Ant Breach

"Greater Manchester has become more functional as the country has become more dysfunctional... Manchesterism is the polar opposite of Westminsterism." - @mayorofgm.bsky.social at today's @centreforcities.bsky.social event

Packed audience for our @centreforcities.bsky.social event with Andy Burnham:

Right, but the decisions shouldn't be made by councillors in Stortford. They should be made by professional planners who are thinking about the whole of the local economy which stretches far beyond Stortford, in line with a plan agreed by the whole local economy's locally elected representatives.

Yes agree - in practice ceding 'Transtamaria' from Cornwall to a Plymouth unitary probably too spicy for any LGR process even though it does make economic sense

Strongly agree on Warwickshire/Coventry and this was singled out by Lord R-M as a major issue in 1972. Less sure about Devon - issue is more that Exeter Plymouth and deep rural areas are all far from each other but rather small

Ant is right about the Cornwall solution here.
Annoyingly the reason the Cornwall solution exists is because of the mad idea that holds in the UK that devolving power is validated by cultural/national difference rather than the institutional base that developed to recognise that difference.

💯. It's why we a "One Yorkshire" devolution deal with loose cultural rationale almost trumped the economic logic of big city devolution

We are definitely more of a fan of metro mayors than major generals

Really good set of proposals. I know I bang on about this, but one reason why I think the 'we became overly centralised...cos of London!' narrative is actively harmful is that it leads to, well, the mess that is the government's local government reform, because they didn't think enough about it.

Rayner and McMahon came out so half-baked on LGR. Had all the right language about functional economic areas in there but then … totally ignored that with monsterous quasi-regional Strategic Authorities to meet 1.5m population. Let counties be counties, but most importantly let cities be cities.

Well worth a read

Yes but that's good as shires and big cities are very different.

Devolution Solution - Centre for Cities The devolution solution will fix English local government and improve economic growth. Read our proposed fiscally-neutral reforms.

I strongly agree - our geography proposals are designed to absorb more fiscal devolution. Increasingly we are seeing Gov recognise that fiscal centralisation is a serious structural problem www.centreforcities.org/publication/...

It's confusing as the process of getting a mayor/devolution creates a new upper tier on top of the newly reorganised councils, which we would argue isn't necessary outside the big cities. We would argue against Brown and for the county council to become the only council in Oxon, with new devo powers

Local gov reorganisation is the process of turning two-tier (district + county) areas into single-tier areas. This makes sense as it means planning for houses can be done in same office as transport planning across area of local labour markets, among other benefits.

I want LIT too badly but I think reformed maps broadly along econ geog lines are an essential step to manage the politics of it

Thanks. It's really quite remarkable how over the years we've managed to centralise almost everything, except some of the most important things that can only be done by central government.

A single Oxfordshire unitary would be a close alignment with the High Skill Travel to Work Area. We would recommend detaching both Oxon and Bucks from the Thames Valley proposal, putting Swindon back in with Wilts, and unifying Berkshire

Ultimately it's not fair to ask councillors to design the system - their responsibilities are local and partisan and this is right and proper. It's national government's responsibility to look after the system and the map because nobody else can.

My understanding is no - Isles of Scilly has a long tradition of being treated as sui generis and I've not seen any indication it would be merged into the Cornwall unitary. In practice I would expect IoS's status to be maintained whatever path is chosen (and I would be sad if it wasn't!)

LGR is really important, but it has been blown off course by politics and muddled thinking from commentators and earlier decision-makers

The Government can still make a positive impact for growth and public services by showing leadership on this key reform agenda

#3 Leave stragglers behind

The politics of LGR are complex and we risk spending lots of bandwidth on places to get very little benefit or even just bad geographies

It's fine if we don't "fill in the map" - the important thing is we make steady progress towards a rational system

#2 Adopt the Cornwall solution

Metro mayors make sense for the big cities, but not so much for elsewhere. A big risk from this is we end up bolting remote rural areas onto cities just to "full in the map"

Giving the shires Cornwall-style devolution would avoid this very neatly

#1 A big problem with local government reform is councillors are currently marking their own homework. We risk gerrymandering and an inconsistent map

MHCLG should create their own map to guide decision-making. High Skill TTWAs would be a solid pro-growth framework

My blog today on three steps the Government should take to put the local gov reform agenda back on track:

#1 Create their own map

#2 Adopt the "Cornwall solution" in the shires

#3 Leave straggler local authorities with chaotic local politics behind

Agree people haven't really thought about it - to me this implies policy should work backwards from what makes fiscal sense and deters most politically contentious flows to something politically defensible rather than using polling to design policy

Yeah I can see the argument for reducing very longest timelines

But principle of accelerated timelines for very high fiscal contributing applicants/dependents and much longer timelines for others (especially most politically contentious/expensive) is intuitive to me

I don't get this argument - does this imply that it would be better to have a very high settlement timeline for all applicants (eg 10 years) than to have an earned component where high fiscally contributing migrants have shorter timelines?

Really looking forward to this in-person event in London on Wednesday - should be a great conversation!