Localism looks set to be the hot topic for political debate in the early months of 2011.

The much-delayed Localism Bill has at last been published, and appears set for its House of Commons second reading on 17 January.

As I suggested last month, the Bill will prompt a great deal of controversy, even if the over-arching objective of devolving more power from Westminster to a local level commands broad, cross-party support.

So, while ministers will try to claim credit for their devolutionary intentions, they will come under heavy fire on a number of different counts.

First will be the discrepancy between their words and their actions. For all that ministers want to talk the localism talk, they find it hard to resist interfering in local decision-making when it suits their wider public relations agenda.

So, communities secretary Eric Pickles’ commitment to devolution disappears when issues such as the pay of senior officers, the cost of car parking in city centres, or the publication of local council newspapers, to take but three examples, comes up.

Similarly, housing minister Grant Shapps’ belief that housing decisions should be taken locally is curiously suspended when Liverpool City Council decides to demolish a decaying terrace property once occupied by ex-Beatle, Ringo Starr.

It isn’t hard to see the common thread running through all these instances – ministers thought they would get good media coverage by wading into these debates. Headlines clearly count for more than any theoretical commitment to localism.

The second criticism that ministers will encounter is the convenient use they are making of the localist agenda to shield themselves from responsibility for cuts. How much easier to leave the local authority in the headlights when unpalatable service cuts or cost increases have to be imposed.

And while they may try to extol the Big Society concept of local voluntary, charitable or community groups taking over responsibility for certain services, this again looks unconvincing –as the chief executive of ACEVO, Sir Stephen Bubb, reminded us recently in his article ‘Don’t cut funding to the voluntary sector’ (The MJ, 16 December) – when these same voluntary bodies are facing sharp reductions in their funding.

There is a difficult and complex tension at the very heart of this debate. We live in a small island with strongly-developed expectations of fairness and minimum acceptable standards applying throughout the country. It takes only one highly-publicised case of failure – the Baby P tragedy is one such example – for the nation to demand government action to prevent such ‘postcode lotteries’ occurring again.

While the rational commentator may argue that ministers should resist such calls – and I personally have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view – political leaders from all parties do not have a good track record in defending localism when News International is clamouring for a tough government response.

So, expect a really difficult period in which local government could well find itself squeezed between public anger at unpopular cuts and central government criticism for the consequent public service failures.

The third difficulty comes from the lack of precision on the part of the Government in defining precisely what localism means. One only has to look at the clauses in the Localism Bill on planning to see the problem. Giving people at the most local, neighbourhood, level the opportunity to help shape planning decisions is a laudable objective, but in the absence of elected, accountable bodies, it will often be difficult to determine whether one group of forceful and articulate residents is truly representative of the neighbourhood view, and an authentic champion of the interests of their locality.

The whole purpose of an elected local authority is to act for the whole community, and to be answerable to that community. Take away that element of democratic accountability, and we are left in uncharted waters, where the prevailing currents of public opinion at any one point in time may or may not be an authoritative and representative view of a local community.

If such nebulous and ill-defined groups can pre-empt the decision of the local authority on potentially-significant development proposals, the door is opened to a whole range of potential conflicts of interest, and the risk that the wider public good is subverted by self-appointed groupings representing their own sectional interests.

Once again, we are in complex territory where the pressures pulling in different directions could prove highly disruptive.

The lesson of history is that no one single approach is a panacea to the difficult problems posed by devolution. To minimise risk, it is, therefore, usually wise to pilot and test new approaches before rolling them out across the whole country. Sadly, the current government has not learned this lesson.

Nick Raynsford is a former local government minister and Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich