The future of English devolution: a conversation with Dr Mark Sandford

Dr Mark Sandford is a Senior Researcher at the House of Commons Library, specialising in local government and devolution in England. Mark’s work includes scoping, researching and writing research on Government bills in the House of Commons, specialising in local government issues. He was previously a Research Fellow with the Constitution Unit from 2000 to 2005, working mainly on regional government in England. He also worked as Research and Evaluation Manager for the Electoral Commission before joining the House of Commons Library in 2008.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

Timestamps:
05:08 – Has devolution taken a back seat?
06:42 – LGR process: set in stone or vulnerable to change?
09:37 – Beyond deals? The future of devolution
12:53 – Completing the devolution map
14:49 – Standardisation vs. bespoke devolution
16:27 – Is devolution in the driving seat?
17:37 – Can mayors really drive local change?
21:32 – How will combined authorities handle political disagreement?
24:15 – What difference will local citizens notice?
27:53 – Is fiscal devolution the missing piece?
32:31 – Advice, future opportunities and reflections

There’s always a sense in local government that we’re at a crossroads, that things are changing fast. But do you think this moment does represent, particularly with the devolution act coming in, does this represent a real moment of change?

I think this is a really interesting moment for local governments generally. There’s a real contrast between the position of local government and the position of the mayoralties in England. So on the one hand, local government is really being treated as if in a holding pattern. That’s understandable because the financial challenges that the sector faces are so huge, and it’s very, very difficult to do more than keep the sector afloat. You only have to look at something like the decision to meet the majority of the sector’s deficit on SEND. That’s £6.5bn over a few years. That can’t have been an easy decision for the Treasury to make. That’s only one of the challenges they’re facing. There’s still a real risk point. They’re still facing a future in which demand is rising and funding is not keeping pace. There are ongoing threats of Section 114 notices still emerging. We also have reorganisation on the horizon. That’s going to cause a lot of organisational disruption. Will it make a huge amount of difference financially? There’s a question.

On the other hand, English mayoralties are in a very different position. The debate there is unrecognisable even from three to four years ago. I get the strong impression from the government that mayoralties are regarded as where the action is. They do interesting and sexy things like economic development, investment and transport. We know that they have really good access to government, senior ministers, which, to a degree, the traditional sector can only dream of. Is this all changed by the act? The act is probably one step in this broader shift towards creating a tier of mayoral governance rather than providing a real inflection point in the whole debate. There’s a lot within what’s been going on recently that’s recognisably continuity from the previous Johnson and Sunak Conservative governments. We’ve got combined authorities, we’ve got mayors, we’ve got powers around growth and productivity and adjacent functions.

There are small but significant differences. The government clearly sees mayors as a peer of government rather than a disparate collection of growth coalitions in certain parts of England. As I was saying, central local relationships are different. You can argue about how far the difference in relationships is rhetorical and how far it’s really being translated into practice. But that’s a significant shift on the part of government and a lot of its challenges at the moment are making that actually work across the piece.

In reality, it feels to me that what we’ve ended up with is an LGR process originally sort of intended as being enabling for devolution. That’s going ahead, but the devolution part of it all seems to have taken a back seat in those areas where there aren’t existing mayoral authorities. We’re now looking at foundational strategic authorities as a precursor to mayoral authorities, but no clear route map between the two. Does it feel as though the ambition of the bill is somewhat under-realised in that sense?

I think it does, and there are a couple of aspects of this. We can’t underestimate how important the resignation of Angela Rayner was in this. There was a sense that, rather than this being a policy that was pursued enthusiastically, it was a policy pursued because it was a policy and it had to be gone through with. That meant that there was a bit of a change of emphasis between mayoralties and LGR. And LGR is something that has a statutory process. We know once the starting gun has been fired, we know what has to happen. It is clearly ensconced in the law, whereas mayoralties are a movable feast, and the entire sector and central government is gradually working out what they are for. There is a clear answer to what they are for, but working through what they are for and how that fits into the more traditional parts of the sector is a long-term prospect.

Let’s talk about LGR. What do you think the status of that process is? A lot of people are asking, is it set in stone – and it’s just a process that now runs – or is it a process that is vulnerable to change politically, either locally or nationally?

There are different ways of looking at this. In political terms, the government would do everything it can to keep the process on the road. It’s committed too much political capital to it to turn back easily. In processional terms, there obviously have been three or four pre-action letters for judicial reviews from some of the authorities. You can never say never with these things, but it’s going to be very difficult for a successful judicial review to happen. You have to remember, looking back just five years to the Cumbria County Council’s attempt at the judicial review, they sought judicial review on the basis that Cumbria was to be split into two unitary authorities, whereas just across the way in North Yorkshire, an enormous new single unitary authority was approved for them, which is now North Yorkshire Council. They were actually denied permission even to take a judicial review forward by the court. That’s how weak their case was perceived to be. There is plenty of wriggle room in the statutory guidance that the government has produced. So it’s really hard to see how any area is going to effectively get a judicial review through.

