Abstract
English local government is currently facing an existential crisis over its future purpose and capacity which is analysed in terms of three underlying crises. (1) A fiscal crisis created by over a decade of financial austerity imposed by successive Conservative-led and Conservative governments since 2011, the consequences of which have been intensified by rising inflation and consequent higher service costs. (2) A governing crisis reflecting the gradual re-engineering of local authorities from their original, post-war high discretion role in welfare state service delivery towards a role closer to that as agents of the centre. (3) A policy role crisis as local authorities have lost entire services and major parts of other services through governance changes, and their capacity to sustain, let alone enact, a policy role has been seriously eroded. Moreover, the Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) recently created in the main city sub-regions are further complicating the role of local government. The MCAs have ill-defined and limited powers mainly focussed on economic development are imposed on top of the existing LAs.
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Introduction
UK governance is characterised by a strong central government with weak sub-state institutions. Notably, in 1999 the UK central government did transfer significant powers to the three UK ‘nations’ (Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales). Yet the subsequent UK intergovernmental relationships (IGR) remain strongly asymmetrical with the Westminster government as the dominant partner, as it is both the UK government and the English government. Meanwhile, an undevolved England remains an exemplar of the ‘centralised policy process’ identified in the Introduction to this book. Nevertheless, since 2010, successive Conservative-led governments have, rhetorically at least, committed to the greater devolution of powers in England. In the major urban areas, Conservative ministers have gradually introduced new, sub-regional mayoral combined authorities (MCAs). These new authorities are layered on top of existing councils and have a predominantly economic development role, unlike the pre-existing local authorities focussed on service delivery.
Even so contemporary English central-local relations continue to be based on a highly centralised policymaking model within a largely uncodified constitution. English local government does remain ‘a very big business’ (Wilson & Game, 2011, 129). A wide range of services are delivered by over 300 LAs to over 56 million people in England. Local government spends £117.2 billion a year (2022–23) (DLUHC, 2023), roughly 10% of total public expenditure. Meanwhile, the politics and policies of these large and ostensibly powerful councils have largely remained subordinate to the two major political parties which dominate the central-local relationship. Indeed, both the Conservative and the Labour party’s electoral fortunes within England depend on these party politics of social groups rather than a politics of territory.
Our argument is that English local government is facing an existential crisis over its future purpose and capacity resulting from (1) a centrally imposed fiscal crisis created by more than a decade of continuing financial austerity imposed by the Conservative-led Coalition with the Liberal Democrats (2010–15) and present Conservative governments (2015–present), now compounded by inflation and rising service costs; (2) a governing crisis arising from the gradual re-engineering of LAs from their original, post-war high discretion role in welfare state service delivery towards a role close to being just agents of the centre and (3) a policy role crisis as, in recent years, LAs have lost significant parts of services and entire services through governance changes and have lost much of the capacity to sustain, let alone enact, a policy role. Moreover, many LAs are having to work with new Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs), with ill-defined and weak powers focussed on economic development, imposed on top of the existing LAs.
This chapter focusses on these three intersecting crises and their consequences for central-local relations within England. In line with the three themes identified in this book, our chapter begins with an overview of the general structural weaknesses of English central-local government relations. The second section points to the changing role of LAs in social policy provision as central government actors have sought to work around local government to impose central direction. The final section analyses how the new MCAs and the levelling-up agenda have emerged primarily from a Conservative party electoral strategy to exploit Labour’s declining electoral fortunes in its traditional social base in northern England and the Midlands.
