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Unlamented
Local Government
Chronicle - 09 August 2007
I am not sure just how much wiser we are about the eventual shape of regional government and its accountability to local people following the unveiling of the Government’s snappily entitled Review of sub-national economic development and regeneration. Once the handful of clear strategic decisions has been digested most of the rest can at best be described as work in progress and, at worst, aspirations needing serious working up.
The regional assemblies go. Designed as forerunners of the directly elected regional bodies which were to control the growing quangocracy they really bit the dust with the North East referendum. Few will regret their passing.
But the quangos go from strength to strength. The regional development agencies add planning for homes and the environment to their economic development role. They can thank Kate Barker for this: the report she wrote for Gordon Brown on Britain’s housing market has acquired the status of a work programme for the Labour Government: the commitment to provide more homes and the reform of the planning rules to provide more “development” and less “control” all stem from her work.
If Kate Barker is one midwife of the Government’s policy the Sir Michael Lyons is the other. The very tentative floating of the idea for a supplementary business rate and the elements of devolution (the most important being the return to local authorities of responsibility for funding education and skills for the 14 – 19 years old) show that Lyons itself is a template for incremental action.
But the most unconvincing part of the Government’s project is that of accountability. Council leaders will hold the RDAs to account- but in ways yet determined The Government says it will introduce regional select committees, but I wonder how well this has been thought through. Party distribution is very uneven across the country. I doubt if there is a single Tory or Lib-Dem MP in the Yorkshire and Humber region who is not either a front-bencher or already tied up on select committees. The Opposition parties between them couldn’t man a tandem let alone a committee in the North East. Labour is under similar stress in the South East and South West.
Perhaps this is an opportunity. What about select committees under Parliamentary chairmanship but including local council, business and civil society leaders? The challenge to Parliamentary precedent and privilege and the difficulties of finding a way of choosing the non Parliamentary members pose fearsome difficulties.
The Government talks about councils working together in sub-regions to strengthen management of transport; about groups of councils agreeing collective targets for economic development priorities; and, most significantly, about working with city and sub-regions on scope for statutory sub-regional arrangements “which would allow greater devolution of national and regional economic functions.”
When challenged about what all this meant John Healey explained: “If local authorities together wish to move to statutory arrangements – without pressure or prescription from central government, because it must be their decision to do so – that will open the door for us to consider devolving more powers from national departments and national agencies and to give sub-regions greater certainty and longer term funding for some of the transport functions that can best be delivered at that level.”
The Government may be sympathetic to city regions but, once bitten over elected regional assemblies is fighting shy of prescription.
The problem is nothing in the Government’s proposals will have the faintest impact on the central issue it itself identifies – the growing disparity in regional economic performance. The burgeoning growth and economic dynamism of London and the South East has made Britain, along with Italy, one of the most asymmetric economies in Europe. A recent Oxford Economics report calculated that London and the South East subsidises public expenditure in the rest of the UK to the tune of £32bn a year (money which, if spent locally, could soon build Crossrail!).
The Scottish Executive is arguing for a lower rate of corporation tax in the regions. The Government is under pressure to do something for Northern Ireland. That Celtic Tiger the Irish Republic boasts a 12.5 per cent rate of tax.
Now, wouldn’t that be an exciting part of the process……?
© Local Government Chronicle
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