Intro to LGIU’s Local Democracy Research Centre’s newest team member: Dan Godley

We’ve recently welcomed Dan Godley to the team at LGIU’s Local Democracy Research Centre. In this piece, Dan shares a bit about his academic background and the insights he has gained, particularly while researching devolution in Cornwall. He also discusses some of the current projects he is working on at LGIU, including our much-anticipating 2025 State of Local Government Finance survey.

My name is Dan Godley, and I have recently joined the LGIU’s Local Democracy Research Centre as a researcher. It is a critical time to be joining the team with my first weeks in the role being marked by a major shakeup of financial and organisational arrangements of the local government sector in England.

I am therefore particularly pleased to be leading our work on The State of Local Government Finance in England, where we seek to uncover the impacts that these changes may have had on the sector through engagement with council leaders, chief executives and cabinet members for finance. Last year, our survey revealed critically, and unprecedentedly, low confidence in local government finance, with more than half of councils indicating a likelihood of issuing a section 114 notice in the next five years. One year later, we eagerly anticipate responses from council representatives: have developments over the past year addressed concerns, or will we again see a familiar, dismal outlook for the sector?

Before starting in this role, I completed BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Cambridge where my research concerned the challenges faced by councils due to the combined impacts of devolution, austerity and Brexit. I took a case study approach to these challenges, focusing specifically on the region of Cornwall, where I interviewed councillors and officers from the local authority. Cornwall has experienced notable difficulty in devolution negotiations while seeing decreased spending power due to austerity and surging service demand. Furthermore, the post-Brexit replacement of European Structural and Investment Funds by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, although increasing local influence over fund administration, has decreased investment in the region. Cornwall, I argue, represents a microcosm of the present local government situation in England, and my research sheds light on the particularities of the challenges faced by local officials with transferable findings for other areas.

For instance, I explored with interviewees the reasons for the collapse of devolution negotiations in Cornwall, identifying the uncompromising preference for the ‘mayoral model’ among central government as a contentious requirement that is likely to limit other regions’ pursuits of autonomy. Interviews also revealed the precise spending pressures that are pushing the authority – and many others – to collapse, with rising housing, health and social care, and home-to-school transport provision being inadequately captured in local government budget allocations from Westminster. Furthermore, the difficulties in administering the Shared Prosperity Fund were examined, with its short timescale representing a prominent limitation which largely restricts investment to smaller, more deliverable projects. Together, these findings illustrate the intersecting, parallel challenges in local governance upon recent developments, and how Westminster’s prevailing policy approach has failed the sector over many years across an array of issues.

By examining devolution, austerity and Brexit together, I also argue that the impacts of each trajectory of change cannot be sufficiently explained without parallel consideration of the others. This is because the simultaneous unfolding of these political-economic reconfigurations has resulted in interactions between them – producing both contradictory and complementary outcomes. For instance, while devolution has increased administrative power in many regions, these same regions have experienced a sustained reduction in spending power under austerity. This supposed newfound local self-determination is thus severely hamstrung by the inability to deviate from the actions necessary to balance increasingly strained budgets. As a result, in any research approach to the changing role of local government in England, accurate conclusions cannot be drawn by looking at devolution alone.

The same is true for the vast majority of studies which ignore the impact of Brexit on local authorities. For councils that engaged significantly with European governance structures, the UK’s departure from the European Union terminated relationships that had been built over decades of collaboration. Cornwall, for example, found in the EU a reliable protector, spearheading efforts towards recognition of Cornish language and culture in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Moreover, European Structural and Investment Funds, though imperfect, were critical for major infrastructure projects in the region, including the Eden Project, Cornwall Airport Newquay and the Combined Universities in Cornwall – a joint campus for the University of Exeter and Falmouth University. To attempt to comprehensively explain recent changes at the local level whilst ignoring the most significant shift in UK governance in a generation, is, to me, myopic. I therefore believe that there is much to be learnt from research which takes a more holistic approach to overhaul and upheaval in the local government sector.

As the devolution agenda marches on, it is an exciting, yet challenging, time for local government, with profound changes to the nation’s political geometry unfolding at present – and more on the horizon. However, reform is urgently needed to prevent the collapse of these keystone institutions and to ensure that they can operate in the best interests of the people that they serve. As I settle into this role, I hope to use research as a collaborative tool for developing ideas for change and innovation in the sector – first through our annual survey on the State of Local Government Finance in England, and thereafter through the Local Democracy Research Centre’s diversity of research projects in the UK and beyond. Most of all, I am very glad to be joining a team who are truly passionate about local democracy and the capacity of local governance to deliver for communities.

If you would like to reach out to Dan directly, you can contact him at [email protected] and you can find out more about the ongoing work at the LGIU’s Local Democracy Research Centre here.