Deal or no deal: English Devolution, a top-down approach

Abstract

A new legislative framework for devolution has been introduced into England marking a potentially significant step towards addressing the unfinished business of Labour's devolution settlement. What promised to be a bespoke and bottom-up commitment to devolution for English local government has manifested into a top-down, prescriptive and inconsistent process of agreeing the decentralisation of functions and finances to groups of principal local authorities. The paper reports on the progress of the new wave of devolution in England to date, through a review of agreed devolution deals and assesses the extent to which the current 'devolution revolution' represents the beginning of a shift away from a centralised system built from the bottom up, or looks set to result in another typically top-down reform to local government. The paper presents the initial findings of early research, which will be used to develop key research questions for a further long-term research project.

The sinking of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc: strategic planning in England at a nadir?

“…Further progress with local government reorganisation had been expected in a 'Devolution and Recovery' white paper in 2020, though this generated a good degree of opposition amongst local authorities, resulting in a long delay of the paper which was then superseded by the LURB. There are also signs of tension around proposed 'County-Deals' and deal-based policy more generally has received critical academic attention, with authors noting the ongoing reality of central government influence and direction (O'Brien and Pike, 2018;Wall and Viela, 2016;Sandford et al, 2017), as well as the overall constraints imposed by austerity (Shaw and Tewdwr-Jones, 2017;Beel, Jones and Rees-Jones, 2018). Additionally, strategic planning has been impacted by governmental and policy issues including siloed and inflexible approaches to devolution amongst government departments and agencies (HC CLG Committee, 2021: para 27), uncertainties around the status and future of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the vague specification of the levelling-up agenda, and a predominant focus on housing numbers over wider issues of infrastructure and place-making (CCN/CRA, 2021: 37).…”