13 February 2024

Thoughts on Local Devolution

Anything that drags power out of London to Yorkshire should be welcomed and anyone who knows me, knows that my political activism over the past twenty or so years has very much been centred on just this: that we in Yorkshire should have the powers to determine our own future. I was the Chair of the cross-party campaign group Yes4Yorkshire during the Blair years as we awaited a referendum (which in the end never came) on establishing a regional assembly. I helped to set up the Yorkshire Devolution Movement and later the Yorkshire Party as ways of forcing a debate on the issue. It’s fair to say that devolution runs deep through my political veins. Therefore, I was open to the idea that, finally, East Riding and Hull councils had got their act together so that the subregion too might share in some of this ‘devolution’ which other parts of Yorkshire had acquired over recent years. Unfortunately, the more closely I look at the details of the proposed deal as it goes out to wider consultation, I just cannot get too enthusiastic. Indeed, I am questioning the whole point of this process.

Firstly, the idea this is in anyway devolution is false. The new combined authority will have very limited powers, mainly bus management, skills training and housing supply. There are a lot of warms words throughout, with phrases such as ‘working with Government’, ‘working closely’, ‘partnership’ and so on, suggesting that the Government does not fully trust the local authorities to do things on their own. In other words, Whitehall cannot stop micromanaging.

Secondly, there is the financial settlement itself. The proposed deal includes a £400m investment in funding over 30 years. This works out at £13m a year or the equivalent of 0.5% of the two councils’ current budgets. This is a small sum, in fact, one of the lowest of any combined authority in the country. The question has to be asked, with such small amounts of money, wouldn’t such funding best be funnelled through the existing structures of the local authorities? All local authorities have felt the financial squeeze over the years as the Yorkshire Post has recently reported. Hull Council alone has had to cut some £150m from its budget over the past few years, shedding 1,500 jobs in the process.

Equally, other aspects of the deal are very geographically specific. For example, there is money for a coastal regeneration programme in the East Riding and £5m for further expansion of the Alexandra Dock in Hull. Again, surely these are best done through the local councils rather than inventing new bureaucracies.

And there is to be a new bureaucracy. There will be an elected Mayor and, in turn, a Mayor’s ‘office’, to be funded by an additional precept on Council Tax payers. Several Mayors do raise a precept - London, Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridgeshire amongst others - so this deal doesn’t come without a price. I appreciate that ‘democracy’ costs but again I would prefer to see additional funding go straight to the local councils rather than the bureaucracy of a combined authority and a mayor.

Sadly, one bureaucracy we cannot lose is that of the Police and Crime Commissioner role. In other areas of Yorkshire, the unloved PCCs have been wound up (or are about to be) and their powers passed to the new Deputy Mayors. This won’t be happening in East Yorkshire because the sub-region’s police authority is not contiguous with the proposed Combined Authority area as it crosses the Humber Bridge into northern Lincolnshire. So the PCC for Humberside will remain.

For those worried about climate change, there are a lot of warm words in the document about sustainability and net zero but in the section on ‘environment and climate change’, it is interesting to read that ‘DEFRA were unable to provide any additional funding’. It suggests that the environment and climate change won’t be a priority here. In fact, the winners from this proposal are not those concerned about the climate but the corporate world. Corporations not only get a newly formed Humber Business Advisory Board, they will also have a seat on the new combined authority. No other groups, civic or otherwise, get such preferential treatment.

Overall, this is a very modest form of what, is in effect, commercial decentralisation – not devolution - and it would not be mine (and indeed many others) preferred option when it comes to transferring greater powers out of London to Yorkshire. I would prefer to see a Yorkshire-wide settlement and all the heft, nationally and internationally, that a strategic body representing five million people would bring with it. I worry that, on its own, a new bureaucracy called East Yorkshire is just too small and too poorly financed to compete with other combined authorities across the country. The two local councils, in this case, would be best left to get on with the job on their own rather than pursue the white elephant on offer.

Stewart Arnold has campaigned for greater devolution to Yorkshire for close to 20 years.