What can Scotland and England learn from each other? A discussion between Prof. James Mitchell and David Marlow

This is the latest interview for our Future Local Lab, where we’re joined by guests from around the world to discuss what the future holds for local government, with the emphasis firmly on what the sector can do now to start preparing for the future.

In this interview, we spoke with David Marlow and Professor James Mitchell, two LGIU associates and experts in UK local government as they discuss the state of local government in England and Scotland in 2025, what they think the future may hold for innovation in the sector and the lessons each country could learn from one another.

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

00:00 Introduction
02:48 Perspectives on local government in Scotland
05:30 The state of local government in England
08:12 Communication gaps between Scotland and England
10:45 Challenges of implementation in local government
13:51 The role of devolution and local autonomy
16:24 The need for intermediate governance
18:57 Future directions for local authorities
21:46 Conclusion and reflections on local governance
25:40 Umproving outcomes for citizens in Scotland
26:14 Asymmetry in governance and local needs
28:47 Empowered commissions and local governance
30:35 The importance of local context in governance
34:42 Community health and local solutions
38:03 The role of the NHS and health outcomes
41:17 Wider determinants of health
45:44 Demographic challenges and political will
49:15 Fiscal devolution and local government empowerment
51:15 Community agency and local decision-making

A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness. 

James and David, thank you for joining us. Can you kick off by setting the scene for viewers and each quickly explain your experiences in the world of local government?

James Mitchell: I’m an academic, so I’ve not got any kind of practical experience in the way that David has. I’ve been studying local government as part of the interest in public policy that I have for about 40 odd years, when I first started doing that as an undergraduate as a student of John Sewell, Lord Sewell, who was then the president of COSLA, and my interest has been retained ever since. I’ve done work with COSLA, with Solace over the years, and I’ve been on various commissions and inquiries and such like, but I come at it more as an outsider and certainly not as a practitioner.

David Marlow: I’m a development economist professionally. I had about 25 years of senior public service experience, both in the UK and overseas. The last eight of that was as a chief exec, first of a large Metropolitan Council in England, and then laterally of a regional development agency. The last 10 or 15 years, I’ve actually worked in research and consultancy. I certainly don’t have the academic credentials of James, but I am a visiting professor at Newcastle University, and I guess I’ve tended to focus on devolution, particularly on local inclusive growth, on anchor institution collaboration, multi-tier working and the areas around that.

So, both of you have been involved in or seen commissions and working groups come and go in England and Wales, from the McIntosh Commission to the Christie Commission in Scotland and many English public sector reform proposals over the last couple of decades.

Can you identify common themes and illuminate what these proposals have delivered for local government, highlighting in particular what was ignored and not implemented and perhaps touching on why these recommendations have not been implemented?

James: If you go back to McIntosh, that was, of course, a report that was produced with devolution in mind. Neil McIntosh was asked by Donald Dewar to look at the relationship between the Scottish Parliament and local authorities. And of course, prior to devolution, relations had turned pretty sour in that and between central and local government in Scotland and the anticipation of devolution. It was expected that there would be improved relationships and that there would be empowered local authorities and I guess the key themes in that report, which produced 32 different recommendations overall, were there needed to be mutual respect and parity of esteem, that the local authorities were vitally important in delivering public services, they were vitally important because they gave the public an opportunity to vote as well.

And the idea was that we would have a very different kind of relationship, and I guess ever since then, some of the recommendations were actually implemented, but many weren’t. But looking back over that period and taking account of the kind of key themes of mutual respect, parity of esteem, that just hasn’t happened. There’s been an onward march of centralisation, of uniformism in Scotland, despite various attempts and suggestions to reform. I think I would point particularly to finance and the way in which centralisation has marched ever onwards in terms of finance. Scottish government essentially controls local government in a way that would have been almost inconceivable pre-devolution.

And it is kind of ironic that many who came to support Scottish Parliament from local government did so in the expectation that things would be very, very different. None of them, back then could have anticipated the scale of change. Well, some did actually, in fairness, some did anticipate that things would go wrong. But things like council tax freezes and ring-fencing and so on. The relationship has become even more imbalanced, and central government has very much denuded local authorities of their power and autonomy over that period of time, despite various inquiries. And one of the crucial recommendations in McIntosh was that there should be an investigation into the financing of local government. And we’ve had the investigations, we’ve just not had the implementation. We’ve had various reviews,most recently the local government financial review, but it just hasn’t been done. And I think that’s really interesting and important that it does seem to be the case. There’s not a lack of evidence. There’s not a lack of ideas out there. There’s just a kind of an implementation gap. Things just don’t happen. So that would be my kind of broad thing. I’m sure there’s much else that could be said and many other themes under that heading. But it is striking to look back over the years and it’s very familiar kind of arguments being put forward. And just so little seems to have happened.