That doesn’t mean that having a judicial review or having some sort of court action couldn’t delay matters a little bit. But then again, we’ve got a time scale which is working towards the first elections for the new authorities next May, May 2027, and Vesting Day the following April 2028. That seems to me to build in quite a bit of slack if there were to be any kind of litigating of the points in the courts. 

One of the intents of the bill was to have devolution everywhere and to move beyond a deal based place by place basis to a standardised format. It feels like we’re still very much in an era of deal-based devolution that doesn’t feel that dissimilar to what we saw under previous governments. Is that a fair comment?

I would personally be a little bit more positive about it than that. On the one hand, we’re not in an era where there is a conceit that every deal for every different area is bespoke. That was very much a core part of the idea of the devolution deal, originally under George Osborne and latterly under the Conservative governments, that it was a bilateral negotiation between the government and areas that wanted to do specific things, so all deals would be slightly different. In reality, there was very little difference between them. There tend to be particular options that were on the table and particular options that weren’t. What we’ve got now is the devolution framework, which is not in the bill. It’s not a statutory matter, but it’s in the White Paper. But we know that there are different categories of strategic authorities. We have the established mayoral ones, the mayoral ones, we’ve got foundation strategic authorities, and we’ve got single foundation strategic authorities, which are where you designate a unitary authority, such as Cornwall, as a foundation authority.

Now we know that each of those classes of authority is supposed to have the same power, so that the powers within the class of foundation strategic authority, whatever they are, are supposed to be the same. I don’t think that this is merely a deal-based arrangement. Having said that, I do think that the government has lost its way slightly in the way that it has moved towards actually making this happen. There was a call out in February for areas which don’t have mayoralties to propose foundation strategic authorities and to propose what the geographies should be on which those are established. So in this whole debate, when you get to the point at which people start having to talk about boundaries, you always get into a bit of trouble.

One thing that happened with the bill is that very, very late on, when it was in ping pong between the two Houses of Parliament, at the very final stages, the government dropped its powers to compel areas to establish mayoral authorities and it dropped its powers to compel areas to accept a designation of foundation strategic authority. So we’ve now actually got a situation in which it would be possible for an area, which didn’t want any part of any of this, to simply not engage. And that means that it’s possible for the map not to be completed. It’s possible for this tier of government not to become finalised. And that makes it very difficult for certain aspects of the agenda to be taken forward.

When the White Paper was launched, I remember Angela Rayner saying we want everywhere to have devolution. We want places to come forward and lead this themselves. But if they do not, we will give ourselves the power to. And they have not given themselves that power in the end, and that must surely open up a risk of that ambition to complete the map not being realised?

Yes, I think it does. That is problematic because again, in complement to this, one of the aspects that has changed between the previous government and this one is that this government came into office far more treating mayoralties as a tier of government, as I was saying, rather than a slightly random collection of growth coalitions around the country. If we are in a position where there’s no compulsion, what then happens is that the nature of the powers that are on offer to local areas at the foundation level or at the mayoral level, whatever it is, becomes quite a lot more important.

There are a few areas of England which have never proposed devolution. For some reason, Worcestershire is on my mind here. I’ve never seen a proposal for devolution from Worcestershire. There are a few others which didn’t engage in the early days of this government. But to get areas like that to take an interest and to want to do devolution in a situation where there’s no compulsion, what’s on offer becomes really important. So we could easily end up in a situation where the map is not completed by the end of this parliament. That puts the whole process on the back foot.

The question of whether the government will hold the line on that or whether you will end up with quite bespoke deals around different foundational strategic authorities also seems to me to be determined. There is a perfectly good argument for saying devolution should be bespoke, it should be different in different places, but will the government’s intent be tested then?

I think so, and that’s the point at which it becomes clear that government, as everybody knows, is not a single monolithic organism. So if you have different areas which are seeking different powers, that has to be managed by MHCLG, who are the negotiating team. But MHCLG is also managing outward to other government departments and trying to convince them that they should devolve powers to certain areas, and certain powers to other areas, and this is why they should do it. That’s the real sticking point, I would say, at the moment, because there is by no means a cross-government consensus that devolution is desirable or that it’s a policy priority.

There isn’t currently somebody with a big enough stick at the centre in order to make that happen. I was talking to somebody from the Treasury last week who was telling me that essentially they experience mayoralties coming to them saying, ” Can you make these departments play nicely with us, devolve things to us?”, and the Treasury have to say, “Well we can’t really, we can tell them what to do with their money but we can’t make them devolve powers.” This is the point at which a real central government push will be needed for something significant to happen. And at the moment, we’re not seeing that.

