Councillor Thomas Heald is a Scottish Conservative councillor for Dunblane and Bridge of Allan, former Scottish Conservative and Unionist candidate for Dunfermline and former political advisor in the Scottish Parliament.
British politics has never been short of grand plans involving a new office, more staff and an impressive title. Andy Burnham’s proposal for a ‘No 10 North’ is no different and has attracted the predictable derision from politicians and commentators and is, fairly accurately, described by some as a vanity project.
I am also incredibly sceptical about how Yorkshire, Northumberland or even Derbyshire feel about ‘the North of England’ being defined by Manchester, but that is an article for another day.
There is, however, a fair question about whether a Prime Ministerial operation, no matter how thin on the ground, in Manchester would make much practical difference. There is an even fairer question about whether a Labour Government that likes targets, national plans and central direction will really hand over power when local leaders make decisions Ministers in London dislike.
Yet Conservatives should not simply mock the idea. Burnham has identified a real problem that we all know to be true: Britain remains too centralised. Too many decisions are made by people who are far from the communities that live with the consequences.
We do not have to accept every part of the prescription to accept that the diagnosis is correct.
In Scotland, the argument should go much further.
Our constitutional debate has spent three decades focused on the relationship between Edinburgh and Westminster. It has been presented as a contest between two capitals: which one should hold the levers, which one better understands Scotland, and which one is more distant from the people.
But that is not the whole story.
For someone contacting a councillor about a dangerous crossing, a missing bus service, a school place, antisocial behaviour or a neglected park, the constitutional debate can feel rather remote. Their concern is not principally whether the power lies with Westminster or Holyrood.
My constituents have a much simpler question: who can actually do something?
The uncomfortable answer, too often, is that nobody local can.
Scotland has a Parliament, a Government and extensive devolved powers. Yet it has also developed a habit of recreating, on a smaller scale, the very centralism devolution was meant to challenge.
The SNP has spent years telling Scotland that decisions are better made here than in Westminster. That principle is at times a politically difficult one to dispute. But it is one that the Scottish Government applies rather selectively. Power is welcome when it travels from London to Edinburgh, but it becomes much less attractive when councils ask for more of it themselves.
Local authorities are expected to implement national strategies, meet national targets, absorb national priorities and report against national expectations. We are frequently asked to deliver ministerial announcements with limited flexibility over how we do so and, too often, without the financial certainty needed to plan properly.
When difficult decisions follow, the same councils are then blamed for the consequences.
As a councillor, I do not argue that councils should be beyond scrutiny or free from challenge. Local Government spends substantial sums of public money and must be accountable for how it uses it. There are services where national standards matter profoundly, particularly in relation to vulnerable children, public health and ensuring that every community receives a fair level of support.
But national standards should not become an exercise in national micromanagement.
The people closest to a community will not always get everything right. Neither do Ministers, civil servants or national agencies. The difference is that councillors and local officers live with the consequences. They know the local geography, pressures on services, voluntary organisations already doing good work, and the practical barriers that can make a policy designed in Edinburgh look very different on the ground.
A national policy may make sense in principle but still fail in practice if it does not take
account of local circumstances. For example, a rural council faces different challenges from an urban one.
That is why the discussion about elected mayors is worth having in Scotland, even if we should be wary of copying the English model line by line. Not least that mayors north of the border should rightly be titled ‘Provost’ or ‘Lord Provost’.
England’s metro mayors have demonstrated the value of visible leadership. They provide major city-regions with a recognisable voice, someone who can bring together councils, business and public bodies and someone whom voters can hold to account for a clear programme of work.
That does not mean every part of Scotland needs an elected Provost. Nor should they be imposed simply because a government wants a neat institutional diagram or another photo opportunity.
Scotland is different.
Our communities vary enormously in size, geography and identity. The priorities of the Highlands will not be those of the central belt in the same sense that the Borders, the Islands and the North-East cannot simply be fitted into a model designed for Greater Manchester or the West Midlands.
But the underlying principle should travel.
Where there is genuine local consent and a clear case for joining up transport, planning, housing and environment, then we should be open to the idea of directly accountable local leadership. In some regions, such as Glasgow, that could mean an elected Provost.
In others, it could mean more meaningful regional partnerships such as those being explored between Stirling, Falkirk and Clackmannanshire or entirely new arrangements co-designed with communities. As Conservatives, we should be open to these discussions because the structure matters less than the fundamental principle that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people affected by them.
That requires more than the occasional funding pots, something that Governments like to call ‘devolution’. The reality is that funding is announced with various strings attached. Local government is then invited to be grateful for the freedom to deliver someone else’s priorities.
Real devolution would look different.
It would mean multi-year financial settlements so that councils can plan beyond the next budget cycle. It would mean fewer ring-fenced funds and less ministerial direction over the detail of delivery. It would mean greater local flexibility over transport, planning, housing, skills and regeneration. It would mean treating councils as democratic institutions with their own mandate, not simply as delivery arms of the Scottish Government.
None of this is a plea for a blank cheque. Local leaders should be clear about what they control, how they spend public money and whether they have delivered on their commitments. Voters should know who is responsible when services improve and who should answer when they do not.
That is one argument for elected mayors: not that mayors are inherently wiser or more capable, but that they can make responsibility visible. Scotland should learn from that, while ensuring any new model is backed by strong scrutiny and does not simply create mini-Holyroods around the country.
Conservatives should be able to make this case confidently. We believe in institutions rooted in place, in civic pride and in the value of people taking responsibility for the communities they know best. We should be suspicious of the instinct that says a problem in Stirling, Stranraer or Stornoway is best solved by a directive drafted in a capital city.
Burnham’s No 10 North may yet prove more symbol than substance. The test will not be where an office is based, but whether power, responsibility and the freedom to innovate genuinely move with it.
For Scotland, the lesson is clearer still. Devolution was never supposed to mean replacing one distant centre of power with another. It was supposed to be the beginning of a different kind of politics: one in which power travels closer to the people.
It is time the Scottish Government remembered that devolution should not stop at Holyrood.