David, from an English perspective?

David: It’s really interesting because I’m sure that myself and many of my colleagues could tell a very similar narrative for the England experience. But there are significant differences. You mentioned in your notes Paolo, the McIntosh and Christie Commissions, which are both Scottish Commissions. And I have to say I haven’t worked really at all in Scottish local government, but I worked in English local governments extensively. And we don’t know about the McIntosh and Christie Commissions. They’re not part of the lexicon of reform narratives, which I think is an interesting point to make that perhaps we don’t spend enough time talking to each other and helping each other. I speak as a very committed decentralist and devolutionist in this process.

I suppose what I would say about England, and this is a really superficial, simplistic characterisation, is that local government reform over all the decades I’ve worked in it has been asymmetric in that different areas do different things and that’s a massive difference with Scotland, which went for this 32 unitary council model. Secondly, it’s been really piecemeal. The national government seems to turn its attention to different geographies at different periods of time and some of them are actually pretty arbitrary in terms of, why did they do Swindon and Wiltshire then, and then they’re doing Norfolk and Suffolk now. And see, my impression is that it’s often been very dominated by the financial equations of reform – will it save, will it lead to greater efficiencies, can we manage the transition costs and so on – rather than a much more fundamental discussion, one of the nice things about going to Mackintosh and indeed Christie was that it did speak about what we’re trying to achieve for our local communities. I think Christie spoke about prevention and integration and partnership working, and the McIntosh did speak about the need for mutual respect and for relations across the tiers towards common purposes and common ends. And I suppose my observation about England is that it’s been much more technocratic and transactional. And of course, it is ultimately always political, but not often politically for the higher purposes that I really would have liked to have seen.

James: I think there’s some really interesting points that David has just raised. I think the first point that think that strikes me as really important is the lack of communication north and south of the border. How dare you not have heard of the Christie Commission? I was a member of that commission! But I do think that the notion that devolved government gave us the opportunity to create laboratories of democracy where we could all learn from one another, I don’t think that’s happened to the extent across public services, across public policy more generally than could have been the case. And I think there is a big case to be made that we could do with a lot more communication, a lot more learning. And in a way, the model of devolution we’ve adopted, particularly in recent times, has been that we in Scotland get on with our thing and we don’t really look south of the border to the extent that we could and should to learn from south of the border. Now, often it will be learning what not to do, perhaps, but also what to do. And I think that sharing is something that we haven’t fully taken advantage of. When we do it, I mean, some of the debates here tend to be focused on things like mayors and it’s reasonably superficial, frankly.

So I do think there is a strong case for a cut over the next few years to open up these debates and learn from one another. And that is the essence of what devolution was supposed to be about. The other thing I would say is that I think I probably overstate, you can overstate the extent to which we engage in good discussions on principles and such like in Christie. That’s certainly true of the commissions and inquiries.

It’s not been the case with respect to government. So in terms of policy making, I think it’s very similar. It’s much more technocratic, and it’s also raises questions about how we are able to do this? What are the transitional questions? And I think that scares the government off doing anything bold or radical and inevitably leads, at bes,t to kind of slow incremental change. So I think that while we’ve got these kind of inquiries and reports and such like, the practical politics of it all isn’t so very different from south of the border. It has tended to be much more about government looking at things very instrumentally rather than in any kind of principled way, I think.

Very interestingly, both of you talked about the need for greater discussion and sharing of ideas and experience between England and Scotland. I want to pick up a couple of points that both of you raised. First of all, James, in terms of parity of esteem, which was one of the key recommendations from the McIntosh Commission, there’s certainly some that’s also reflected in the Christie Commission.

Can you explain why you think that’s not happened in obviously more recently we’ve had the Berwick and Reams agreement, and there’s been issues with that as well. So maybe give some background to that.

James: Yeah, I mean, think the Verity House Agreement really is a good example, an extreme example of where you’ve got a good set of ideas and proposals. If you read the Verity House Agreement, there’s very little to disagree with. I mean, I would be bit bolder, but nonetheless, it would suggest a step forward towards the McIntosh principles. The problem was that I remember being at the COSLA conference at which the then First Minister spoke very eloquently about the agreement and why it was important and why its implementation was important, and it was a great speech. A few weeks later, in a speech to his own party conference, however, he announces that there’d be a council tax freeze, contrary to what was in the agreement. The agreement was very clear that no policies affecting local government would be announced by central government without consultation, taking account of local authorities.

