A number of wild and wonderful geographies are on the table to devolve powers to. Doing so will likely undermine the ability of devolution to improve national economic performance.
Labour is likely to have something to say on devolution in the forthcoming party conference. Going further on devolution is very welcome. But there are some bear traps that the Government should be wary of as it pushes to fill in the map, and some of the mooted deals would fall right into them. Here’s why.
Labour committed to continuing to pass powers from Whitehall to town halls in both its national manifesto and its local one. As part of its vision for kickstarting economic growth it said three things. Firstly, that it will deepen devolution deals where they are in place already. Secondly, that it will widen devolution to fill in the map – covering the remaining half of people in England that don’t live in an area covered by a deal. And thirdly, that it will set this out in a devolution bill.
Reports suggest a number of places are putting forward new proposals for deals in advance of the Government setting out its position in more detail. Examples are the ‘South East Midlands’ area containing Milton Keynes, Luton and Northampton, the Bournemouth-Dorset-Wiltshire-Swindon-Somerset deal and a long-mooted Hampshire deal.
As has been the case with previous governments, the current government has pitched devolution in the context of economic growth. Given this, the area that policy powers are devolved to should reflect the geography that the economy operates over. Not doing so means passing these powers from one inappropriate geography to another; from too large to still too large.
Many of the geographies that have been mooted since the election – in the south of England in particular – fail on this principle. Being driven seemingly by a misguided belief that size is all that matters, rather than geography, gets you to the bizarre position of entertaining a deal that contains Bournemouth and Somerset in it. No more than 0.2 per cent of working residents in each respective area commutes to the other one.
This undermines the rationale for devolving in the first place, and devolution will struggle to improve a single local economy if a mayor is responsible for multiple ones. It makes the future mayor’s job much harder than it needs to be.
This has long been a challenge in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, two very different places. It presents ongoing issues in West of England, where North Somerset (whose northern boundary is around a mile from Bristol city centre) is not a full member. And, as Claire Ward is likely discovering, it is an issue in East Midlands too. We shouldn’t make this mistake again.
A knock-on impact of a poorly-defined deal is that it makes achieving a sensible geography for surrounding areas more difficult too. East Midlands is again a good case in point here. The original plan for what is now the South Yorkshire Combined Authority area was to include Chesterfield. It falls into Derbyshire but on a commuting basis points north to Sheffield.
But the process for incorporating Chesterfield was deemed unlawful, and so it never happened. Chesterfield is now part of the East Midlands mayoralty. This means the mayor has the challenge for creating policy not only for Derby and for Nottingham and their hinterlands, but part of Sheffield’s hinterland too. This will likely cause a huge headache for any future bus franchising plans alone. And that’s just one policy the mayor is responsible for.
In the case of the ill-fated Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), letting politics define the geography – rather than economics – resulted in a strange mix of geographies, including three LEPs that cut through the Birmingham urban footprint. The Government should learn a lesson from this and intervene to set more appropriate boundaries.
Getting the system to work requires guidance from a body who can see the overall system. Very helpfully, the Government has been clear about what powers are available to places. It now needs to be as clear on geography.
As shown in the recent Centre for Cities briefing, Devolution Solution, the Government should use high-skill travel-to-work areas to define the geography local economies and devolution deals operate over (see Figure 1). In the case of the mooted Dorset-Somerset-Wiltshire deal, this would mean having three separate devolution deals rather than the one ‘mega’ deal.
The map is simpler to achieve than it first seems too: 21 out of 48 new authorities are either unchanged (e.g. West Yorkshire, Somerset etc.) or have one “obvious” merger (e.g. Leicester and Leicestershire).
This of course is fraught with political fallout, which in turn risks taking up a lot of time to resolve. From a growth perspective the Government must weigh the time taken to manage this fallout against the economic returns that are likely to result from devolution to the rest of England.
On economic impact, the bigger gains will most likely come not from colouring the remainder of the map in, but going further on devolution in large cities which by definition make a larger contribution to the national economy. If it is possible to do both in good time then there isn’t a problem, but this seems unlikely. Given this, the Government should be wary of moving resource away from working on single settlements for existing combined authorities to working on broadening devolution instead.
On time, it is worth remembering that it took the last government two years to produce the levelling up white paper, and it did very little once it was published. Much time has been wasted already. Let’s not squander even more.
Leave a comment
Be the first to add a comment.