I’m dreaming of a white paper

Sadly, the English Devolution White Paper isn’t it

I think the Starmer government has a tic. It has a habit of describing the things it is doing, or intends to do, in rather grandiose terms. Yet the specific measures being described often amount to little more than minor, piecemeal reforms.

This comes from a good place, for the most part. Labour recognises that radical social, political and economic change is required. But there are few realisable options for genuine transformation available in most policy areas.

Labour knows that it needs to be seen to be doing something, and that most of its policies wouldn’t get seen at all if they weren’t accompanied by the pomp and ceremony of a white paper or a prime ministerial speech; maybe a quango rebranding, or at the very least a new mission board. So the significance of the small stuff gets over-inflated.

The government must know this is risky. It is the over-promising that Keir Starmer, well, promised the electorate he wouldn’t be doing. Of course, he was referring mainly to policy promises with a large price tag attached, as the economy continues to stutter. But is this not all the more reason to be bold on the largely cost-free institutional reforms that would modernise the state, strengthening our democracy as well as enabling more responsive and efficient policy-making processes?

The Prime Minister has accused the civil service of being too attached to the status quo, but on issue after issue, we find a cautious government reluctant to throw the baby out with the tepid bathwater. The recent white paper on English devolution is an excellent case in point.

Words not deets

For a policy document about the organisation of local government, the white paper is not short on rhetorical flair. Angela Rayner’s foreword promises ‘a completely new way of governing — a generational project of determined devolution’, as well as an end to Whitehall’s ‘layers of governance and bureaucracy’.

Benefiting perhaps from a rather low bar, the white paper apparently ‘initiates the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster to England’s regions this century’. The journey from these sorts of statements to dry proposals for greater co-ordination among local authorities within city-regions, and the abolition of an entire layer of local government, is a pretty wild one.

The core agenda outlined in the white paper has three main stages. First, virtually all local authority areas in England must combine with neighbouring areas, with a strong preference for a directly-elected mayor covering the combined area. Combined authorities are nothing new, and the white paper arguably suggests a much more top-down approach to boundary-setting and local governance structures than was evident under the previous government.

Second, these combined authorities — principally the mayoral authorities — will now become ‘Strategic Authorities’. What this means is that mayors can make more decisions affecting their regions without the unanimous consent of all constituent local authorities.

According to the white paper, mayors have a mandate that demands this kind of power. Very low (and falling) turnout rates for most mayoral elections would beg to differ.

Third, Strategic Authorities will have an ‘Integrated Settlement’ whereby central government will no longer dictate how much they must spend in each individual policy area they have responsibility for. Mayors can instead move money around different budgets in line with local priorities.

This is perhaps the most positive change, but there are a couple of catches. While central government won’t be doing as much bean-counting, it will still be target-setting. Strategic Authorities will be expected to deliver against ambitions set at the centre, in areas such as house-building and retrofitting. And Integrated Settlements are only available to ‘Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities’, that is, when criteria set by Whitehall are deemed to have been met.

The house always wins

There are two big gambles in the government’s plan. First, that the metro-mayoral model of city-regional governance established by the Conservative-led coalition government is the correct approach to devolution in England.

Second, that the economic under-performance of England’s regions can be addressed primarily by more suburban housing and renationalising bus networks. These are the main areas in which mayors will be granted more powers, taken from below as well as gifted from above.

This will all be very familiar to devo-watchers. Labour’s gambit therefore is not that ‘a completely new way of governing’ is necessary, but rather that leaning into the longstanding features of an existing — and so far underwhelming — English devolution agenda is the best way forward.

In terms of economic policy, there will also be further devolution of skills and business support budgets, and a stronger role for mayoral offices in shaping science and innovation funding strategies.

Image credit: MHCLG (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

All good stuff, but none of this amounts to meaningful control over the way local economies function. Investing in skills is not the same as investing in the industries that might make use of them. Liberalising planning does not guarantee that more (affordable) homes will be built. Buses do not generate growth.

Fiscal devolution is still the elephant in the room: mayors aren’t going to be given greater tax powers any time soon, it seems, despite the urging of the influential Economy 2030 Inquiry. (My own proposals for an enabling institutional architecture have yet to find favour!) We can expect business rate retention schemes to be expanded, but the white paper also rightly points out the danger that decentralisation poses in this regard:

We cannot keep operating in a system where key social outcomes – like the number of children with a child protection plan – are worse in places that are receiving less funding than they need. As part of this, accumulated business rates growth will be subject to periodic redistribution across the country, through a business rates reset.

In case you’re wondering, local government in England is not going to be given any power over employment rights or corporate governance. It is not going to be able to redesign public services, the benefits system, or financial regulation.

Maybe that’s fine. But it isn’t radical devolution.

There are also few signs that the centre will subject itself to greater local scrutiny. A new mayoral council, and the council of nations and regions, will have no official power. House of Lords reform — which might have granted local authorities a legislative role — has unsurprisingly been kicked into the long grass. And the idea of sending senior civil servants into new Strategic Authorities on secondment sounds more like a threat than an opportunity.

A known unknown

There is no grand conspiracy here. Perhaps the white paper really is a step towards genuine devolution. It does, after all, promise a framework with constitutional status that could be strengthened in future.

There is no doubt that the greater informal control that the centre can exercise over Labour metro-mayors — because they are a smaller group, and mayors tend to have national political ambitions — helps to explain why the government is entrenching the mayoral model. The government probably cares more about house-building than local democracy, and it sees mayoral power as a useful vehicle for the former. There are no new forms of local accountability for mayors proposed.

But all of this can also explained by the absence of any serious alternative options for a coherent system of multi-level governance that local elites can agree on.

(Note that Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future did not endorse the mayoral model, but nor did it endorse anything else. Instead it recommended amorphously that all existing layers of local and regional government — and national government in Scotland and Wales — should be empowered.)

Similarly, I think the government probably would devolve more economic policy powers, if there was a degree of consensus on what might actually work. The centre itself has little idea how to restore sustainable economic growth.

Nobody really knows what the correct format and geography for English regional government is, or what will encourage people to care enough to vote. At least empowering mayors is an actionable plan.

More importantly, if we’re being honest, there is little certainty about how to turn a highly centralised economy like Britain into a more geographically balanced economy, at least not without jeopardising the residual economic strengths we still have. Brexit makes this problem even more wicked. Even if devolution were the correct medicine, it might already be too late to administer it.

So, while I’m a decentraliser by instinct — and a big champion of the work of local government officials — I maintain that devo-fanaticism is unhelpful.

I think the government shares this view. Why then is it determined to sound like a devo-fanatic? Its modest proposals are being described rather immodestly. The only political advantage would seem to be the opportunity to shift the blame for sluggish growth, if it persists, to metro-mayors.

But I don’t believe that’s ultimately what the Starmer government has up its sleeve. The mayors could easily contest this narrative anyway, by pointing to the limits of the powers being devolved. Labour has just got itself stuck in an unfortunate way of communicating, as it seeks to arrest its decline in popularity. It might just be digging a deeper hole.

None of this means that doing nothing is an option. The centre cannot hold, as they say.

On devolution, the government needs to apply its own ‘test and learn’ approach. There is no evidence in the white paper that lessons from recent experiments in mayoral governance have been fully absorbed. Rather than boasting of ‘the biggest transfer of power… this century’, the government needs to acknowledge that it does not have all the answers we need. The plans outlined in the white paper shouldn’t be the end of the story.