I'm a Tory council leader - Andy Burnham's devolution changes are a big step in right direction: Carl Les

The BBC’s “What do we get for the licence fee?” campaign is designed to be reminiscent of the comedy sketch about “What did the Romans ever do for us?” I appreciate the message, but it’s getting a little repetitive now.

Although there is much of what I do watch, and enjoy, the messaging doesn’t persuade me about whether I would sign up to any of the stuff that if it were a subscription service.

We get the same questions as councillors. Quite legitimately, but often with a lack of knowledge, although we try to explain our budgets and how they are made up every year when we send out the dreaded council tax demand. This tends to be pie charts that show where our spending is committed, but does help to show where the big money goes. It shows we are not just about potholes and pavements, important though they are.

One of the big spending directorates is Health and Adult Services (HAS), which looks after adult social care, public health, supported housing, and our partnership working with the NHS, the commercial sector, and many voluntary bodies. The directorate plans, invests and delivers services to support individuals and communities to be healthier and to live the lives they want to live. This is achieved with a social care budget of £289 million, and a public health grant to spend of £26 million.

At the end of July the Executive Committee received a “state of the nation” report summarising the council’s position, its successes and its forthcoming challenges.

The national direction of travel for health and care provides a greater emphasis on prevention, community support through neighbourhood health, and integration.

We monitor the performance of HAS both internally within the directorates management, and externally at our quarterly Executive meetings. In addition to key performance indicators (KPIs) there are a series of improvement priorities we have identified, each with a lead manager working to an improvement plan. Presently these are support for unpaid carers, of which there are many in our communities; waiting well; home first, and increasing the use of direct payments.

There is also a regular review by the Care Quality Commission (CYC). Our last assessment was in June 2025 when we were rated “Good” with a score of 81/100, ranking us joint sixth highest performing nationally. But we are never complacent.

Public health performance is monitored by voluntary peer reviews. The last was again in 2025 ,and although unscored the outcome was “incredibly positive”.

The financial outturn for HAS showed an overspend of £3.6m in 2025/26. This is mainly driven by increasing demand, and an increasing cost in the delivery of care, and these figures are confirmed as being in line with national increases.

However North Yorkshire has a higher than national average percentage of the population of older people so we would expect to be ahead of any national statistic. I’ve always said that this is a good thing as it means people are living for longer, (my grandmother died in her 50s, my mother in her 60s, her much younger sister in her 70s), but we must reflect that this brings with it increased costs. We have increased the HAS budget by a £5.6m growth allocation.

A Fair Pay Agreement aimed at improving recruitment and retention with a greater recognition of the skills involved in the role, although welcomed and supported will also increase cost pressures.

A key national objective is to work towards moving care closer to home and reduce the reliance on hospital settings. This will reduce discharge pressure on hospitals in time, but will depend on investment and the growth of community health and social care services.

The new Prime Minister appears particularly keen on this, and want to accelerate the review that Baroness Casey is carrying out. We were very pleased to host a visit by her in February this year, and give her our evidence at first-hand. A major theme is likely to be a shift from institutional models of care towards prevention and early intervention with greater personalisation for adults drawing on social care. It is a journey we have been on for some time.

There has also been big news about devolution, and the biggest change in the government of the country for years. Fiscal devolution as well as administrative devolution, moving the country from the most centralised governance model in Europe to one less so. It won’t be introduced for two years, there’s no new money, and already we have seen that the devo decisions will have to be taken with Westminster`s agreement, but it is a step, a very big step, in the right direction.

Number 10 North is symbolic, Michael Heseltine located Whitehall outposts in the regions some years ago, Rishi Sunak created a Treasury Quarter in Darlington and as PM worked from there some time each week, but this devolution is a structural positive. I will come back to this in future.

Carl Les is the Conservative leader of North Yorkshire Council