This week saw the Chancellor spread his promise of city devolution to Birmingham, with the promise of further powers for the Midlands if they agree to an elected mayor. If this trend continues, big changes will be coming to the way we are governed and how the public affairs industry engages with politicians.
In opposition, politicians diagnose widespread political apathy as a problem of geography. Far removed officials in Whitehall are making decisions about your life, with limited understanding of the practical consequences. To remedy this, they make bold pledges to bring these decisions closer to you, to shift power from ‘Whitehall to the Town Hall’.
Invariably, these pledges only survive contact with office in limited form. For all its faults, a centralised model offers some tempting advantages for policy makers: consistency, some guarantee of minimum standards and the ability to affect change around the system at relative haste. Rather than ministerial vanity, it is these characteristics that gave the centralised model its durability.
This cycle finally seems to be breaking down. Advised by former Policy Exchange Director Neil O’Brien, the Chancellor has offered regional authorities around England the opportunity to take whole swathes of powers from central government. The transfer of responsibility for transport, infrastructure, skills, even health and social care have already been agreed with Manchester council. This week’s announcement that the same model is to be offered to the Midlands brings the vision into sharper focus. Beyond a 'Northern Powerhouse', this is the rise of the city state.
This big new transfer of power comes with a condition – democratically elected mayors. The centralised model, for all the advantages noted above, finds a key ally in the gap between responsibility and accountability. Look at the NHS, where the Lansley vision of a Department of Health detached from the day to day performance of the NHS quickly ran up against shrieking headlines about A&E performance and waiting times. It is a brave Health Secretary that points to the 'decentralised commissioning model’ in response.
So to devolve power, you need to devolve the flak, and an elected mayor is the chosen vehicle. London provides an interesting case study: when the transport unions call a tube strike, people look to City Hall for a response. When rioters tore through the streets of London in 2011, Boris Johnson was the politician criticised for not returning from his holiday. When there aren't enough affordable homes being built in London, City Hall are held accountable. In all their areas of responsibility, political accountability is much more readily directed to the Mayor. If this model can be replicated across Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds, the gap between administrative responsibility and political accountability begins to close.
It is worth pondering where this trajectory takes us. ‘Radical’ is an epithet frequently attached to a policy, but rarely substantiated. Yet if this vision takes hold, the contours of a truly radical shift in Britain’s model of government begin to emerge. If powers over healthcare, transport, infrastructure, skills, even tax raising powers, are devolved to these new bodies, those powers will increasingly get used. And crucially, used in different ways. You could see completely different models of healthcare provision in different regions - a real ‘postcode lottery’. There could be different rates of Air-Passenger Duty in different airports, different tax and spending models in Manchester and London, different models of welfare provision between Hull and Sheffield.
And it won’t stop there. Devolved administrations lean towards self-perpetuation; once the genie is out of the bottle, calls for further devolution don’t die away. They lurk in the background, until alighted upon by a politician in search of a prospectus. For a case in point, look at the London Mayoral elections in 2016, where almost all the declared candidates are running on a manifesto of more tax-raising powers for City Hall.
Some of these regions will be successful, some will fail. Manchester was widely seen as be a safe bet to pioneer this model; ably led by Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. Whether other regions can demonstrate the same competence, or the same level of political harmony, will be the test of the Chancellor’s plans.
If this has implications for our model of governance, it must have implications for how public affairs practitioners operate. Increasingly, public affairs consultants will be engaging with new bodies, new administrations and new politicians. Arguments will be local, rather than national. Party allegiance will become less relevant and a whole new set of players will enter the debate.
Beyond that, it has bigger implications for the traditional idea of the state. Universality is the cornerstone of the modern welfare system, with a strong state at the centre to redistribute wealth across regions to pay for it. But how is wealth redistributed within a series of smaller pies? How does a Government shape macro-economic policy, fiscal policy and industrial policy in a system where it has given away control of the levers? If times get tough, how does the state administer a Keynesian stimulus across such varied economic zones?
Mao Tse-tung was famously misquoted for ‘letting a thousand flowers bloom’; he actually only wanted a hundred. George Osborne, it is thought, will settle for 10. But even if those 10 different models of city administration bloom, it will raise big questions about the way we are governed.