Andy Burnham has hit the ground running as Prime Minister, and in no respect more than devolution. He has drawn heavily on what he learned as Mayor of Greater Manchester to set out his ambition for ‘good growth in every postcode'.
And to anyone who read the Cabinet's Rewiring the State paper at the end of July, it is clear he is determined to carry that ambition out of the realm of politics and firmly into that of public administration too.
But, relatively speaking at least, those are the easy bits.
Recent experience of local government reorganisation, or attempts to create new towns, shows what can happen when central government meets local. There is plenty of scope for things to move much more slowly than is consistent with the Prime Minister's ambition. And if even the National Audit Office concludes that Whitehall has, in effect, tied places in knots with the accountability arrangements surrounding Integrated Settlements, it is clear there is much work to do. The danger for any government facing that dilemma is that it resorts to the old techniques: top-down programmes, centrally commissioned support and new processes intended to make things happen which can end up compounding the very problems they were designed to solve.
That is why the first substantive output of my Independent Review of Growth-Capable Devolution is deliberately nothing more than a problem statement.
Its central proposition is simple. The first phase of English devolution was largely about creating strategic authorities and devolving limited powers. The next must be about building the capability to use those powers well as a foundation for what follows.
The best way I can think of framing what lies ahead is this. If the Government is to follow through on its ambitions for devolution in housing, transport, skills, industrial policy and public services, capabilities which have distinguished the strongest mayoral authorities until now will become a floor rather than a ceiling. What has been exceptional will increasingly need to become normal.
There is plenty to build on. Strategic authorities have created visible political leadership, delivered major programmes and begun to make choices at the scale at which economies actually work. But they start from extraordinarily different positions, and the ambitions now being placed upon them are growing faster than the institutional and financial foundations available to them.
A genuinely growth-capable place needs to understand its economy, make strategic choices, turn ideas into fundable propositions, assemble finance, land, powers and partners, manage investment and risk, deliver major programmes and negotiate confidently with government and investors.
The practical task before us is one of building that institutional capability and capacity. But in doing so, we must keep our eyes firmly on the real prize. It is not stronger strategic authorities for their own sake, but places capable of delivering sustainable economic growth and more nimble and effective public service reform, enabling people in every community to fulfil their potential.
Nor does all that capability have to sit inside the strategic authority itself. One of the most important conclusions of my work so far is that we need to think about the capability of places, not simply organisations. Constituent councils, businesses, universities, public services and national agencies all matter, as do the relationships, trust and shared purpose between them.
Rewiring the State makes clear that the Government understands the centre must change too. The NAO points towards one potentially important part of the answer: the creation of local Accounting Officers for Integrated Settlements. The direction should surely be towards capable local institutions taking greater responsibility for resources and results, rather than Whitehall having to account for every programme and every decision.
The best way I can think of framing what lies ahead is this. If the Government is to follow through on its ambitions for devolution in housing, transport, skills, industrial policy and public services, capabilities which have distinguished the strongest mayoral authorities until now will become a floor rather than a ceiling. What has been exceptional will increasingly need to become normal.
The question, then, is how to get there. The aim of my review isn't to duplicate what government and places are already doing. It is to prepare for what lies ahead and to get ahead of the curve of what will emerge from the White Paper, so that by then we have a clear view of what good looks like: not to fulfil the promise of devolution, but to create the foundations on which full devolution can be securely based.
I am working with places and funders to secure the resources needed to create pilots this financial year. With those in place, alongside the conclusions of the final report of my review, the White Paper will be born into a world in which what constitutes a high but attainable bar for every strategic authority will not be something it has to describe in a vacuum, but something that is already being created in our country now.
The work has started, but it needs to accelerate. There is a long way to go in many places, so we need to be clear and honest: if we don't build those foundations now, we will miss the opportunity and give Whitehall the excuse to soft pedal. In short, we will not create the dynamism needed for genuinely growth-capable devolution across the country.
The country cannot afford that. We need to act, and we need to act purposefully now.
The first report from Bringing Dynamism into Place – the Mike Emmerich Independent Review of Growth-Capable Devolution - can be viewed here
Mike Emmerich is founding director of Metrodynamics