The Structural Weaknesses of English Local Government
Central government actors occupy a powerful position and devolved governments a correspondingly weak one in Westminster systems. Constitutionally the Westminster doctrine of ministerial responsibility confers legitimacy on ministers as, at least in theory, they can be held to account in Parliament for their departmental decisions. The conventional wisdom stresses that this centralised system bequeaths structural advantages on English governance, notably the capacity for central government to act decisively and to co-ordinate policy implementation across layers of governance. The normative logic of the doctrine is that the location of power is clear, yet in practice, allocating responsibility for policy failures is much less so. Meanwhile, local government actors have no formal, constitutional rights of representation or participation at the national level. Consequently, subnational politicians in England, unlike their counterparts in many other European countries, have very limited effective access to parliamentary and central government arenas. Neither do they have any strong means of mobilising resistance to the centre through constitutional institutions, such as French local politicians enjoy through the Senate and German Länder politicians in a federal system through the Bundesrat and through their differently organised parties. This absence of strong access rights to central government for local government in England seriously limits its ability to influence central government policy. Individual local authorities (LAs), too, face considerable obstacles in mobilising effectively to resist central government policy decisions and have limited capacity to challenge central policy directions. Moreover, when policy shocks and crises do occur, ministers’ natural reflex is to further centralise power, as illustrated by the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic (Diamond & Laffin, 2022).
A crucial, structural problem confronting LAs in all politically devolved systems arises from how collective action problems limit their capacities to organise. These problems are not unique to English or UK local government. They are characteristic of any situation in which it is difficult to organise large numbers of individuals or individual organisations even when some interests are widely shared. Individuals or organisations may potentially benefit from any collective action taken, yet they have little incentive to join in any action if that benefit is likely to be realised regardless of whether or not they participate (Olson, 1965: 45). In particular, these problems are greater for local government associations (LGAs), the greater the differences in geographical interests across their membership. These interests tend to divide LGAs and create difficulties for their leaderships in (1) achieving agreed positions and then (2) mobilising against central government. The English LGA is a good example of an LGA facing these difficulties in achieving common positions on key issues and then mobilising enough LA members to resist central government effectively (de Widt & Laffin, 2018). A telling illustration of the English LGA’s weakness is how the LGA political leadership has been a spectator to the introduction of the MCAs (de Widt & Laffin, 2018: 1952).
Moreover, the English LGA is also divided by political party allegiance. Party interests constrain the LGA from taking policy positions involving dissent from the central government policies when the same party controls both central government and the LGA. Similarly, government ministers and their advisers often marginalise the LGA when it is controlled by the opposition party, or even when it is controlled by a different faction of the ruling party, as occurred during the 1997–2010 Labour government (Entwistle & Laffin, 2003).
The Westminster central government also enjoys financial domination of the central-local relationship. It controls local government’s block grant allocations and increasingly uses specific grants and tied funding to shape local authority activities. Consequently, LAs have limited scope to deviate from central policy as local council tax represents only a quarter of their spending. The Conservative-led Coalition (2010–15) and Conservative government (2015–present) have imposed an austerity regime across government, with a limited exception for the National Health Service (NHS). Reflecting its subordinate position, local government has suffered from disproportionately deeper cuts compared to central government departments. Central government grants to local government have been cut by 37%, from £41 to £26 billion at 2019–20 prices between 2010–11 and 2020–21, and local government spending power fell by 26.3% in real terms (NAO, 2021a, b: 16). Meanwhile, the centre has limited the ability of local councils to raise revenue through increasing council tax. LAs must hold a referendum if they wish to increase council tax by more than 3% (alongside an additional 2% precept for adult social care).
Austerity, too, has disproportionately affected the more deprived areas of England, including the ‘left behind’ places, that is the more deprived areas, outside London and the south-east (Gray & Barford, 2018). Government ministers have trumpeted the so-called levelling-up funds being injected into local government but avoided mentioning the past and continuing government cuts to the annual local government funding system. These new levelling-up funds are specific grants dispersed through competitive funding pots for which LAs have to invest time and effort to bid. The funding of these, mostly specific infrastructure, also usefully enables ministers to claim political credit for local projects as well as preventing LAs from diverting funds to support their own local priorities. Moreover, cuts to English local government, plus the increasing proportion of spending devoted to social care and children’s services, have reduced LAs’ policy capacity and thus made it more difficult for them to implement pro-growth policies in planning, transport and housing. Thus continued austerity is undermining Conservative ministers’ own declared intentions to reshape councils as agents of wealth creation. It should be noted, too, that the long shadow of austerity will constrain the Labour party opposition if it comes to power in 2024 or 2025. For example, the feasibility of Labour’s commitment to a massive house-building programme has been questioned by the Royal Town Planning Institute given the considerable loss of planners from the public sector consequent on austerity (Thomas, 2023).
