Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and former Senedd candidate.
As the country prepares for the ‘King in the North’ to abandon his regal title for the more workaday role of Prime Minister, the word devolution has started to enter the political lexicon in the most significant way for three decades.
Whilst in the 1990s it meant a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, Andy Burnham has made it central to his credo to disperse power across the United Kingdom in the belief it would lead to more investment, not just financial but emotional.
This agenda suffers from a similar problem that has afflicted national devolution but, also, Brexit. Both leaving the European Union and establishing legislatures in Holyrood and Cardiff were mechanisms that would enable those in power to do something. The campaigns for all of these promised much, but it was all conceptual as what was delivered was a means to an end, not the end itself. The disappointment in devolution and Brexit so far is down to those who have these new powers either exercising them poorly or, even, choosing not to utilise them at all.
Both Conservative and Labour governments in Westminster chose not to diverge from many aspects of the EU’s regulatory regime. This is despite divergence being precisely what would deliver the competitive advantage that would leverage greater levels of foreign direct investment and nimble native business activity and, consequently, trigger the economic vision espoused during Brexit. Britian also took back control of our borders only to open them up.
In the Scottish and Welsh capitals, their degrees of autonomy have been used to build up new elites – the fact that they are physically closer to those upon whom they impose a metropolitan worldview has not mollified dissatisfaction with politics, if it hasn’t exacerbated it – who very much wanted to use their powers to be different from London, but largely for the sake of it. The result is an absence of demonstrably positive outcomes, with voters in Scotland and Wales putting up with worse schools, lower pay, and longer NHS waits.
In short, promising positive outcomes as a result of delivering constitutional rewiring is asking for trouble because reorganisation itself is not what drives change. Of course, we know Burham is talking more about creating more versions of his former self – mayors across England. The Starmer government had already decreed that everywhere in England must have a mayor even when this has made little sense. Are we going to start talking up Andrea Jenkyns as a model to follow now? By implication, Burnham is doing just that.
The irony is that when people in England are asked if they want a mayor or devolution of some sort to their patch, they say no. Whether that be the North-East rejecting a regional assembly proposed by Tony Blair or the Bristol mayoralty that was abolished in a city-wide referendum four years ago, dispersing power to new elites rather than communities is not desired.
Not only are people awake to devolution requiring more politicians, with public service budgets being top-sliced to funnel into this middle-class, jobs-for-the-boys welfarism, but it involves imposing a new geography that makes little sense to what is felt in the bones of people who make an area a community.
It is one of the reasons why regional assemblies died a death, why people in North Wales and the Scottish Highlands find the devolved legislatures to be as distant from their needs and wants as Westminster, and why there is much resistance to the local government reorganisation initiated by Angela Rayner.
Surprisingly, the people of Cornwall do not want a joint mayor with Devon. I imagine Devon wouldn’t want to be paired up with Somerset either. People are not buying into an agenda of tidying up the local government map with eliminating two-level district and county councils when the argument for it is to lower costs and remove confusion, only for a mayor to be installed over them anyway.?
We’re being told this kind of devolution is a silver bullet, but it does it really work?
In Greater Manchester, its recent success story was the product of empowering pre-existing local authorities, not the glorious ascension of Mayor Burnham. Mayors can be good communicators, schmoozers, and convenors – but these functions can easily be fulfilled by Council leaders.
Here is where Burnham must prove himself to a British Prime Minister, and not just an English voice. With polls showing most people in Wales being ambivalent or hostile to national devolution, he must bear his teeth to the separatists in Cardiff Bay, and Holyrood, and recognise that the recentralisation of powers in these bubbles must be taken on too. Ignore the siren voices of the devo-elite who says he must not interfere in devolved areas – they are very happy to meddle in reserved areas, and he should pay them in kind. He should sue them for it too.
Parliament is sovereign and can legislate in devolved areas. If Burnham truly believes devolution must be done, then he cannot exempt the other home nations. He must push powers from the devolved legislatures to local government. Regional working structures between authorities – roughly resembling the pre-1970s ceremonial counties that marks a better way of both strengthening and tidying up local government – are already underway, so he would be tapping into something that’s already halfway built.
There is already tacit support within his party for this. The ruling Labour group amended a Yes Cymru-sponsored Plaid motion on Cardiff Council last year on the devolution of the Crown Estate – another pet issue pursued by the devo-regime in the Bay – with a “cascading principle” of devolution. Taking powers from Westminster to the devolved legislature to local authorities.
Let’s save everyone some time and skip the middle step whilst also pushing what’s in the Senedd’s hands into those of real local leaders who concern themselves with the public realm of their city, towns, or villages, rather than the preoccupations of the people that gave us a generation of functionally illiterate children, a fifth of the population on an NHS waiting list, and the worst economic productivity in Britain.
Burnham faces crises on many fronts from the defence of the realm and a culture of welfarism to an infrastructure and housing shortage and the collapse of the immigration system. That he has chosen to define his premiership before it has even begun with a devolution programme is bold, especially knowing it is impossible for this constitutional rewiring to pay off before the next general election.
But if he is determined to go down this road, he must recognise its shortcomings from its lack of effectiveness and public support to the establishment of other bases of power who, let us not forget, use their bully pulpit with its lack of scrutiny from weak local media and disinterested national media to criticise central government for all ills.
Or has Andy already forgotten how he got the job in the first place?