Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, January 03, 2011

Devolution in England

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were on the receiving end of devolution and have their own legislatures and limited powers. The coalition government is now intent on devolving powers (and deficit reduction plans) to local councils in England. It's that deficit reduction part that is causing concerns in local councils.

Careful what you wish for: The coalition is making local government more powerful, but also poorer and—probably—more unpopular

THE rhetoric of the announcements this week about the future of local government was uplifting. Eric Pickles, the Conservative communities and local government secretary, said on December 13th that reforms in a new bill marked “a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities”. But the reality of the funding settlement he announced the same day, specifying how much less councils will get in central money over the next two years, was a bleak reminder of the grip Whitehall retains over local authorities, by providing just over half their finance…

[T]he localism bill is a hotchpotch of reforms. One eye-catching proposal is for 12 big cities, including Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, to get elected mayors, joining London in having a powerful boss. Another is that councils will be given a new “general power of competence” to act as they think fit in the interest of their residents, rather than having to rely on powers specifically conferred from the centre. And, as already announced, councils will no longer have to comply with regional planning strategies, which previously set house-building targets…

There are uncertainties about how some of these plans will work in practice. What happens if, as seems likely, some or most neighbourhoods adopt a nimbyish approach to development? But the direction of travel is clear, and marks a reversal of the centralising trend under both Labour in the past 13 years and the previous Tory government…

The government’s critics say that what is really being devolved from the centre are painful spending cuts and some of the attendant unpopularity. Including money for policing, total grants to local authorities are to fall from £32.7 billion ($51 billion) this year to £29.4 billion in 2011-12. That is a cut in cash terms of 9.9%; it will be followed by one of 7.3% in 2012-13…

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Labels: devolution, economics, politics, UK