Central government’s incremental funding of local government through annual settlements also hampers financial planning. Austerity, this funding system and a sharp upward shift in inflation have already forced about a dozen local authorities, including the city of Birmingham, to declare themselves effectively ‘insolvent’ and ask for central government emergency support (IfG, 2022). The National Audit Office (NAO) (2021a, b: 5) has raised the alarm, pointing out that local government finance is likely to become unsustainable on present trends and that continuing financial uncertainty is undermining local councils’ ability to plan effectively.
Despite these issues, central government cuts since 2010 have encountered surprisingly little concerted opposition from within local government. The constraints on LAs acting collectively, their limited capacity to mobilise countervailing power against an aggressive centre and the central-local politics of blame have left LAs little scope for resistance. Moreover, the lessons of the 1980s Thatcher Conservative governments have not been forgotten. At that time some Labour-controlled LAs did resist central government, some refusing to implement cuts. However, the Thatcher government, unconstrained by any constitutional barriers, retaliated by capping local rates, surcharging some councillors, and in 1986 abolishing the then (Labour) metropolitan councils covering the major conurbations, including the then Greater London Council (O’Leary, 1987). Ministers also sought electoral advantage in stigmatising the opposition Labour party by branding protesting Labour councils as ‘loony left’ (Lansley et al., 1989). It is widely assumed that this image of Labour ‘irresponsibility’ contributed to keeping Labour out of office nationally until the late 1990s. This historical experience of the counterproductive effects of local councillors’ anti-government protests for Labour nationally has contributed to deterring Labour councillors from serious political resistance.
Network Governance or a New Centralism?
Over the post-war period English LAs played a key role in the expansion of the welfare state. They acquired a broad role in social policy provision including school and further education, social services and social care, alongside social housing, planning and environmental health. LAs had significant discretion to determine local spending priorities, as central government priorities remained indicative, although they were reflected in determining the overall block grant to local government. LAs could take significant policy initiatives involving local issues of social redistribution notably by reorganising secondary school education (Mandler, 2020, 54–5) and by increasing LAs’ subsidies to their council housing accounts. However, over the last 40 years central governments of both main parties have significantly curtailed LAs’ freedom of action (especially where social redistribution is at issue) by tightening financial controls, transferring services outside the local government sector to non-profit associations (e.g. most social housing provision and most schools are now outside LA control), and tightened, centralised regulation of those services remaining with councils, such as through Ofsted (the central government school inspectorate). Consequently, LAs are now left primarily delivering the remaining social policy fragments as effectively agents of central government.
Traditionally, English local government bureaucracies were highly professionalised with strong and influential professional-bureaucratic, vertical central-local linkages (Laffin, 1986, 29–32). Professionalisation had emerged during the late nineteenth century as a central government strategy to counter the excessive influence of local elites on, and corruption in, local governments (Laffin, 1986, Chap. 3). As reforming central governments added further services to local authorities, notably planning and social services, those new services were also organised around a professional, occupational model. Essentially this model was intended to ensure effective local administration but avoid the detailed central, bureaucratic control of councils. Consequently, dedicated corps of local government officers emerged whose primary allegiance was occupational—to their professions and careers—rather than to the localities.