The ability of MHCLG and its predecessor departments to push other big spending departments in that direction has been limited. Hasn’t it?

Yes, that’s the case, you can see this in the various reform proposals knocking around the Home Office for the police and around DHSC for the integrated care boards at the moment. There’s a bit of rhetorical nodding to the role of devolution, but there is also a very strong sense that there are operational considerations which are going to drive how bodies get merged with one another, and those are paramount. So how that plays out, I don’t think, is a foregone conclusion. 

The Act does bring in local growth plans. It gives mayors some new ways to try and influence other public bodies operating in their areas. But does it give them powers to actually really drive change at a local level, where it involves trying to coordinate and coerce and influence and persuade other local bodies?

Potentially, it does. Those are really interesting aspects of the act. And they go back to a contradiction that I can remember noticing for the first time about a quarter of a century ago when I started out in this field, which is that there was even back then in around the regional development agencies in the regional chambers under John Prescott, there was this idea that there would be strategies locally and public bodies would just fall in with the local strategies drawn up by local leaderships. What happened, of course, was that public bodies said, we have to follow the strategic imperatives of our national office. So, if those differ from what is wanted locally, then the imperatives of our national office are going to take precedence. It’s valid and important that the act recognises that tension exists.

Is it possible that it will change the way things are actually done? It probably is possible. How that would happen in practice, I don’t think we really know until it gets tested out. To take an example, the local growth plans legislation in Schedule 22 of the Act. It says that a list will be drawn up of local public bodies that have to have regard to the local growth plan in terms of central government shared priorities that come up in the local growth plan. So the implication is that if you’re a health body or a police authority, you would have to have regard to what has been put in the local growth plan by the mayor when you’re making your own decisions. Now, that potentially is quite revolutionary because it means you’ve got a mayoralty locally which doesn’t control the health board, the health authority, but is able in certain respects to frame the decisions they make.

It’s quite an interesting, neat way of doing things because it circumvents having big political arguments at the local level, where it circumvents the need for a mayor to say, well, what should really happen is I should be controlling the health service in my area. That rapidly becomes a massive national political issue and nothing gets done. This is the way around that. 

How it actually pans out in practice remains to be seen, and I suspect it will be determined to a large extent by the politicised behaviour of the mayor. Would a mayor say, if you go ahead and do this thing which I don’t like, it’s possible we might seek to challenge it on the basis that you haven’t had regard to my strategy? You can imagine some sort of negotiation proceeding around that kind of idea. You might not get a legal challenge, but the threat of it might concentrate minds. That would be how I’d see that working.

Do you think there is potential for tension and structural standoffs between local authorities, particularly if we’re moving towards bigger unitary authorities and mayors? And what do we need to do to avoid that?

It’s very difficult to say. As an academic researcher of sorts, this is one of those areas where I’d love to say more research needs to be done, because we really don’t know that much, other than anecdotes about how combined authorities actually work together, because obviously, a combined authority is made up of a directly elected mayor and a member from each of the local authorities in the area. So they each have one vote. There are lots of complexities to this, but it is possible for local authorities to vote down something that the mayor would want to do. So how that has all worked up till now is something that would be really interesting to find more about.

There’s also, of course, the issue that it may be too early to say. Mayors have been so focused on building up their organisational capacity and wrestling with government for more powers that, in a way, their relationship with the local authorities could be said to have taken a back seat. There’s also, of course, the splintering of political parties. We’re getting more mayors of different political colours. We’re getting more examples of cohabitation, where the elected mayor is of a different party to one or more of the local authorities. It’s easy to forget that the system that we’ve got was basically designed for Greater Manchester, where eight or nine out of 10 of the local authorities were always Labour, going back to 2014. The system we’ve got wasn’t designed to broker large political conflicts between different parties. We’re still learning about how that works.

If we take a positive interpretation of the difference that we think this can make, more mayors, more foundational strategic authorities, more combined authorities, think about it from the other end of the telescope. What difference does this make to people? What’s the potential for if you’re a citizen? How does this make the world better?

Well, this is a really difficult question to answer, and it has the potential to be a threat to the agenda in the long term. That is because so much of what mayors do is very much background policy. It’s planning of things, it’s strategy writing, it’s doling out money to certain organisations for housing developments, and to further education institutions. We have a policy field, which we call economic development, which really consists of giving money to certain things rather than other things. And these decisions don’t touch the vast majority of the population overtly in the way that things like the school system or the health service do. So it’s quite difficult for people to understand. It sounds like a very patronising way of putting it, but it just is difficult unless you have a lot of time and knowledge to understand what mayors do.

