serve.
Original source: Bright Blue.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett School of Public Policy.
