Will the PM’s Rewiring the State deliver growth for regions like ours? - Carl Les

I’m paraphrasing Tony Blair’s words here when he said that what you don’t get done in the first year of the Parliament after election you struggle to complete in the rest, and the wisdom of business suggests you need a first 100 days plan after major change.

So emulating the Blair days when they announced a new policy each week (detailed and costed) the new Prime Minister has hit the ground running, with a headlined press announcement each morning at 6am to meet that day’s news schedules.

Important issues all, designed to catch the nation`s attention, but not detailed enough to allow proper scrutiny. But then as Parliament is on its summer break (no criticism here, the Holidays with Pay Act was introduced in the last century) then there is no formal scrutiny, although the real scrutiny of this government is by the Labour Party in the Commons, as the previous Prime Minister found to his cost.

The announcement that interested my world the most was about further devolution of decision making. This is mainly about England, as the home nations have had degrees of devolved powers for some time, but even so the United Kingdom has the most centralised form of governance in Europe, excluding those under the influence of the Russian Federation. So this is welcome news although the devil, as ever, will be in the detail, and the detail isn’t fully available as yet.

No wonder this paper carried a headline of “Westminster baffled as PM bids to hand powers to regions”, and it might well be added to by ‘Whitehall resists handing over powers’.

That’s why it was an important piece that the new PM wrote in this paper on Saturday, August 1 – Yorkshire Day, celebrated by many of us. He promised that “decisions will be made by the local leaders who know Yorkshire best”, and that in introducing the “biggest transfer of power out of Westminster in modern English history” he was going to change the civil service ethos from asking why should we give up that power, to one of why should we keep it?

Well good luck with that, because what I’ve learnt about change over time is that there is always a resistance to it, however well or ill founded, but that’s no reason not to if it’s the right thing to do.

A couple of concerns though. Was it just a slip of the speech writer’s understanding that the examples of future benefits were only in metro land, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Bradford, or a real lapse in understanding.

In North Yorkshire we may be joked about as having more sheep than people, and we certainly enjoy a very large geography, but our Council is the third largest in England behind Birmingham and Leeds, and together with York in the Combined Authority, our population is much nearer to one million than it is to half and growing.

The second concern is that Prime Minister Burnham seems only to refer to Mayors. Perhaps that’s understandable, as he was one himself until recently, but he understood that the Mayor leads the Combined Authority, and the clue is in the title – ‘combined’.

There is a perception that it is some individual individualistic body, working on its own. In reality, it is the sum of three parts, Mayor (priorities as defined by election), City of York Council, and North Yorkshire Council, working together for the good of all our residents. I make the point repeatedly that we work not with the CA, but within it.

When we were negotiating with the government about setting up a Combined Authority one of the principles which we were happy to agree with was one council, one vote. I think this is a sound example of how the previous government did devolution and local government reorganisation with a straighter political bat than the Starmer government has. This was a model that all CA’s had adopted. We were the only one to have such a stark distinction of population between only two authorities, York (200k) North Yorkshire (600k). There was a view that there should be weighted membership of the CA, or at least weighted voting of 3:1 in favour of the larger authority.

Clearly this would have presented a challenge, probably politically insurmountable, to the smaller authority who would have to run the risk of being outvoted at every division of opinion.

We accepted that principle, mainly because the point of principle was right, but also there were checks and balances to ensure that decisions were done with the individual local authority, and not to us. So leaders had to be in favour of proposals that affect their residents only, as had the Mayor for any major decision.

Regrettably recent legislation designed to obviate blockages elsewhere has now changed that to majority voting only, and we have seen how that can lead to conflict rather than consensus.

We continue to study the PM’s Rewiring the State and how it will affect what we do for the residents we serve. In particular, how does it deliver growth?

Coun Carl Les is the Leader of North Yorkshire Council.