Now, nobody in local government was in any way party to that decision on the council tax freeze. So I think one of the things we get often is good rhetoric from government, but bad practice. And ultimately, there’s not much that local government can do about this because power ultimately lies with government, with the Scottish Parliament, and effectively that means the Scottish Government. And they can ultimately do whatever they like. I think one of the problems that we’ve found with devolution is that the Scottish government becomes frustrated when things don’t work out as well as they expect. They make a great speech. Ministers will make a great speech on “We’re going to close the attainment gap in education” or whatever else. And it’s almost as if they think that the speech will automatically lead to improved outcomes. That there isn’t a bit in between the outcomes and the speech. And that bit of implementation of policy development and all the rest that goes on, a huge amount that centrally involves local authorities and others is kind of not taking into account sufficiently, if at all.

And they get a wee bit frustrated. I think what happens is that ministers get frustrated. They see that things aren’t improving and their response tends to be the default position, which is to centralise and blame others, particularly local government, for not doing it right. And how frequently have we heard First Minister’s ministers say, well, I know in my local backyard things are going really well, they make policy on the assumption that everywhere is the same and that something that’s maybe happening in Blair Gowrie could be applicable across the whole of Scotland. So I think there’s a kind of a mindset amongst ministers that doesn’t quite appreciate the complexity of delivery and implementation. That’s why the Christie Commission was focused on delivery, the future delivery of public services. That was the focus.

And that’s why we recognise the importance of Greater collaboration, integration of services, prevention, getting out of those silos that we operated in. So I do think there is a bit of a problem. And the parliament, of course, hasn’t frankly helped because MSPs, individual members of Scottish Parliament, will be hearing complaints about the local schools, about local authority services, about the health service, and they will raise questions in parliament, legitimately and understandably, and ministers feel obliged to do something and that something tends to be to try to take control. But actually what they’ve got to understand, and I don’t think this is fully understood by ministers, is that taking control in the way they’ve done it to centralise actually makes it more likely that things will go wrong! It won’t improve the situation they’ve got to work in partnership, and again that theme of partnership, which was so central to the Christie Commission, I think has not really taken root.

So partnership, understanding that local authorities and various other actors are hugely important if we are to improve outcomes for people. I’m going to be blunt here, sometimes when I listen to parliamentary debates, it’s like listening to a student debating society – “We want a better world”.  I mean, when I teach public policy, I’m not interested in what you want; it’s how you’re going to achieve it, it’s the how that we’ve not focused enough on. We’ve got grand eloquent speeches and wonderful rhetoric. That’s fine, that’s great to know that’s what we want to achieve. Anybody can make a speech. I often say that ministers deliver speeches but little else. That delivery is the bit that’s absent from our thinking. We’ve got to really get that into our mindset as we kind of move forward.

David: I’m sure ministers love it when you tell them that.

James: I’m not always popular with ministers like you.

David: I was just going to say, it’s really fascinating. I liked your laboratories of democracy thing, which was attached to devolution. And I do think a lot of the principles that most academic and indeed practitioner communities know, your principles around some level of fiscal autonomy, principles around place-based solutions for economic, social, and environmental problems. Actually, around subsidiarity and localism. All of those, we sort of know what the likely solutions are. And it really is difficult for the centre, whether it’s in Whitehall or in Holyrood, to enable the sort of hundred flowers to bloom type of thing. And I mean, I hope one of the things that we can get on to discuss is something which has really been an issue in England during my career, which is what I would call the intermediate tier. The problem of the intermediate tier, whether it’s between Holyrood and 32 local authorities in Scotland, or whether it’s between the UK Parliament, and however many hundred local authorities, asymmetric local authorities in England, there has to be some sort of something in between which helps, if you like, mediate the types of scaling up of laboratories if they are allowed, or which actually holds the centre to account, to some extent.

It’s not letting go of the reins enough. And I’m really interested in how it has felt for the 32 unitary local authorities having to deal with two governmental tiers over the 25-30 years of devolution, and indeed what lessons can be learned actually for both Scotland and England, particularly as England moves to mayoral combined authorities in the British situation. Because I could make the case, and I hope that I do get the opportunity to make it more thoroughly, that what has come out of Spending Review 25 has been the skeleton of a potential long-term England model of mayoral combined authority-led, mission-based sub-national governance with integrated settlements and the potential for laboratories in different mayoral combined authorities. Now that puts pressure on the constituent members, which are English local authorities. But it also puts huge pressure on the mayoral combined authorities to negotiate settlements with Westminster and Whitehall that give them the flexibility and the versatility and the autonomy to do things to vary national goals and national solutions. And I think one of the characteristics, this is as an observer only James, one of the characteristics of the previous governments, previous conservative governments nationally was that they increasingly tried to reach out to Scottish local authorities directly as a way of bypassing Holyrood to some extent and that must have been incredibly resented in Holyrood. So I think there’s quite a lot of learning that we could do, that we could discuss because clearly, Holyrood is not an intermediate tier in the same way that Andy Burnham and Greater Manchester are. But in terms of dealing with multi-tier alignment and multi-tier variations and localism, I think there is quite a lot of learning to be done.

