The government’s English devolution white paper envisages a network of beefed-up regional structures, led by powerful, directly elected mayors with responsibility for housing, planning, transport, energy and skills across their area, backed up with consolidated funding.
The new model will see mayors, untrammelled by the need for unanimity among constituent councils, given the political muscle to get their budgets passed, houses built or infrastructure pushed through on the basis of a simple majority vote.
Each strategic authority is expected to serve a combined population of around 1.5 million, reflecting functional economic areas and a sense of local identity, while avoiding awkward gaps on the devolution map.
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner described the proposals in the paper as a “generational project of determined devolution”.
“To truly get growth in every corner of the country and put more money into people’s pockets, we must rewire England and end the hoarding in Whitehall by devolving power and money from central government to those with skin in the game,” she said.
But underlying that devolution – and non-negotiable to it – will be a major reorganisation of the structures that underpin it: the mishmash of unitary authorities, metropolitan boroughs, counties and districts that make up English local government.
Let’s regroup
All two-tier areas and “smaller or failing” unitaries will be expected to regroup into new authorities of an optimal size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks – the suggestion is that each will have a population of at least 500,000.
Leading the way will be six areas – Cumbria, Cheshire & Warrington, Norfolk & Suffolk, Greater Essex, Sussex & Brighton and Hampshire & Solent – chosen by government to join the devolution fast-track as part of a heavily over-subscribed priority programme.
Essex County Council leader Kevin Bentley pledged to work with Thurrock Council and Southend-on-Sea City Council to maximise the benefits of devolution.
“It is the biggest chance we will get to rethink our system and bring more power into the hands of local people,” he said.
“This will mean more opportunities for our residents and businesses that will help them and our whole county flourish.”
Consolidation talks in the region will need to include a viable solution to the legacy debt amassed by Thurrock, with ministers coming under pressure to write off the debt to avoid the derailment of the whole process.
The white paper is clear that, however fraught the discussions, reorganisation is not up for debate.
“We will deliver this process as quickly as possible, including through legislation where it becomes necessary to ensure progress,” it says.
Leaders in Kent and Medway said that while they were disappointed their area had not been included on the priority programme, they remained keen to secure for residents the benefits of devolved powers and funding as well as stronger representation on the national stage.
“It just means there is a voice for Kent and Medway that is able to articulate our needs,” says Medway Council chief executive Richard Hicks.
“For me, the benefits are all about those additional powers coming out from Whitehall and Westminster to more locally elected leaders.
“We’re a highly centralised country, and the more that we can do to get powers… into local places, where we know our issues best, [the] better for us.”
As one of those responsible for setting up Medway Council almost 30 years ago, Hicks is “absolutely convinced” of the merits of unitary authorities, able to speak with one voice to accelerate regeneration and economic development.
But he warns against any delusion that the efficiency savings from reorganisation alone will eradicate the risk to balance sheets posed by children’s and adults’ social care, special educational needs and disabilities services and homelessness.
“You cannot just assume that by having that bigger scale, those financial challenges will go away, because they certainly won’t,” he says.
Years of joint working between Medway Council, Kent County Council and Kent’s 12 districts will help smooth the path towards reorganisation, although the boundaries of the new unitaries are still to be thrashed out.
“When it comes to the lines on the map, there are always going to be differences of view around that, but we will be doing our best to settle on an agreed position,” says Hicks.
Single-tier savings
Recent years have seen a swathe of two-tier areas across England reinvent themselves as unitary authorities, driven by the prospect of efficiency savings and a more strategic deployment of resources.
Those who have taken the leap are evangelical about the benefits of single-tier structures from both a financial and service provision perspective.
For North Yorkshire, formed from the merger of eight councils in 2023 and now part of a mayoral combined authority, unitarisation is expected to lead to savings of over £60m by next March, against a cost to date of just under £20m.
“It is absolutely the right thing to do to make savings from the infrastructure of eight separate organisations, so we can protect the frontline delivery that residents and businesses rely on,” says chief executive Richard Flinton.
Three of North Yorkshire’s predecessor authorities had previously been responsible for their own housing stock, with varying degrees of success.
Now, says Flinton, the area benefits from having the best people running the service, as well as the resources to put improved systems in place, including more accurate data on the state of the stock and where improvements should be targeted.
“Just being able to go in with a fresh look at a different scale of operation… enables you to see opportunities that others wouldn’t have been able to realise before,” he says.
