Councils must prove their relevance

When Keir Starmer appointed a new cabinet secretary in December 2024, he spoke of the need to ‘rewire the state': breaking down Whitehall's silos, organising around cross-departmental missions and resetting the relationship between ministers and officials.A change of Prime Minister later, the phrase survives, but its meaning has fundamentally shifted. Under a Prime Minister who spent nearly a decade as a metro mayor, rewiring is less about Whitehall's internal fittings than about where power sits.Re-arranging accountabilities in Whitehall is now seen as a small part of a wider problem – how to strengthen governance at all levels so that public decisions are made nearer to the people affected by them. England's fast-ageing population, set to reach 60 million by 2030, is ill-served by the over-centralisation of power in Whitehall.Consider the ratio of workers to dependants. Working-age people make up about 64% of England's population, and will do so until 2050, because the projected rise in retirees roughly matches the projected fall in children. But the costs of the two groups are very different.The Office for Budget Responsibility's age profiles in its most recent Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, put the average cost of educating a child at around £14,000 a year, and of pensions and health and social care for a retiree at around £31,000. Each fewer child saves £14,000.Each extra pensioner costs £31,000. The answer lies largely in prevention and care organised around people where they live, and that is council territory.But the disparities that gain most attention from the public and from politicians are between places – in quality of life, life-chances and livelihoods. It is these that underpin this attempt to rewire the state by changing the geography of public investment.Strategic authorities aim to lift infrastructure and investment decisions out of the desiccated calculations of Whitehall, while raising them above the parochialisms that can block public action. Their success will depend on imagination and on drawing on the distinctive capabilities of their area.As designed, strategic authorities are principally capital allocation bodies. They use infrastructure-led development as the catalyst for growth, with revenue funds to streamline employment and skills support across wider geographies than is possible locally.Councils must prove their relevance and act as stewards of local democracy rather than its gatekeepers to rebuild a living connection with the communities they serve.The case for devolution rests on a simple test: do preferences, conditions and priorities differ more between places than within them? Where they do, a geographically differentiated system is likely to match policy to citizens' circumstances better than a national settlement. Where the principal divisions run through places rather than between them, the argument weakens. It weakens further where public functions generate large spillovers to neighbouring areas. And many strategic authorities will sit across these points of tension.But scale is not the whole story. The challenge, to para- phrase American diplomat and public administrator Harlan Cleveland, ‘is to get everyone in on the act and still get action'.Strategic authorities may supply the critical investment action, but it is local councils that must get everyone in on the act. People do not feel they belong to a geography drawn for economic purposes. They belong to the town, the borough, the neighbourhood and their local elected council is the institution through which that attachment becomes civic engagement.If rewiring reduces councils to service delivery agents beneath strategic authorities, it will weaken the very democratic legitimacy that devolution is meant to renew.So what makes a council more than a service delivery agent? Three things. First, it should own the services that depend on intimate knowledge of people and neighbourhoods: care, children's services, housing, public health and the prevention that local needs demand. Second, councils should be the democratic foundation of strategic authorities, not a tier beneath them. That means co-authoring growth and spatial plans, holding the mayor to account through scrutiny and turning strategic investment into neighbourhood benefit. Third, each council should lead its place. It should convene health partners, police, colleges, businesses and community groups around shared outcomes and build neighbourhood governance that gives residents a real voice.None of this will be conceded to councils by right. It has to be earned. Too many have become remote administrators of shrinking budgets, with low turnouts and residents unsure who does what.Councils must prove their relevance and act as stewards of local democracy rather than its gatekeepers to rebuild a living connection with the communities they serve.Not a week passes without someone, somewhere, asking for ‘more powers'. That is understandable: strategic authorities hold only a functional power of competence, narrower than the general power of competence enjoyed by councils. But few, if any, ask for ‘more duties'.Well-rounded governance means having to do things, not merely being free to choose them.The UK is a multi-national state. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a combined population of 11 million, each have different powers and constitutions.Why should England, with nearly 60 million people, not have commensurate variety in its politics and constitutions, as in its geography? Is constitutional tidiness the right goal? And if not, how do we ensure that the rights, life-chances and livelihoods of people throughout England are less unequal in 2050 than they are now?Barry Quirk is a former council chief executive, local government adviser and a former president and chairman of Solace

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REWIRING LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Councils must prove their relevance

By Barry Quirk | 21 October 2026

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