James: I think that’s a really interesting one because just before we had the Scottish Parliament, we had that major reorganisation that led to the 32 authorities. And of course, prior to that, we had the two-tier system, the regions, districts and of course, the island authorities were always single-tiered. But abolishing the regions I think was a mistake. And I think the regions, even if we had to make some amendments, I think we would have had to do so, performed a very important function.

And there’s no doubt they were done away with by the government. I’ve looked at the archives and looked at the debates inside the Scottish office. It’s very clear it was party political. The regions were too powerful. They would and could cause the Scottish office trouble. And they did, they often did. But I think the absence of  a tier between the 32 authorities and the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government is a problem. Many of these 32 authorities are frankly too small. So even if we were to give them more functional responsibilities, it just would not make sense. So we do need to get to a kind of situation, I think, where we’ve got some larger authorities.

Now, there is already the kind of beginning of that in some parts of Scotland, particularly in the Western Glasgow and the Greater Glasgow area, where there is real cooperation. And I think that could be taken further by giving these kind of bodies that are emerging more powers and competencies, including fiscal powers.That would make for a big difference. I mean I noticed today in one of the newspapers, think it’s The Herald this morning, that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has got peace arguing that Glasgow is behind Manchester because Manchester’s doing exactly what Glasgow should be doing. Now, whether that is going to be welcomed by the Scottish Government I doubt, given the source.

But we’ve got to try and get out of the way of looking at this from a party political point of view and actually see it in terms of how do we deliver better services. So I think if we were to move forward, we will at some point have to address the problem of scale. Now, I’m not suggesting that we want to return to the regions, but there was a lot in the regions that was very, very good. And there’s certainly a case for across Scotland, larger authorities, at least for certain purposes.

And it may well be the case that we could look at health and decide that some aspects of health could be brought within these larger units. And it may also be the case, and I think this would have to be done gradually over time, because I don’t think there’s any appetite to do it any other way. You know, maybe some of the existing authorities are actually too large for certain functions as well. So maybe we should be kind of re-decentralising and centralising as it were, scaling up and scaling down with the current arrangements, I just don’t think work. I think it is interesting what the conservatives were doing, reaching over Hollywood and the Scottish government, and local authorities. And some of the local authorities understandably welcomed that because they could see that there was a wonderful incentive there. It’s called money. So they went for it, including authorities that were controlled by the same parties as in government in Edinburgh.

And in a way, at the end of the day regardless of Scotland’s constitutional status, decisions made in London will affect local authorities in Scotland and affect citizens here. So we would want to take that into account. And a truly good system of devolved government or multi-level governance is one which is certainly more complex than what we had pre-devolution. But it can work. But it requires proper cooperation, and it requires the kind of respect that just has not been there, and particularly I think of recent times where the constitutional question, big capital C constitutional question has been so dominant, it’s really cast a big shadow over our politics here. I sometimes think we’re moving out of that shadow now, but we have to be very clear as to where we’re moving to. We’ve really got to grasp the opportunities that exist. Now I’m pretty sure that you know there are many people in local government who will be who would be opposed to some of this. Who would be very nervous about some of this, not least the idea of having these, if you like, city regions emerging in Scotland. Some people would feel that they might be losing out in local government if that was to happen. But I think that we need to kind of start thinking much more boldly and particularly putting kind of delivering services, improving our economy, much more centre stage than we have been.

And I have to think that we need a kind of much more public policy focus rather than a constitutional focus on some of these issues in Scotland. But this is where England is interesting from a Scottish point of view and that diversity that is in England is interesting, and you know the asymmetries, I don’t think asymmetry is a bad thing. Scotland isn’t a symmetrical society in its geography in any sense and that needs to be recognised. We’ve always recognised it with respect to the islands but we haven’t really recognised that elsewhere. It is absurd that an authority like Clackmannanshire should have the same kind of competencies in terms of local government as the City of Glasgow. So I think we’ve got to start thinking much more about these issues. And I think if we could in Scotland put as much energy and intellect  into these debates as has gone into the big constitutional question over the last 15 years or so, then I think we could start to really improve outcomes for citizens in Scotland.

