Local government devolution – Why and why now?

Let us put aside for one moment the intellectual incongruity and perhaps madness of saying you want to deliver 1.5 million new homes whilst at the same time reorganising a vast swathe of local government. Good luck with those both working out simultaneously! Instead, let us focus on why the government wants local government devolution at all. There are principally two reasons:

Intellectual rationale – Every government wants to cut the cost of local government. Every government wants to streamline or rationalise local government. And quite bizarrely every government pretends to believe that they can do these and not have any impact on local government service delivery. We all know this is insane but still politicians of all colours persist with this magical thinking.

And of course there is an intellectual rationale to streamlining local government. The arbitrary split between the services county councils provide (principally education, social care, transport, minerals planning etc) and those managed by district councils (typically housing, planning, leisure services, waste collection etc) is fake because unitary authorities, like London boroughs, manage both roles. And if you merge six councils into one, then that's five less chief executives, five less finance directors etc. So the Treasury loves this idea and always has done.

Political rationale – But there's a deeply cynical political rationale to all this as well. It inevitably means many fewer Tory and Liberal Democrat councillors. And importantly the denial of many future Reform councillors. And councillors are these parties’ main activists. Labour grassroots activism is in large part supplied and funded by the unions.

So one can see the appeal for Labour politicians to publicly hide behind this intellectual rationale whilst quietly trying to kill their political opposition. As we wrote, a deeply cynical political strategy, which, as ever, none of the great minds of British journalism have noticed. Plus ça change.