This traditional, and peculiarly British, local government model of professional self-regulation has declined significantly since the mid-1980s. A new emphasis, on corporate rather than departmental management, and an enhanced role for local authority chief executives, emerged following the 1974 English local government reorganisation. More significantly, from the 1980s onwards, ministers have been increasingly critical of professional practice and advice as reflecting self-interested, public officers’ ‘producerist’ interests (Laffin & Entwistle, 2000). The slowdown in post-war growth and the emergence of Thatcherism and the search for a smaller state also triggered a new assertiveness within the political elites. Moran (2003) argues that from the 1980s the UK has become particularly susceptible to ‘hyper-politicisation’ and ‘hyper-innovation’ which is reflected in ministers asserting their control over larger areas of policy such as the school curriculum, once left to the professionals. In particular ‘politicians are forced to intervene to shape policy around the short-term imperatives of the adversarial battle, and the management of their own careers’ (Moran, 2003, 190). Thus recent generations of activist ministers, compared with their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, typically seek to implement, and then micro-manage, what they present as their own distinctive ‘reforms’. They can embark on major service reorganisations with minimal policy learning and can avoid consultation with frontline stakeholders (Norris & Adam, 2017; Moran, 2003). For example, over the last 30 years, English regional governance has been subject to five waves of reform—regional government offices (Conservative), (unelected) regional assemblies with Regional Development Agencies (Labour), RDAs and regional offices abolished and replaced by Local Enterprise Partnerships (Conservative) and now the MCAs (Conservative)—with consequent uncertainties over LAs’ changing relationships with central departments. Another example is the disruption created by the 2012 Conservative-led major reform of the National Health Service which had had a long-term, deleterious impact on the NHS’s capacity and responsiveness during the Covid-19 pandemic (Diamond & Laffin, 2022, 214). Meanwhile, central-local relations have been affected by increasing ministerial turnover with nine cabinet ministers holding the local government portfolio between 2010 and 2023, raising obvious issues over the consistency and effectiveness of political control.
Over recent decades, successive governments have created new mechanisms to oversee the operation of local government. In 1975–76 the imperative arose from the economic and fiscal crisis that engulfed the UK, requiring the imposition of much tighter public expenditure controls, particularly on local authorities (Gamble, 1994). In the past central departments’ priorities had been to manage central-local conflicts consensually. But from the 1980s ministers placed less value on maintaining good relationships and instead stressed their own initiatives often regardless of the established channels of central-local consultation. A good example was during the Covid-19 pandemic when central government initially avoided joint central-local service delivery, instead relying on private sector management consultants for advice and implementation, and outsourcing delivery functions to circumvent local government despite the well-established local strengths in local public health expertise (Diamond & Laffin, 2022, 223).
Such alternative service delivery chains, intended to work around local authorities, have become a significant central control strategy. Both Conservative and Labour governments have switched to outsourcing delivery chains, notably in social housing, school education, adult social care, alongside leisure and cultural services, mainly to extra-governmental organisations in the private and voluntary sectors, thus removing them from direct local government control (NAO, 2013; Laffin, 2013). Moreover, outsourcing has tended to displace the professional-bureaucratic linkages that previously underpinned the central-local coordination of service delivery.
This trend towards transferring service delivery functions outside local government was initially identified and celebrated as the rise of ‘network governance’ by some scholars. Their argument was that the formal government institutions were being displaced by self-organising networks of extra-state actors in the provision of services, with responsiveness through networks replacing formal accountability mechanisms (e.g. Rhodes, 1997). However, in reality this change did not reflect a trend towards a new network governance system but rather central government actors’ search for greater control over local services and for savings through substituting voluntary and private sector providers for local government provision (Bache, 2003; Laffin, 2013). Such outsourcing typically bypasses local authorities and downgrades traditional professional expertise (Crouch, 2014). Meanwhile, financialisation, not anticipated by the academic proponents of network governance, has eroded the capacity and finances of LAs (Pike, 2023; Horton, 2019). The National Audit Office, too, has raised serious concerns over the quasi-monopolistic position of the large service delivery companies upon which central and local government has become increasingly dependent. In addition, serious concerns have also emerged about alleged ‘cronyism’ in contracting-out (NAO, 2020; Conn et al., 2020).