He warns that those about to embark on the journey must be prepared to accept the diversity of views that will inevitably emerge, while also maintaining the momentum to move forward once the decision is made.
“[We] had a myriad of views from people who were open to the change; enthusiastic about the change; scared of the change; didn’t want the change to happen because they enjoyed what they were doing previously – you’ve just got to accept that’s absolutely where you’ll be,” he says.
Ultimately, the period of uncertainty – particularly where there are competing proposals and potential conflicts between councils – should be as short as possible.
“People don’t like being in this awkward change position for longer than they need to be,” he says.
The move to single-tier structures has not always been voluntary.
West Northamptonshire was one of two unitary councils set up after the catastrophic financial collapse of Northamptonshire County Council, absorbing the functions of part of the former county and the districts of Daventry, Northampton and South Northamptonshire.
Perfect sense
Chief executive Anna Earnshaw says the benefits in terms of financial sustainability have been “huge”, with savings of £85m across Northamptonshire through the transformation of services, joining up of systems and rationalisation of buildings, set against implementation costs of around £18m.
Residents, too, stand to gain from services that are less complex and easier to navigate.
“It never feels like it when you’re going through it, but, in the longer term, in terms of outcomes for people – and particularly those that need us most – it makes perfect sense,” says Earnshaw.
But the sheer scale of the planned shake-up – and the complexities it will throw up – cannot be underestimated, especially for those whose day job it will be to turn the rhetoric into reality.
One major risk is that councils on the brink of extinction splurge their resources on legacy programmes for ‘their’ residents, potentially threatening the financial resilience of the new authority or hampering it from making innovative new arrangements that would benefit the area as a whole.
Earnshaw is one of many senior officers to see a “real danger” of nascent authorities finding their hands financially tied by decisions taken by councils on their way out.
She would like to see authorities in that situation prevented from disposing of assets over a certain amount or letting major contracts unless the decision has been considered by an overarching governance board.
“I don’t disrespect in any way the legacy people want to leave, but I think all of us found that was an issue and could have been and should have been better controlled,” she says.
For the district councils whose days are numbered, the fundamental concern is whether new unitaries representing half a million people are best placed to meet the needs of local communities.
Trevor Holden, who chairs the chief executive group within the District Councils’ Network, says local democracy must be protected under the new arrangements, with a flexible approach needed to ensure that the new structures properly reflect local circumstances.
“If local government is to be local, it needs to be close enough for people to be able to interact with it easily [and] to be able to influence it – that’s the essence of what makes local government local,” he says.
“While I understand it needs to be done at pace, it needs to be… done properly, so that we have a model that’s sustainable for the next 50 years – at which point somebody will change it again.”
In the meantime, he believes local government faces a huge operational challenge to align systems in a short timeframe, with significant upfront costs and any productivity gains years down the road – all while delivering “business as usual” during an unsettling programme of change.
The holy grail is getting more parts of the public sector working smarter together around the needs of citizens, communities and economies, says Holden. “That’s probably where the prize is, but at the moment we aren’t having enough of a conversation around public service reform,” he adds.
Simon Kaye, director of policy at the Reform think-tank, says that while the white paper is an important first step, its failure to set out a more ambitious path towards wider reform – and, in particular, the alignment of health systems with other public services – is a “pretty big missing piece”.
The other damp squib from a local government perspective is the silence that continues to hang over fiscal autonomy, particularly in the wake of rumours that even modest proposals to permit areas to levy tourist taxes were scotched by the Treasury.
Control issues
“For Treasury to turn its nose up at a source of revenue, however small, just because it doesn’t have direct control over the lever, says nothing good about how that part of the Whitehall system functions,” says Kaye.
“Real regionalism” will require acceptance of greater diversity in the way the strategic model operates across the country, he believes.
“You can’t treat a rural area with a bunch of large towns and small cities in it the same as a hub-and-spoke area with a clear metropolitan core,” he says.
A different solution will be needed for areas that don’t readily lend themselves to the model set out in the white paper but that still need to bind together in order to be strongly represented.
In the meantime, “haphazard” arrangements are likely to emerge as the struggle to fill the map on a tight timetable intensifies, Kaye warns.
“I think you’ll end up with dozens of strategic authorities, many of which won’t feel particularly coherent or be positioned to take on deeper devolution over time,” he says.
“To get to that next step, there needs to be further thinking over how the model evolves and how it reflects different bits of the country.”
