I don’t want to buy this off the shelf, ‘one size’ only model of local government

In the next few weeks we expect the white paper on local government devolution in England to be published. A real statement of intent from the Labour government about what their vision for local government to be like across England.

The expectations are that the model of local government we see in places like Greater Manchester or Birmingham with arguably successful metro mayor style leadership is what will be pushed onto the whole of England. However, I argue that this one-size-fits-all approach isn’t necessarily the right one for all of England.

England is a really big place, and one part of England doesn’t look like the whole of the rest of it. What looks good and works well in our big urban cities like Greater Manchester feels like pushing a square peg into a round hole when it comes to the rural counties like Lancashire or Cumbria.

In my recent Westminster Hall debate I was pleased to be supported in this view by my neighbouring Cumbrian MP Tim Farron, whose constituents have already been reorganised from two-tier local government into a unitary authority on the understanding this was a deal without a mayor. Unsurprisingly, after all that disruption he was not seeking to add to it by tacking on a mayor!

I’m not against looking at local government and if reorganisation makes things better for my constituents, delivers their services more efficiently and cost effectively then I can see merit in it. But it also needs to feel local, and if the government words are to match in actions, we need devolution to feel local. A huge unitary authority with 500,000 residents living in a compact urban environment can still feel like the ‘same place’, but once you head out of the city and into suburbia and rural England that population can be spread over an area that feel distant from one another.

So, no I don’t want to buy this off the shelf, one size only model of local government.

Then it comes with a mayor. Undeniably we have seen some great success stories about how this model has worked for some parts of England, in my part of the England we can see down in Manchester the way in which under Andy Burnham’s leadership Greater Manchester had a strong voice in the pandemic and Andy has transformed local transport with the Bee Network model of local transport. But could a Cumbria or Lancashire version of this work in the rural counties to the north of Manchester? Or are we being set up to fail?

My worry is that a mayoral model will feel distant in rural England. And if devolution is meant to be the cure to the lack of trust the public have in politicians, adding another politician who probably won’t have strong local connections beyond the town or district they hail from might actually make this problem worse, not better.

When you look at our messy two-tier local government in Lancashire, you can see it is confusing. Often it is also three-tier with active parish councils too! Sometimes even I struggle to get my head around which council does what, and it’s not always logical. I am not saying what we have now is perfect, but it is what has evolved over time and reflects the nature of our communities.

So when Jim McMahan hovers his ministerial pencil over the map of Lancashire and tries to shoe horn it into a model he knows well in Greater Manchester my plea is this; please stop and listen to the people who live here. I don’t believe there is any appetite for a mayor. The only arguments I am hearing for it are that we have to take it in order to get access to government funding. This is totally back to front, why should we be taking a model which we don’t want, probably won’t work in order to access the funds our constituents need? Look again at if we can improve local government but let’s not come in with a fixed idea one an identikit model of large unitary authorities and metro mayors.