These pressures, particularly in adult and children’s social care, now contribute significantly to councils’ financial difficulties. Social care is managed and locally funded by LAs on a means-tested basis rather than through the National Health Service, the cost of social care now represents over 56% of all LA spending and even so the care sector has become increasingly under-funded. As a sector with too little funding that relies on some degree of means-testing (unlike the free-at-the-point-of-use NHS), it has long been recognised as needing reform. Yet successive governments have repeatedly postponed action. Meanwhile, councils have become increasingly dependent on the private sector for care provision. In the UK 82% of the care home market is now privatised compared with 40% and 23% in France and Germany (Savills, 2022). The sector, too, has become increasingly financialised with private equity taking over chains of providers. Consequently, the sector is increasingly focussed on property investment returns rather than with health outcomes (Horton, 2019).
This situation further undermines the quality of care at the local level, intensifying the pressure on local councils as such care is the other main pressure on LA spending. Yet private provision has not had a beneficial impact on social care provision. Over the last four years English councils spent £480 million on care home provision classified as ‘inadequate’ (Booth & Goodier, 2023). The National Audit Office concludes that LAs are losing control of care home provision: ‘in a vast and diverse social care market, the current accountability and oversight arrangements do not work’, and ‘the lack of a long-term vision for care and short-term funding has hampered local authorities’ ability to innovate and plan for the long term, and constrained investment in accommodation and much-needed workforce development’. In children’s care, LAs are dependent for 83% of the provision on the private sector (MacAlister, 2022, 241) and are being significantly overcharged by private operators (CMA, 2022). Meanwhile, a recent policy review concluded that private providers were overcharging councils for children’s care (MacAlister, 2022).
A New Politics of Territory or an Old Politics of Party?
A key feature of recent Conservative governments has been their rediscovery of a politics of the north and Midlands. Ministers in the Conservative-led coalition government (2010–15) and the Conservative government (2015–present) have sought to strengthen the Conservative electoral base in deindustrialised areas of northern England and the midlands and, in so doing, respond to the long-term productivity problems in those areas (Heseltine, 2012). Many of these so-called left behind areas had traditionally been strongly Labour-voting areas. Labour had already begun to lose support in these areas as a sense of discontent spread among voters, reflecting their perceptions of relative economic decline locally arising from deindustrialisation, the consequent fall in real wages and the impact of the post-2010 government austerity policies (for a detailed analysis see Sobolewska & Ford, 2020). Conservative ministers saw an opportunity to exploit the ‘geography of discontent’ to win further parliamentary seats (McCann, 2019). As mentioned, the signature Conservative policy response was the creation of the sub-regional, city-level mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) primarily focussed on economic development to fuel a politics of place. Indeed, in the 2019 general election the Conservatives made serious electoral inroads into Labour’s traditional Northern heartlands, not least winning former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former constituency seat.
A pattern of an ad hoc implementation of MCAs has unfolded in the main conurbations over the last ten years. Greater London already had a directly elected mayor established by the then Labour government in 2000, although, unlike the MCAs, the London mayor has more powers and works with a directly elected Assembly not with representatives of the constitutive councils. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority was the first ‘deal’, with an interim mayor in 2015 and the first elected mayor in 2017. The details of each deal are formulated through informal and closed contacts between central and local politicians and bureaucrats (for a critique of the Greater Manchester process as an interaction between central and local ‘coteries’ of politicians and officials, see Moran et al., 2018). Thus the new framework for territorial relationships in England has been cobbled together rather than planned within an overall policy framework and subject to a public consultation process, unlike the major, previous local government reorganisations of 1963 (Greater London) and 1974 (the rest of England). The mayoralties and combined authorities are based on individual ‘city deals’ struck with central government. These deals are ‘contract-style agreements between central government and local authorities to pursue agreed outcomes in discrete policy areas’ (Sandford, 2017: 72). These new English city mayors have limited powers, while the powers they do have are mostly coordinating powers taken from councils in their area rather than devolved from Westminster. Nevertheless, central government has cast the new mayors in a heroic role, calling on them to serve as advocates for their cities to attract private sector investment and lobby on economic development (only the Greater Manchester MCA has responsibilities involving planning health [a nationalised service] and social care [a local government responsibility]). Yet to make any sustained impact given quite limited resources and powers, the mayors depend on their ability to deploy influencing strategies to co-ordinate with other agencies in a crowded governance landscape (Roberts, 2020).
