England needs devolution not a new system of local government

That map sets out the boundaries for English local government proposed by the Redcliffe-Maud Commission in the late 1960s. At the time there was a huge outcry and chunks of historic counties would be ripped from their heritage and lumped into new utilitarian councils. What we got in the end, the 1972 Local Government Act, represented a classic English fudge, one that didn't satisfy those opposed to moving lumps of Yorkshire into Lancashire or pretending that Peterborough is part of Cambridgeshire but which calmed most places down.

The current government, in its quest for 'levelling up' will be setting out its plan in a "Devolution White Paper". We're not yet clear as to the contents of this White Paper except that the government seems committed to the model of devolution developed under the Coalition government where, in response to "asks" from city-regions, the government in Westminster would 'devolve' powers and cash to those city-regions - so long as they had an elected mayor. This is the model developed under the direction of George Osborne and wrapped up in a report prepared for him by Lord Heseltine. I've been clear that, from a degree of experience, the approach Heseltine (and government) prefer is not the way to go about regenerating the North or a sensible basis for devolution.

At the heart of this approach is the idea that, because current economic activity is skewed towards cities (sort of ), future investment should be driven by city-regions as "economic hubs". The essential argument is that growth happens in the densely populated hearts of big connurbations so therefore we should use these connurbations as the basis for political geography:





This slide, produced by Andrew Carter from the Centre for Cities, returns us to the world of Redcliffe-Maud where a utilitarian presumption is used to design English local government, one without reference to anything other than a narrow (and open to question) economic assumption that cities are the principle driver of economic development. Carter doesn't provide us with the map but does set out a sort of options appraisal for getting to a map central to which is that there is no opt out - devolution will be imposed (the irony of which shouldn't be lost on us). We also see from the slide above that "economic" services (what these are is unclear - economic development, planning, transport, regeneration, skills, training) would be lifted out of existing local councils and subsumed into the new mayoral authorities.

Leaving aside political judgements, the assumption that cities drive economic growth must be challenged if we are to get a genuine levelling up across England. Carter acknowledges that English cities underperform against a basket of economic measures (GVA, start ups, employment rate, skills). So why base the economic development strategy on these places rather than on places that are not underperforming? Why spend billions on new transport systems linking together underperforming urban centres? This approach simply denies the reality of how economies are changing and the manner in which technology is changing how we live and work.

By focusing on a sort of central place theory of economic development, we fail to recognise that most people don't work in those urban centres, their employment is dispersed across a multitude of, largely suburban, locations that people access by car. The choice of a central place theory as the model isn't just a mistake but is the opposite of how economies are developing. Worse still, by taking economic functions away from local communities, we ossify this centre-focused planning approach and sideline the very communities we want to help.

There really isn't much need for wholesale local government reorganisation and absolutely no need at all for the creation of these huge, unwieldy city-regions especially since even the Centre for Cities recognises that large, economically-significant parts of England fall outside the 'functional geographies' of those city-regions. If we want devolution, there is no reason at all why we have to change England's political geography - you want to give local government powers then give them to existing metropolitan and county councils rather than invent a whole new (and probably unpopular) system of local government.
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