Other Ideas: ‘Shock Treatment’
Other Ideas is a new series of essays published by Localis, featuring perspectives from our team, our research fellows and the wider local government family.
On 31st of July 2026 freshly appointed Prime Minister Andy Burnham released ‘Rewiring the State’ which set out his vision for the future of governance in the UK. In this short report from Emeritus Professors of local government, Colin Copus and Steve Leach, argue that rewiring the state and central government’s approach to local government as whole ‘shows clearly that councils have far less prominence in government thinking than the comparatively new creation of strategic authorities and their directly elected mayors’.
‘Shock treatment: will English local government blow a fuse in a Rewired State?’ identifies some major issues of concern regarding the new government’s plan, including:
- Conflation of Devolution and Decentralisation: Current proposals offer administrative decentralisation (the transfer of service delivery tasks and specific budgets) rather than genuine devolution (the transfer of primary decision-making, policy-making, and legislative powers as seen in Scotland and Wales).
- Marginalisation of Local Authorities in Favour of Mayors: The government’s “Rewiring the State” agenda prioritises strategic combined authorities and directly elected mayors over traditional local councils. This risks replacing Westminster centralism with a new form of regional mayoral centralism.
- Unjustified Local Government Reorganisation (LGR): Linking devolution to LGR forces council mergers into massive unitary bodies despite a lack of compelling evidence that larger councils deliver better outcomes or cost savings.
- Erosion of Place and Community Identity: Creating giant unitary authorities undermines local democracy and public connection to place, running counter to historical evidence and international models that favour smaller, community-rooted councils.
- Lack of True Fiscal Devolution: Financial freedoms remain restricted, with new revenue mechanisms or tax retention (such as tourist levies or business rates) primarily directed toward strategic mayors rather than granting genuine financial autonomy to local councils.
- Economic Growth as a Centralist Instrument: Devolution is being treated as a mechanism to implement central government policy objectives—specifically economic growth—rather than establishing a fundamental shift toward sub-national democratic self-governance.
- Absence of Constitutional Protection: Unlike international systems (such as Germany’s Basic Law), English local government remains constitutionally vulnerable under the Widdicombe doctrine, leaving councils subject to arbitrary central restructuring or abolition.
Professors Copus and Leach expand on questions raised by their previous Localis paper: reorganisation, local government and the future of English devolution. Asking a simple, related question: does local government have a future under devolution?