The rhetoric of ‘levelling-up’ these ‘left behind’ places and the new MCAs has formed a key focus of the Conservative party challenge to Labour in its traditional heartlands. In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives widened their commitment to devolution and levelling-up to include a UK-wide commitment to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between areas and social groups (even though such a policy strictly breaches the UK devolution settlements). In practice the main policy focus has been on the ‘left behind’ areas of Northern England and the Midlands. These traditional Labour strongholds had voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. In the 2019 election, the Johnson Conservative government, campaigning on the ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan, was able to gain 48 additional Westminster Parliamentary seats, mostly in these areas.
In government, the Johnson government announced new levelling-up funds to be available to all LAs within the UK. In practice, despite the levelling-up rhetoric, party politics reigned. For example, the £4.8 billion Levelling Up and £1 billion Towns Fund, announced in 2020, disproportionately favoured Conservative-held seats rather than areas of deprivation (Bounds & Smith, 2021). Ministers seem to be resorting to ‘pork barrel politics’, using funds for high-profile projects and other commitments, and relocating ‘high level’ civil service jobs for electoral advantage, notably moving part of the UK Treasury to the Tees Valley Combined Authority with its Conservative mayor. The analysis by the BBC (2023) supports this interpretation; it found that only 24% of Labour areas received levelling-up funding compared with 52% of Conservative areas.
In the 2023 Budget, the government announced significant financial flexibilities for the Greater Manchester and the West Midlands MCAs. Both MCAs, seen as among the most successful MACAs, were promised flexible multi-year funding allocations from central government to cover local transport, housing, skills, innovation, regeneration and net zero to be agreed in the next spending review (HM Treasury, 2023). These ‘trailblazer’ agreements ‘equip these authorities with deeper and additional policy levers to deliver on their priorities’ (HM Treasury, 2023, 71).
Ostensibly the English devolution agenda is intended to address the stark inequalities in regional economic performance resulting from the asymmetric shocks during the 1970s and 1980s which seriously depleted the economic bases of the former industrial areas of the Midlands and Northern England (McCann, 2022). Government ministers argue that devolution will enable these areas to tailor a policy response to address local factors and circumstances more effectively.
However, there are limits to the Conservative model of English devolution. Ministers still distrust local government, particularly in relation to managing public money. The MCAs do not have direct tax-raising or borrowing powers. The ten MCA mayors have together argued that taxes raised locally such as business rates and stamp duty (a central government tax on property purchases) should be hypothecated and channelled back into the MCAs (Williams, 2023). The mayors have formed their own ‘M10’ group, cutting across party differences to include both eight Labour and two Conservative mayors. The Northern Powerhouse Partnership (representing the northern cities) has also called for council tax, stamp duty and business rates to be replaced by a new land value tax, along with 1% of employer National Insurance (NI) contributions to be retained by local authorities to fund improvements in infrastructure. However, at the time of writing, these proposals, which would effectively mean the Manchester and West Midlands MCAs could bypass the Treasury for some spending, seem unlikely to be adopted (Williams, 2023).
These proposals come with their own new requirements in the form of a new ‘outcomes-based accountability framework’. Curiously and tellingly, this accountability framework is focussed upwards towards the Westminster Parliament rather than bottom-down towards the MCAs’ local areas. It will be a central government department, alongside committees of the MCA’s local Westminster MPs, which will scrutinise MCAs’ delivery and performance (HM Treasury, 2023), thus apparently reinforcing the role of the centre. Many critics argue that English devolution, unlike UK devolution, based on this contractual model is too limited and offers only a limited and fragmented discretion for the devolved bodies. The priorities in each city-region are still determined by central government, while Ministers and Whitehall officials implicitly assume that MCAs are agents of the centre despite the rhetoric of decentralisation (Sandford, 2023).
