Fabian’s column: Burnham’s vision for mayors needs an accompanyng vision for councils 

At Labour conference, we heard more of the Prime Minister’s vision for the country with mayors at its heart. Burnham has a clear concept of place, seeking to drive growth in every postcode and end Britain’s stark regional imbalances. 

It builds on his speech in Manchester on good growth and devolution before he became prime minister, and the groundbreaking ‘rewiring the state’ cabinet statement after.

But Burnham’s vision for mayors demands an accompanying vision for councils too. Because only together can they deliver the change he has promised. Labour’s new agenda requires strong local government, whether devolution, the biggest council house-building programme since the Second World War, or reforming social care. 

But councils are more than delivery bodies for central ambition. They are democratically accountable, visible guardians of their localities, running crucial public services, maintaining the public realm, and shaping housing and high streets’ futures. 

The government’s model of devolution, through strategic authorities, embeds a strong role for councils. Outside of London, strategic authorities are integrated ‘combined authorities’ with formal relationships and joint decision-making between constituent councils, including their mayor in the mayoral strategic authorities.

Councils have a crucial role in strategic authority accountability, which the government rightly wants to strengthen. As Mayors become increasingly powerful, taking on fiscal powers, they will need a new local accountability architecture. This will provide strong democratic counterweights for better decisions, a culture of improvement, and confidence to the public and Parliament. Well-resourced local democratic processes, involving councils and councillors, are the right mechanism to provide this.

The Conservative government proposed a role for Members of Parliament in local oversight, but this is not the role that best suits them. Strategic authorities are a local government body, that need to be held to account by local politicians. Detailed scrutiny of strategic authority decisions will never be a primary function of MPs, who are intensely busy national legislators scrutinising national policy or serving as Ministers or Shadow Ministers. Instead, MPs’ role is strategic and system wide. They ought to design the system of local government and scrutinise its overall effectiveness.

That system needs capacity and clarity to support its potential. Structural financial problems constrain this. Over the austerity years, cuts to central grants shifted more of the funding burden onto local taxpayers while statutory duties expanded to eat more of the dwindling pie. Social care is the only category of local authority spending that rose since 2014/15, while all others fell. Funding settlements under Labour have helped, boosting funding and providing multi-year certainty. But councils still face severe pressure, and remain reeling from the Tory years of increasing council tax while cutting services. Pressure on statutory services risks deciding councils’ role by default. 

For councils and councillors alike, devolution strengthens their hands after decades of corrosion. Since the 1970s, both have had powers and autonomy eroded. Building stronger strategic authorities in which councils and councillors have active roles is a course correction. 

In Burnham’s Labour Conference speech, he showed how political control has been corroded in recent decades with the hollowing out of councils. Repairing this damage, alongside devolution, starts to put that right.

The government will soon publish a white paper on devolution. It promises fresh powers, including fiscal devolution for strategic authorities. But it is also an opportunity to set out a vision for councils, and councillors, in a more devolved system – to put councils on the same purposeful, reforming path Burnham wants for the country. 

With the National Care Service brought forward and local government reorganisation paused, now is a moment to step back and evaluate how England’s tiers of government will work, have agency, and relate to one another. 

If the government wants to rewire the state, they must not overlook councils, but back them as partners with purpose of their own and fix the funding challenge that holds them back. Good growth in every postcode requires a capable council in every postcode.