I’m interested in this dichotomy between centralisation and decentralisation and the asymmetrical or piecemeal approach in England compared to the more centralised one-tier-fits-all approach in Scotland. David, from your perspective, the English perspective, do think the piecemeal approach or asymmetrical approach to local government reform and reorganisation is working or are there other inherent problems in that?

David: Well, no, I certainly don’t think it’s working. There are different types of asymmetry. I agree with James that if you believe in place-based solutions and place-based agency, then clearly, places are different. And therefore, you would expect different institutional arrangements to pertain. And therefore, I’m not against an asymmetrical pattern of sub-national governance as a matter of principle. I think the piecemeal tactical approach is very damaging. So, for example, what we have in England at the moment is a selected group of non-metropolitan county geographies being incentivised to create unitary structures of plus or minus half a million people, almost regardless of A. What local government is actually for going forward in the long term. B. What are the critical economic, societal and environmental challenges facing those geographies? C. What do the people actually want? And D. How are going to resource any of it? And it’s self-evidently ridiculous because, as James himself said, I think I’m right in saying there are only two, which I think is Edinburgh and Glasgow, of the 32 authorities, which are over half a million people in Scotland. I think that’s rotten ( I apologise if I got that wrong). But you know, very, very few very large councils in Scotland. So if you actually as a national government genuinely believed you needed half a million people in today’s world to tackle these issues, you’d have to have not only local government reorganisation in a few of the shires, but you would have in England, you’d have to have local government reorganisation throughout Scotland, Wales and indeed the Metropolitan areas.

If you look at London’s 32 boroughs, none of them are actually half a million population, or if there are only one or two. If you look at Greater Manchester, you could say the same thing. In West Yorkshire, only Leeds and Bradford might get close to the supposed optimum population threshold. So I think what is needed is probably some sort of empowered commission with a large degree of bottom-up fraction, with a small number of articulated principles that they were working to come up with solutions for different geographies across the UK, if we’re to remain a unitary state and I do think where James and I seem to be agreeing, is there are a small number of principles where we know it would improve things if there was more fiscal autonomy. It would improve things if sub-national leaders were politically empowered. It would improve things if citizens and communities felt some agency and some ownership of the political decisions that affect their lives. So it would improve things if you could do integrated place-based working well.

You know, it would improve things. I think the Clackmannanshire thing is fascinating. It would improve things if our sub-national tiers had the capacity and capabilities to deliver change effectively. There are a small number of things that we could probably all agree on in a one-hour LGIU Future Local Lab discussion. And where we could probably get a majority of national, regional and local politicians to agree, we then need a process for actually turning those principles into practice.

James: Yeah. One thing I would say about Clackmannan, given that I kind of probably articulated that more bluntly than I ought to have, is that Clackmannan may be the appropriate size for some functions. It may well not need to be done away with in any shape or form. But I do think that kind of point about the population of half a million and so on. I mean, it just would not work if that was a sole criteria because you’d have places like the Highlands of Scotland where there’d be enormous local authorities and that just wouldn’t work.

The intriguing thing is that historically, and this goes right back to the 1970s, if not before, the islands have always been treated quite differently. The islands were given all-island status in the 1970s reforms, and it has kind of worked there. Now, that is interesting given the nature of the islands and the communities, which are very spread out, with a sparse population and so on. So there is something there that I think we could do with taking some of that thinking and applying it across the whole of Scotland and indeed the whole of the UK. But I think the danger is if you take one single criterion and use that and say, this is the model, that is a kind of symmetrical thinking as it were that may have some crazy asymmetrical effects, but it’s to get away from that. And that’s why I think David’s point about the importance of the bottom up is, is vitally important that we need to, to look at what’s going on in different communities. That which is required in Greater Glasgow is going to be different from the Highlands and Islands. And yes, Glasgow as a city is a decent size, but there’s certainly a very powerful argument that the boundaries of Glasgow are inappropriate and for things like the economy travel to work areas, and the surrounding areas really ought to be in a Greater Glasgow area. What’s interesting when you speak to people through in the west of Scotland is how many people want to be part of this Greater Glasgow conglomeration. And I can think of some local authority councillors who are not part of the current kind of informal arrangements who would love to be part of it, which is interesting.

Now, having said that, there are other parts of Scotland where we’ve not seen anything like that development. There’s not the same development, say, in Edinburgh and the Greater Edinburgh area. But it may well be the case that in the fullness of time, say, Glasgow was allowed to, Greater Glasgow was allowed to push ahead with this, that maybe there’ll be a learning process and people would start to think that’s one for us, or a variation is for us, say, in Edinburgh, to make a Greater Edinburgh. Yeah, that’s why I think it would have to be a process of change over time. I don’t think that we want to go back to having a kind of Royal Commission or a commission that would impose a solution on Scotland. That becomes more difficult, becomes a bit messier, but I think it would lead to a better situation in the long term.

