We are entering an end of one political cycle and waiting for a new one to start.
Some Conservative grandees are hoping this May’s expected shellacking in the local elections will be stemmed or reversed in the national polls that are likely to be held the following year.
The precedent for Rishi Sunak supporters is the grey man Sir John Major’s defiance of political gravity and baked-in expectations of a Labour victory in 1992. Fainter hearts fear the electorate made its sea change before or during the bizarre interregnum of the Liz Truss weeks – and that a 1997 Blair landslide will unfold regardless.
More sanguine Conservative com-mentators trust that, by dint of Labour’s abysmal starting position, we will emerge into a hung Parliament in which Sir Keir Starmer would wield power through a true rainbow coalition of which we have had examples aplenty in local government.
The corporate world of public affairs will be packing their bags in greater numbers to Liverpool, while policy analysts will be seeking to decipher what the drolly titled Take Back Control Bill will mean in practice.
Is talk of ‘community empowerment’ something real from a party that never really advanced from New Labour’s New Deal for communities until recently, or just a policy plea for local government to get back to it with the heavy lifting?
It would be nice to imagine we are building up to a localist arms race for the main party manifestos. But with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves pulling the brakes on fiscal devolution talk, ambitions here may have peaked too early.
Casting our eyes back to what will have been nearly a decade and a half of Conservative-led – albeit coalition, minority as well as to majority (one thin, one stonking) – Governments, what will be the verdict of history? With Sir Eric Pickles lasting a full five-year term as communities secretary, the long shadow of the front-loaded emergency budget cuts and the lasting impact and reshaping of local service delivery has cast the longest shadow over this period.
The inability to stick to a single social care reform programme, as first outlined in the Dilnot Report from the early coalition years, and the continual kicking of this can down the road, most recently shunted by chancellor Jeremy Hunt until after the next election, will also resonate.
It will be remarked that a whole series of changes to the economic development landscape did nothing to redress an initial lost decade of economic growth – from the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis to now.
The replacement of regional development agencies with local enterprise partnerships; the whack-a-mole proliferation of growth funds and competitive bidding pots; the promulgation by Greg Clark of an industrial strategy, then subsequent disavowal of such strategy by his Johnsonian successor at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Kwasi Kwarteng. None of it shifted the dial, this is all the way to today and the levelling up agenda, with its ellipsis of public realm improvements and emphasis on civic pride, its push to improve local services for better social outcomes while boosting regional productivity – all to reduce stubbornly entrenched geographic economic inequality.
One verdict may be that there was a missed opportunity to enlist and register local government and the local state as nimble, efficient and effective agents of social and economic transformation. This is a two-way street, as became all too evident with the seeming ignorance of the longstanding role and experience of public health during the pandemic: the sector failed to promote its potential also.
Whatever and whoever is running the show after next year’s General Election, attention and protection should be afforded to local government. Not to preserve it in its current state in aspic, but to defend its role and function against the headwinds of financial weakening and institutional decrepitude that would undermine its local and democratic tradition of largely self-sufficient self-government.
If it is a case of we will miss it when it’s gone, this means a greater focus on audit, accountability and governance for the sake of viability.
To this end, it will also be instructive how the next Government intends to develop the combined authority programme. Given their gravitational pull, they are likely to exert greater and greater control and responsibility for public service reform and delivery, possibly at the expense of constituent councils.
Parliamentary researcher Mark Sandford has recently written of the ‘conceptual fuzziness surrounding ‘accountability’ within the English devolution debate. This upward trajectory of accountability and power will need to be managed by a revised devolution framework that puts clarity of communication ahead of fuzzy logic.
Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis
@Localis
