Reflections on the second reading of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
Tuesday this week saw the second reading debate of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment bill in Parliament, with Angela Rayner and Jim McMahon dispatched to defend the bill’s provisions against the official opposition’s charge of a “power grab” aimed at increasing costs and reducing local democracy. The debate was expansive, ranging from specific policy areas such as combined authority voting systems, to a more general discontent over the pace and scale of local government reorganisation.
In this short briefing, I am going to cover how the second reading reflected concerns in two recent Localis publications – Colin Copus and Steve Leach’s Reorganisation, local government and the future of English devolution and Callin McLinden’s Centralisation, local decline and the future of community power – and have a brief look at how further reforms could address some of these issues.
Joe Fyans, head of research
Unitarisation and its discontents
A central position of Colin and Steve’s paper is the formal role of local government within the British state and its lack of protection from a central government which can act “at will” to modify arrangements. The paper cites the cancellation of local elections in priority devolution areas as “fundamentally unconstitutional”. This was a significant point of contention in the parliamentary debate, with Sir James Cleverly criticising the postponement of elections in nine Devolution Priority Programme areas as undermining democracy. Joe Robertson (Con) noted that the Isle of Wight was being “fused under a combined mayoral authority with Hampshire without having a single say,” despite a previous referendum against it and Ben Maguire (LD) also expressed alarm that the government could “force combined authorities without local people’s consent”.
The essay also repeatedly challenged the government’s target figure of half-a-million population count for new unitary authorities, arguing that it has a “deleterious effect on a range of democratic criteria” and will lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of councillors in England. Several MPs in the debate raised similar concerns. Martin Wrigley (LD) called the idea of reorganisation saving money a “fallacy” and opposed large mayoralties in vast areas. Robbie Moore (Con) argued against “oversized unitary authorities” and David Simmonds (Con, and a Localis board member) explicitly stated the Bill “abolishes 90 percent of all the councillors in England’s shires”, a figure drawn from the good professors’ analysis.
What the reflection of Colin and Steve’s essay in the Parliamentary debate displays (on a cross-party basis, at that) is the political damage of rolling in local government reorganisation with the English devolution agenda, a major misstep in the bill. The devolution agenda, through the expansion of the combined authority model, has been more or less trundling along for a decade now. By trying to address the fiscal unsustainability of local government at the same time as accelerating that agenda, through the dubious financial rationale for unitarisation, the government has muddied the waters and created a whole lot of fighting within and without the local government sector. This is taking up energy which might be better spent delivering on the stated goals of the new model – attracting investment, improving infrastructure and ultimately increasing quality of life and environment in place.
How these two agendas got bundled into one is a matter for debate. Colin and Steve make the case that the answer lies in a deep-seated institutional bias within MHCLG, whereas I, myself, would point out that the first mention of reorganisation in this Parliament came not from that ministry but from the Treasury, as part of the 2024 budget documentation. Either way, it’s not turning out to be a brilliant idea across the whole country, and rationality suggests that after the local authorities in the Devolution Priority Programme have been jimmied into acceptable shapes, it might be best to eschew this dual focus and get back to the business of housing delivery and economic growth.
A more ambitious ask of government might be to abandon the myopic focus on mayoral strategic authorities as a one-size-fits-all model and allow for some variation. But given that preference for mayors is about the only thing to have survived the last decade of central government policy, that ship likely has sailed.
Genuine community empowerment
The debate reflected many of the concerns raised in Callin’s essay, which provided a powerful critique of the current state of governance and community empowerment in England. The essay raises concerns about the extent of genuine devolution, the continued centralisation of power, the limited nature of community empowerment provisions and the financial pressures on local government. Callin writes of a “pervasive sense that power has drifted almost completely out of [community] hands”, which was acknowledged by the secretary of state in her introduction to the bill. Yet while the government presented the legislation as a transformative shift, many MPs echoed the view that it risks being “rhetorical devolution with practical centralisation”.
Centralisation, local decline and the future of community power centred on the need for meaningful statutory provisions for double devolution, passing power through councils to communities rather than merely delegating it from Whitehall to local authorities. Similar sentiments were voiced in the chamber, with the aforementioned Martin Wrigley MP arguing for a statutory obligation for councils to work with parish and town councils.
We launched the essay with a webinar held in partnership with the We’re Right Here campaign, who were singled out for praise by Jonathan Brash (Lab) in advocating for a form of devolution that does not stop at the strategic level.
Callin argued that the Bill’s specific community empowerment provisions are “indirect, discretionary, or procedural,” largely limited to assets of community value via the Community Right to Buy. While the debate saw widespread welcome for this measure, the depth of empowerment was questioned.
The issue here is one that has dogged community-level initiatives such as neighbourhood plans for years – that of divergent capacity and expertise to engage with the process across the country. Local control cannot be reduced to a process of councils, under heavy external pressure to sell assets, offloading unaffordable social infrastructure to only those communities rich enough in money, time and expertise to manage the transfer. Nor can we crowdfund our way out of a decade of austerity. What is required is patient financing and the development of resources to manage its provision in local areas, without which the bill’s new community powers will be of little use to many who would otherwise value them.
A trapdoor of sorts in the legislation is the promise of neighbourhood governance units which, whilst fairly criticised on Tuesday as being “vaguely set out”, could end up being a form of organisation to which capacity support of the kind outlined above could be extended.
Indeed, there is hope in these prospective arrangements to enact the other measures of community power outlined in Callin’s paper. They might also be used as the voting base for participatory budgeting mechanisms, as similar neighbourhood-level units are embedded in other systems, and as a point of contact for community engagement with local economic strategy.
The devil will naturally be in the detail of how these neighbourhood committees are constituted and how their formation works within the existing patchwork of parishes, neighbourhood forums and informal community alliances. We will be advocating where we can for strong, accountable and empowered neighbourhood-level governance.
In the meantime, you can keep up with all things Localis on our LinkedIn page and via this newsletter – we will shortly be announcing our webinar events for this month and October.