David: I totally agree that we shouldn’t necessarily go for a big bang. I mean, maybe it could be like a standing committee or something that managed devolution, some sort of standing committee. But it’s fascinating what you said about Greater Glasgow because one of my concerns in England has often been that outside London the other areas look at what Greater Manchester appears to have achieved and they say we must gravitate towards that model because A. That model appears to be making progress in Greater Manchester B. The Government is increasingly familiar with it and has confidence in it. But self-evidently, if you’re in Cornwall and Devon, actually you don’t want that model. And I completely agree with you. I don’t know Clackmannanshire, but I passionately believe in place-based solutions and community agencies.

And if I take one thing that I’m working on at the moment, which is about the ongoing Streeting NHS reforms. I mean, it is very clear to me, and again, like Scotland, and I’m not an NHS expert, but it’s patently clear to me that if the government wants to achieve its health outcomes, community health is massively important. And the proposition that you put the system through this abolition of NHS England without doing a commensurate effort at very, very local level in some geographies about community health, your anxiety, mental health, loneliness, active, healthy living, which are all very local activities, is to me really, really worrying.

James: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, to go back to the comment I made earlier about the kind of laboratories of democracy, I think one of the things why we should be doing that – and I think you’ve made the point very powerfully, David – is that we couldn’t, we shouldn’t just try and lift and paste. We should look and learn and take account of all the issues and problems that may arise from lifting and pasting and recognising that we can take the best from elsewhere, but we must take that which is appropriate to our own area.

And I think that kind of thinking is much more nuanced than the tendency that we get, I think, from those at the centre who tend to think, right, this is what and whatever. Blair Gowrie is always my favorite example because I’ve heard it so often and apply it elsewhere. It’s really vitally important that we make sure that we take that which is appropriate. But you’re right, again, the complexity of it is highlighted by the fact that you do need these very local reforms as well. And I do think that we’ve got to get out of our silo thinking, but there’s the health over here and local government over there that that has not helped us. And I think the tendency is certainly up here. When people think about health, they think National Health Service. They, know, we now use the language of public health, but I’m not sure we really think about public health in the way we should be. And that is another area that we kind of touched on that in the Christie Commission, the vital importance of public health and that very local set of relationships. And then the other thing, of course, I guess we’ve implicitly referred to, but we haven’t said so explicitly, is the third sector’s involvement in all of this. The third sector is vitally important in all of this. I mean I know communities would not survive without active third sector activity.

So what you’re both saying well is that what we need to look at is place-based solutions and local solutions, which means subsidiarity. And going back to the very first question in terms of the McIntosh Commission and the Christie Commission in Scotland was that subsidiarity was at the heart of what they were recommending, and this maybe hasn’t happened.

And as you were saying, James, in terms of Scotland at least and possibly also in England, there’s been greater centralisation rather than more subsidiarity. You both touched on health and social care and also there’s been a lot of discussion in Scotland in terms of health and social reform and the proposals to create a national care service, modelled on the national health service, and now in England there’s discussion about having a national care service as well. So I wanted to get your views on why reform of health and social care hasn’t happened in the way it should have happened. And is that all that just part of centralisation, where health wants to keep control of public health? Whereas as you were saying earlier, David, public health is really a local issue, not really a national health service issue. So can you touch on why you think health and social care reform hasn’t happened in the way you’d wanted?

Going back to the finance issue, which you both touched on earlier as well, there’s been a lot of discussion over recent years about council tax reform again. Can you maybe, from your perspectives, outline why you think council tax reform hasn’t happened in the way it should have happened? David, do you want to kick off on the health and social care side of things?

David: I can’t say why it hasn’t happened, but I think I can give a couple of observations. I mean, the first is one of the things that I find really significant about the Starmer government’s missions is that there are four missions which are clearly about socio-economic and environmental outcomes that are really important to people. And then there is a fifth mission, which is about fixing the NHS, which with the best will in the world, is an institutional mission. And I think this actually does tell us a lot about politicians’ belief in the political realities of their constituencies, that the NHS being almost a British religion. But I would have much preferred a mission about health outcomes rather than it being a mission about the NHS. And I think it then clearly goes on to talk about the health experiences and the differential outcomes of different cohorts of the population. Again, it’s one of these things that we all know, but we seem to find it really difficult to operationalise. We all know that far and away the majority of health outcomes, long-term health outcomes, are determined by the wider determinants of health. You know, your housing, where you live, the type of work you do, the sort of household income you’ve got, your lifestyle, your well-being, assets and resources. And the NHS is a service that has typically focused on the management of ill health. So I mean these are all basic things that we all know and really to flip that around again it’s probably been in the narrative for as long as I’ve been working, which is an awfully long time. You know we need to start with a wider determinant and then enable the NHS to advise, support and enable us to address some of those community issues and sort of only come in with the intensive high spend stuff with the ill health, you where there have been, if you like, problems or issues.