One thing we really do miss at the moment is the existence of a strong narrative about why mayors are here, saying this is the kind of thing they’re going to do, and this is the difference they’re going to make.

Now, saying all that, there are a few exceptions. The biggest exception is transport. Transport touches the majority of people, especially if you’re in a large conurbation like Manchester, the West Midlands or London, but really all over the country. The mayor typically has quite a bit of control over authorities and you’ve seen visible changes. It’s not an accident that Andy Burnham’s name has been connected so strongly to the Bee network because there are buses, they’re out on the streets, they’re yellow and people see them. I can remember exactly the same thing being true of the London mayoralty in its first couple of terms. One of the main talking points about what Ken Livingstone did back then was around Transport for London, around improvements to the bus service and the tube, because it’s something that touches the majority of people who live in London. What happens there has a major effect on public views of what the mayoralty is for.

It’s almost inevitable, and it makes an argument for any mayoralty to have at least one seriously high-profile set of powers through which it can be judged. Otherwise, they can be perceived as just staying in the background. You saw exactly the same problem, although there’s a very different context, with the regional institutions under the Blair/Brown administrations. When somebody came to power who wanted to abolish them, nobody knew what they did, so they had no defenders and that’s a weakness.

We’ve seen the Chancellor of the Exchequer recently committing to a roadmap to fiscal devolution, but we don’t see much of it in this bill, do we?

No, I would not expect to see it in the act as such because it’s a very big topic and there are certain procedural issues around actually getting it done, assuming that somebody wants to do it. I’m probably slightly more sceptical than the average person about whether fiscal devolution is needed for real devolution. I would say that probably sufficient money from whatever source is more important than where it comes from. That’s a whole other discussion about money in the English context. Tony Travers once said the English government needs to get away from the idea that you can get a £100 job for £70. And that’s something that features time and again in any discussions about funding sub-national government of any kind. Fiscal devolution can take a variety of forms. Supposedly, we’ve got the overnight visitor levy coming in.

There are certain powers from mayors around community infrastructure levy, small powers to raise a portion of council tax. It’s my understanding that latterly the government is looking at devolving a share of income tax and possibly a share of business rates to mayoralties, with the idea that that would replace funding they already get, it wouldn’t be additional. Then they’d be able to keep the rises in those revenues if and when they rose over subsequent financial years. There are complexities around that. There’s a question of what happens if the amounts raised fall. There’s a question of whether there should be equalisation between areas – how we work out how that would work and how much equalisation there should be. It’s really important that the fiscal devolution system that we do have is well-designed. It’s clear what it’s trying to do because I do not think it’s a panacea for effective government.

There is a good case for having a stream of revenue which can be relied upon. Of course, mayoralties in particular experience this because mayoralties have received 80% plus of their funding from short-term grant programs. At best, they’ll have a five-year grant program, so there’s a little bit of certainty there. But if they had some sort of system where they knew year on year what they’re going to get and how they could forecast it, then the argument is that it enables them to invest with greater reliability in particular programs. It enables them to borrow because investors and financial institutions see them as a better risk. It gives them financial stability as organisations. Because again, if you’re on a series of five-year grant programs, how do you know when those grant programmes come to an end, whether you’re going to be able to keep in place the excellent team that you’ve built up to deliver whatever it is? All of those very basic organisational concerns are really key, almost more key than the principle that if you have fiscal devolution, that’s better.

Thinking about all of these things and more, you know, a lot of people watching this will be senior officers in local government, senior councillors in local government. What advice would you give to them right now? What are the biggest opportunities to be seized and what are the biggest risks to be avoided in terms of this agenda?

It’s a difficult one and I always feel uneasy answering a question about giving advice because I’ve never worked in the sector myself. Probably the biggest opportunity, in my sense, is that ministers and senior officials within central government are listening and taking on board concerns more than they have done in the past. That doesn’t mean they’re always going to act on those concerns or that it gives any guarantees of good outcomes. But there’s much more of a sense that ministers regard mayors and local authorities as part of the team, part of a shared challenge of doing things well. Having said that, there is no doubt that Whitehall is engaged in a fight with itself to actually make this happen, partly because of recalcitrance in certain departments, partly because there are genuine conceptual obstacles, basically around the accountability and trust in local areas.

I don’t know how those get overcome other than a lot of thinking, a lot of talking and over a lot of time. So it’s not easy to say. We’ve got a long history in this country of councils spending a lot of time trying to talk central government around to certain things, being told that there’ll be consultation, there’ll be a consultative body, or whatever it is, and nothing much coming out of it. There’s a real trust issue there. There’s no doubt about that. Sometimes central government really underestimates how much of a deal that is, partly because there are a lot of people who don’t stay in post in any central government department for any length of time, so they don’t have that historical awareness.