combined authorities

Doubts cast over rural England elected mayor plans

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Plans for new elected mayors announced in the Budget by the government should be abandoned, Conservatives have said.

Local councillors and some MPs say mayors for three rural parts of England will add an expensive and unwanted extra tier of government.

Councils could reject the idea and opt out of new authorities in Lincolnshire, the west of England and East Anglia, North Somerset MP Liam Fox said.

The government says it wants to help the local economy and devolve power.

Some Conservative councillors in the rural areas intend to try to block the policy, which will not be imposed on unwilling areas.

In his Budget in March, Chancellor George Osborne announced plans for elected mayors in the three areas.

Local authorities will vote on whether or not to accept detailed proposals by the end of June.

North West Norfolk MP Sir Henry Bellingham, said people would feel no affinity to a new authority and elections for a new mayor would attract a “pathetic” turnout.

He told the Today programme on Radio 4: “Now I don’t want a regional leader coming along and saying look ‘Henry you’ve been a bad boy, I gather you don’t want this incinerator, you don’t want these houses, well actually the region do want it and I’d like you to have it’.

“That is going to put MPs in a very difficult position and change their constitutional position.”

While he supported the idea of devolution, he said plans for a new mayor should be put on hold.

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) said it was making “huge progress” in making local areas more powerful by devolving power from Whitehall.

A source close to the chancellor said: “The devolution revolution taking place across the country has unstoppable momentum behind it.”

Six new authorities, which will have elected mayors, have been established in mainly urban areas, with another expected this summer.

Conservative sceptics argue the plans will not work in rural areas.

Without clarity and local scrutiny we risk the prize of devolution

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I like this opinion piece. I used to get heartily sick in local government of civil servants making judgements about whether the council should be allowed to do this that or the other, many of whom had no experience of delivering anything themselves.  It turns the tables and gives those negotiating devolution packages a “must do better” score. It also bears ongoing witness the preponderance of those lower down the chain continuing to blur the high rhetoric of national policy with a nit picking approach to detail. Some things never change – the article tells us:

Around the country, the government is doing deals with a patchwork of local areas to devolve powers over economic development, further education, skills, regeneration, transport, public health – and perhaps more in future.

These devolution plans are undeniably a positive move both for local government and local people. The potential prize is huge: direct local power exerted over services and issues that were previously planned and delivered from London.

You’d expect this would be accompanied by plans to ensure that devolved funding and powers are subjected to robust, meaningful accountability. You’d assume, too, that government was working towards some overarching policy objective. The National Audit Office (NAO) has noted that the sums are very large – tens, even hundreds, of billions of pounds over the next five years. But accountability for that spending, and a coherent sense of what it is meant to achieve, is difficult to find.

The approach government has taken to putting these deals in place has been ad hoc and inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’re told that devolution deals are bottom up, that local objectives should be defined by local areas, rather than arbitrary objectives set by Whitehall, and that inconsistency between areas is actually a hallmark of a devolution process being driven by local needs.

But behind the scenes, ministers and civil servants have sought to tinker and engineer those deals to a surprising level of detail. We’re told, too, that government has no framework or plan that it uses to conduct negotiations – but good management practice suggests that it must do, to learn lessons from the first deals and improve the quality of the negotiations on the tranche of proposals now being considered.