And so what I would very much like to have seen would have been a health mission that was based on outcomes, where the NHS was required to work in partnership with the other public and indeed third sector agencies that determine the wider variance, so to speak. And until we do that, I think we’re going to be quite frustrated.

It is fascinating that each time, I mean, James, one of your earlier answers was about political pronouncements, but every time I hear a political pronouncement, which actually talks about “we’re to provide this additional equipment in the hospitals” or “this additional equipment to the digital literacy of GPs” or whatever, I think, that’s really great. I mean, I don’t decry that, but until we start at sort of bottom runs. It’s going to be really difficult.

James: Yeah. I think the kind of prerogative side I disfavour are the ones where it’s a thousand more X. And I always point out that anything that’s a thousand more at any round number is highly suspicious. That’s designed not to address a public policy problem or issue, but to get a headline. When I think of the why has it been so difficult with health and social care and with local taxation? I’m kind of drawn to Paul Johnson, the Institute of Fiscal Studies director, who is soon to move on from that post. But he wrote a book that came out a couple of years ago – Follow the Money. And I think he provides the answer, at least implicitly, to that question. And he says that so much in terms of public policy, not just about finance, but particularly about finance, he’s obviously focused on finance, but it involves really difficult decisions. It’s difficult, painful decisions.

There will often be unintended consequences. will be winners and losers. And that has to be taken into account. You know, governments are understandably cautious. They don’t want to make anything too bold. They may make bold statements, but bold decision-making, quite rightly, I think they’re cautious. But it often can lead to no decisions being made, nothing much happening. And you kind of get this inertia.

And you know, there will always be these trade-offs when you make decisions. And I think those winners and losers. And the truth of the matter when it comes to say local taxation, if we were to reform local taxation in Scotland as we all know, we’ve not had a re-evaluation since 1991, and even that was a pretty inadequate exercise, there will be some very significant losers.

That’s why I think if it was to happen as it should happen, it would have to be done over time. And we have to look at who would be the losers. The truth of the matter is that the kind of people who tend to turn out to vote, highest propensity to turn out to vote are likely to be the people who will lose. And so from my point of view, I don’t seek an election. It’s easy for me to say, let’s do that. If you want to get returned at an election, you’ve got to take that into account. And unless and until we get a greater consensus across the politicians and parties, then I think that’s going to be very difficult to do. I think the National Care Service in Scotland, I think one of the problems is that that was just a kind of a pronouncement with very little thought as to how it should be implemented. And the piece of legislation that was presented before Parliament really demonstrated it. I myself and a colleague in the law school who’s an expert in drafting of legislation wrote a piece about this, especially as the legislation was moving through parliament. I mean, at one point, the government itself was forced to make so many amendments that the original bill essentially had been ditched. And it was almost like a new bill was being put forward through parliament. But of course, what happened then was it didn’t go back to the earlier stages where you would get the kind of input from others that was required.

And so we’ve wasted a lot of time on this, because this tendency to not think things through, work out how you would implement it, just hasn’t happened. The truth of the matter is, we’ve got this growing elderly population. We have a major problem. We’ve got a problem in terms of general demography in Scotland and the kind of dependency community, the community, whether it’s young people at schools and such like, or the older people who are retired together are increasingly a larger and larger proportion of the total population. So the population that’s actually contributing to taxation is shrinking. We’ve got lots of problems in that respect in Scotland as the oil and gas industry is declining. These are people who’ve been employed at fairly high salaries and wages. That has meant and will mean into the future that we’re not going to have the same income coming to through the tax base to the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish government. And we have some really troubling years ahead in this respect. So we’re going to have to think a lot more imaginatively and we’re going to have to think about how to tackle some very politically difficult questions as to how this can be addressed. And I fear that nothing much is likely to happen until such time as we can get frankly, the political parties in Scotland, or at least some of them, to work constructively together. The trouble is that if a party X, for example, says, we’re going to kind of have a revaluation in Scotland, parties A to Z other than X will jump up and down and oppose it because they see the opportunity from a party political point of view in doing so. So it’s, we’re caught here.

