'The continued denuding of local democracy will stymie real change and open the door to the far right even wider'

Julian Dean is a Councillor in Shropshire and the Green Party’s Senior Local Government Political Adviser. This article is written in a personal capacity.

The screams of anguish from large parts of Local Government are real. Thursday’s announcement of extra cash is largely swallowed up by the employer national insurance hike for council staff and for those contracted to provide services. Planning reforms defang councils and communities looking to find a balance in land-use decisions. And Monday’s Devolution White Paper, includes ‘reorganisation’ of District Councils into huge unitary councils plus a new top tier across all parts of England where that doesn’t currently exist. This piece focuses on the implications of Monday’s announcements.

The White Paper envisages mega Combined or ‘Strategic’ Authorities under directly elected Mayors where they currently don’t exist. The expectation is that these will see a transfer of powers and resources not just downwards from Whitehall – which, to be clear, is in principle welcome – but also upwards from the more local layers of government, whether those are currently county councils, district councils or unitary councils. Labour plans to replace district councils state that the new unitary councils should have a population of 500,000 or more.

This is an outright attack on local decision making, especially when you consider that on those numbers, and if applied consistently, Bristol, Leicester, Coventry and Nottingham would not qualify for anything beyond a parish council. Middle-sized towns will be wiped from the political map, and rural areas will see power move further away, held by fewer locally elected representatives. 

Meanwhile even existing large unitary councils are expecting ‘placemaking’ powers including strategic planning to be sucked upwards to the Strategic Authority, leaving them with the most costly statutory duties of social care and children’s services. Many are actually considering whether they can transfer cultural and other assets to town and parish councils in time to save them either from closure due to their own retrenchment and ‘downsizing’, or to keep them from the clutches of even more distant authorities. 

Cynics might also suggest political gaming. Beyond the option to cancel some May local elections the subsequent imposition of directly elected Mayors for ministerially approved strategic areas (‘gerrymandered’ you might say) suggests the prospect of a new phalange of Starmer-loyalist Labour Mayors owing all to number 10. Does anyone believe an independently minded Labour candidate will make it through a selection process following the fate of Jamie Driscoll? It’s also very likely that we will lose a swathe of strong women District Council leaders (yes – several of them Greens), whilst current trends (9/12) suggest men will dominate the Mayoral role. We should be wary of an even more worrying outcome. The directly elected Mayor model is specifically designed to create high profile regional politicians. What if a celebrity businessman, with a million or so to spare on an election campaign (and possibly with the backing of Farage or Musk) fancies their chances, and the opportunities for further enrichment? 

So what’s going on? There is widespread agreement that devolution is a ‘good thing’. But it is now clear that Starmer and Rayner plan to actually reduce truly local decision making. Labour’s primary purpose is to remove ‘the blockers’ in order to drive development led growth. Given that there is very little else in their tool bag to deliver improved living standards and better services, their reliance on private sector house builders to drive up GDP is understandable, if wrong-head and almost certain to fail on all three counts; raw numbers, cracking the housing affordability crisis and producing a boast-worthy boom.

In a world where disengagement and disillusionment are damaging our democracy and strengthening the far right, this sacrificing of local decision making on the altar of ‘growth’ is a considerable risk. That this even needs stating is shocking. So we should keep asking, what is the problem that Labour wants to solve? Overcoming inequality and creating sustainable places? Removing impediments to delivering truly affordable homes, early years family support, better public transport and active travel options, home insulation with electrification and lower household bills, town centre regeneration? From my council seat, it doesn’t look like it. All these require local expertise, community support and adequate funding. Longer term funding is no substitute for enough funding. Much of this work is truly ‘granular’. By way of example, delivering warmer homes grants has been extremely hit-and-miss, and has worked best where there are locally committed staff and councillors, often in partnerships with local energy charities and with links to local tradespeople. Ripping these arrangements up and starting again, but from a greater distance, could set us back years. And that logic applies equally to a range of policy areas from active travel work to nature recovery initiatives. 

Perhaps it’s all about efficiency? Yet there is no evidence at all that larger or unitarised authorities will deliver more efficient services (see Colin Copus’s excellent book, The Strange Demise of the Local in Local Government). Cooperation and collaboration are already widespread in local government, but economies of scale are frequently not meaningful when set against the granularity of many local services, and technologically driven new ways of working make much larger subregional consolidation of little point on a value for money basis.

Or maybe it’s about creating public sector simplicity? Pull the other one. Complexity is baked in across public service; the tiers of local government look straightforward when compared to the public sector web beyond the council chambers, which councils work with every day: Police and Crime Commissioners and Authorities, the NHS in all its complicated manifestations, passenger transport authorities, the probation service, JobCentre Plus, Fire and Rescue Authorities, Housing Associations, Multi Academy Trusts and National Park Authorities alongside a range of central government departments and agencies from Sports England to the Environment Agency. With this degree of complexity, a reduction in the number of locally elected representatives – an inevitable and indeed intended consequence of proposals for larger unitaries and the removal of district councils – will only create more distance, and possibly distrust, between communities and public authorities.Meanwhile the wholesale adoption of AI in customer services is already depersonalising responsiveness.          

Yes, Strategic Authorities can provide opportunities for a step change in delivering sustainable local economies, planning for transport, energy and skills development – and for system-wide service improvement especially if health bosses start to feel locally accountable. Yes, all England’s regions should have the powers currently sitting with London and Manchester. And yes, there may be places where urban development and the patterns of living and working mean the county-district distinction no longer fits.  But the umbilical cord between the places people call home and their councils is vital if communities are to be properly engaged in the democratic process. In this context, the disappearance of whole towns and familiar places from the local government map – much of which has already happened, but more of which is planned – is a risk both to the health of our democracy and to actual delivery of improved lives. 

Of course, in defending local democracy we do need to come up with a credible response to the accusations of nimbyism. So here it is. Land use must balance the need for food, homes, energy, infrastructure, nature and flood management. Communities are quite capable of understanding and managing that when properly engaged with.  Within that land-use balance, affordable homes – best delivered as council housing – can and do attract local support. But Rayner and Starmer don’t want balance, they want to shift power to the developers.

Right now, the power to reorganise local government sits with ministers alone, even if they then need to tidy up the legal framework. Incredibly, our constitution provides no protection to local democracy. This in the context of a country with one of the weakest and sparsest local government set-ups across the wealthy world and which has been steadily weakened over decades. Progressive voices have not been great at defending local democracy. ‘Think Global, Act Local’  is meaningful to many local activists who are fighting for cleaner rivers, for better nursery provision, or for safer walking and cycling, but the national Labour Party has never centred this approach to making change happen (though I do wonder where Lisa Nandy’s constant refrain about towns has gone). It would be great to see left voices raising the alarm; the continued denuding of local democracy will stymie real change and open the door to the far right even wider. Let’s not leave Localism to the LibDems, Countryside Alliance types, or worse.

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