The ‘devolution offer’ has now been extended to the whole of England (HM Government, 2022). The white paper on levelling-up proposes that ‘by 2030, every part of England that wants one will have a devolution deal with powers at or approaching the highest level of devolution and a simplified, long-term funding settlement’ (HM Government, 2022, 234). Presently nine new areas have been invited to enter negotiations for combined authority deals.
Nevertheless, the government has done little to actually correct the inequalities underlying the geography of discontent. These funds fall a long way short of compensating councils for ten years of real terms cuts in local government expenditure and the amount of funding allocated to these areas does not match the levelling-up rhetoric. Indeed, recent years have seen the gap in people’s incomes between London and the UK regions actually worsen. In 2021 the average gross disposable income in London was 43% higher than the national average, the highest since records began in 1997 when it was 22% higher than the national average, rising to 37% in 2008 (Romei, 2023).
Successive governments, of both parties, have also failed to revalue the council tax since 1991, which is based on household property, so that LAs remain partly dependent on a seriously regressive tax (Johnson, 2023, 238–9), council tax, a tax on properties that in England remains based on property values from 1991. The substantial rise in house prices, particularly in London and the south-east, since then makes the charge highly regressive. The share of median annual gross pay spent on council tax varies from 2.2% to 10.9%, with those in the left behind north-east and south-west actually paying the most, relative to wages, while those in London pay the least despite their incomes and home values being much higher (Editorial Board, 2023; Adam et al., 2020).
Conclusion: Local Government’s Existential Crisis
The existential crisis facing local government in England over its future role and purpose comprises three, intersecting crises—governance, fiscal and policy role crises. Firstly, the present governance crisis is rooted in the constitutional and governance context of local government within the Westminster system. Constitutionally local government has no enforceable rights of representation or participation at the national parliamentary or government level. Rather the recurrent feature of English government is a strong executive with few significant veto players, especially not from subnational territorial levels. Thus the current Conservative levelling-up proposals exclude any formalised territorial representation in the Westminster Parliament or the central administration, reflecting the tradition of UK central government containment of territorial interests. The adversarial system of two-party government dominance, too, tends to marginalise territorial interests in central government policy debates. The more consensual and deliberative IGR systems in many other West European countries, with sub-state territorial interests strongly represented at the centre, tend to ensure that territorial interests are taken seriously at the central/federal level. The risk for England is that an overly centralised government, with no strong countervailing territorial (or indeed other) institutions to counter party interests, will not constrain ministerial ‘hyper-innovation’ (Moran, 2003) and make policy failures more likely.
Secondly, the present fiscal crisis is deeper than the last major crisis in the late 1980s. The present crisis is a pernicious combination of longstanding central austerity policies, inflationary pressures leading to spiralling service costs (especially in providing social care for an ageing population and children’s services) and continued reliance on a regressive, unreformed local property tax with strongly adverse effects on those living in the poorer parts of the country. Yet the Conservative government’s levelling-up agenda involves a political narrative which evades responsibility for an effective reform of this system, despite its regressive consequences, and imposes significantly greater cuts on Labour than on Conservative authorities. Meanwhile, the much-trumpeted levelling-up funds fall a long way short of the massive investment really required to level up deprived areas. Local councils are now left to manage continuing decline as best they can.
Thirdly, the governance and fiscal crises create a policy role crisis. LAs have lost entire services and significant parts of services through governance changes. They now lack significant policy capacity as they have had to direct resources towards propping up day-to-day, service delivery capacity especially in social care and children’s services as de facto agents of central government. Another consequence has been the passing of the once well-established, central-local policy structures, linking LAs with central departments, and their replacement with an unstable mix of uncoordinated and improvised central initiatives.
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Laffin, M., Diamond, P. (2024). Local Government in England: An Existential Crisis?. In: New Perspectives on Intergovernmental Relations. Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61790-4_2
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