And that takes me back to another of the points that is made by Paul Johnson in his book is as part of the problem is the public places. know, we, we, we, we demand all these things, but actually when things come forward with that could have cost us money, we’re not so keen on them. And so we do need to have a bit more, a serious debate about the options with the public in Scotland, us elsewhere. And I don’t think we’re doing that to the extent that’s required. We’ve certainly got people trying to do that. We’ve got some academic communities. We’ve got the fiscal commissions and so on doing this, producing great reports. We’ve got people like Audit Scotland doing a fantastic job, frankly. But I still fear that we’re not getting through. And certainly for me, I think what it highlights is that Scotland is perhaps not quite the progressive country that many of us thought it was or would like to think it is. And we need to take that into account as we as we’re kind of developing our thinking. So, I mean, I hate to say it, I see so many difficulties and problems and I can so from that point of view, I can see that why not much might change. I worry. I do worry that what may happen is that we’ll hit a crisis of some sort. I mean, it’ll be not a kind of moment, but we’ll move into a position where we’ll be forced to make changes. Tend to find that if you do that, the changes you make are not always the best changes. So we really need to kind of be ready for the opportunity to make the kind of changes that are required. Fortunately, I think there are some good ideas out there. We’ve certainly been debating some of these issues, certainly our local taxation, for long enough, we’ve got the ideas there. It’s the political will.

And that’s not just the politicians, that’s also the public in Scotland, as I suspect across the whole of the UK.

Before we finish, can I ask you both to put your crystal ball thoughts on it? If you were Prime Minister David or First Minister in Scotland James, what one or two things would you do to help local government deliver for citizens? You’ve touched on some of that already, but very succinctly, what’s the one or two major changes or minor changes that you think would need to be put into place to help a local government deliver for its citizens?

David: I think what both James and I have sort of implicitly said all along is long-term fiscal devolution is absolutely critical. It would achieve so much if local government A. Had a degree of certainty and B. Had a degree of financial muscle when it’s sitting around the table with whether it’s Holyrood or Whitehall or both. So for me, we need to have a process, it might be an incremental process, but we need to have a clear direction of travel towards enhanced fiscal devolution and then everything else sort of goes can come from that. And in its skeletal form, I mean, I hope I do get the opportunity to write and talk a bit more about this in other forums. I do think the potential long-term England model that is implied in the spending review 2025, I would be absolutely fascinated, James, to have a separate discussion with you about how that lay out in Scotland because it’s a huge set of questions for Scotland. But B. I think our sector, if I can call the devolution and the sub-national sector a sector, our sector needs to do some serious thinking and practice and laboratory work on how we move towards long-term fiscal devolution.

James: Yeah, I would 100 % agree with all of that. I absolutely agree with that. And I suppose the question that would follow on from this, I’m not sure the answer at all is the speed of change. mean, David’s right to say we’ve got, it’s got to be long-term. I suppose if I were First Minister, I’d be wanting to go as fast as I possibly could, which would probably mean that I’d lose out and I’d be re-elected, that’s for sure. So I think there is an issue there about the speed. I mean, we have a problem in that the longer we put this off, the more challenging it’s going to be and the more we’re going to have to do things very quickly. So we better start soon because we are running out of time. We really are running out of time. And if you just look at the demography in Scotland, it’s very worrying. So I think the fundamental point is we’ve got to start. And I would very much agree with Dave.

David: Yeah, and then the second thing, sorry, if I’m allowed two shots, which I did refer to earlier is this whole issue of community agency. The whole loss of trust in political institutions, I think, can be addressed if we find ways to make localism real and to allow the people to feel empowered about their local decisions that affect their future. So the two have to go hand in hand. I know, a local, a sub-national landscape or architecture that has the muscle to speak as partners with national government and local communities who feel that they’re empowered to make decisions about their lives.

James: Again, I could not agree more. I mean, I think one of things about the debate in Scotland is that you tend to find there are people who want to focus on the local and then there are people who want to focus on the kind of larger units. And it’s almost as if there are two separate conversations. They ought to be brought together. I think they need to be brought together. And that in Scotland hasn’t been happening. I know groups of people who are very much focused on that local dimension of the community. And I respect and agree with them. But we cannot ignore the other side of things and the need for these kind of bigger units as well. So absolutely, that’s how we’ve got to go. If we only go for one, then we’ll fail, or at least we won’t do what we need to do. It’s going to be difficult, but we need to start.

James and David, thank you very much for joining us today, we really appreciate your time and your insights. It was good to get to your unanimity at the end in terms of what the key issues are facing the local government. The LGIU will be back soon with more expert interviews for the LGIU’s Future Local Lab Programme. In the meantime, please explore our website lgiu.org and check out Future Lab Local where you can find more information, ideas and innovation for local government around the world.

For now, thank you for listening and James and David, thank you once again.