Ministers should immediately devolve control of key public services to major English cities and counties – such as Manchester and Kent – in return for a reduction in total spending across those areas, a major new report has claimed.
A study of the future of ‘localism’, published by the 2020 Public Services Trust on 22 March, calls for a ‘more-for-less’ deal to achieve the devolution to localities which all major political parties claim they want.
As political leaders talk up their localist credentials before the general election, the trust’s report – based on interviews with senior central and local government figures – provides a ‘route map’ to workable devolution in a post-election period dominated by Britain’s public debt.
Chancellor Alistair Darling’s Budget, this week, was expected to tackle the UK’s deficit, partially through another programme of public savings and cuts.
The 2020 PST study, published before the Budget, pre-empted Mr Darling’s announcement by combining local government’s impatience for greater devolution with Whitehall’s favoured programme to improve services while slashing costs – Total Place.
Under Total Place, CLG and Treasury ministers have successfully experimented with merged budgets for a range of services – including health, criminal justice and children’s services – and devolved decision-making over how that cash should be spent to local managers.
The 2020 PST report, Delivering a localist future, urges ministers to initiate a two-speed devolution to localities by immediately inviting cities and counties which have proven ‘capacity, capability and confidence’ to manage all major public services. ‘The best shouldn’t wait for the rest,’ the report states. ‘So the next big step should be negotiated autonomy with the large cities and counties that are already operating as sub-regions, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Kent, Essex and Leeds.’ But the trust warns devolution should carry a price – responsibility for finding significant savings.
‘The basis of the negotiated autonomy deal will be ‘more-for-less’ single-place budgets, in which a place will agree a single budget with the Treasury which amounts to a fixed percentage less than is currently being spent on services in this area,’ the study states.
Devoid of responsibility for key services, Whitehall could then become smaller and focused on co-ordinating local services.
Ben Lucas, the trust’s director, said the need to tackle Britain’s deficit provided politicians with the ideal rationale for rapid devolution.
‘The danger is that, far from building on the goodwill and collaboration within Total Place, central government will just want to bank the savings without any gain to local areas,’ he said.
‘The alternative is to use Total Place and statutory city-regions as building blocks for a new deal with local areas, in which they get the power and autonomy to properly shape their place in return for playing their part in reducing the nation’s deficit.’
But local government practitioners questioned Whitehall’s desire to hand over its long-held powers.
However, Chris Leslie, director of the New Local Government Network think-tank, said an opportunity now existed to ‘build a critical mass of localists’ which, joined together, would be powerful enough to win the argument with Westminster’s centralist tendency.
