Congratulations on your appointment as the new minister for decentralisation. We have just been elected on a ticket of ‘power to the people’, so your job is one of the most important in the government.
First, there is confusion as to what decentralisation actually means. For some, it is just shorthand for more powers to Scotland and Wales, and possibly London too. For others it’s about strong town halls. For others it is about city-regions and a return to the ‘regional development agency’ model. For others, it is about putting communities in control, with what David Miliband once called ‘double devolution’, to councils, and then on to citizens.
The answer to this conundrum is simple: it is all of these things. Our organising principle is that power should be passed to the lowest possible level, so that the people most affected by decisions have the greatest say. But we need to recognise that some agencies of the state are best delivered nationally: tax collection, for example, or MI5. It is about what works.
You will need to recognise too that there are plenty of refusniks inside the cabinet. Not all your colleagues are signed up. As GDH Cole mentioned some years ago, the main divide in British socialism is not between reformers and revolutionaries, but between centralisers and federalists. As AH Halsey wrote ‘the movement which had invented the social forms of modern participatory democracy and practiced them in union branch and co-op meeting, thereby laying a Tocquevillian foundation for democracy was ironically fated to develop through its political party the threats of a bureaucratic state’.
There is real resistance inside the civil service too. The ‘man in Whitehall knows best’ attitude persists in some corridors of power.
Let us start at the bottom: devolved budgets to local boards to run parks, leisure centres and other local services. More powers for ward councillors to make grants to local groups. Somewhere in Whitehall exists the blueprints for large-scale asset transfer. This was mooted by the last Labour government and quietly shelved. Let’s dust it down. There are state assets we can pass to local groups to run, especially land owned by the Ministry of Defence or NHS. We can create wealth and income for local groups in perpetuity.
How about councils? The devolution of public health to local authorities has been an important step forward. Let’s pass more of the NHS budget to local councils. It should trigger a renaissance of the Finsbury health centre model of local provision. What other powers can we give them? I suggest a hitlist of business support, welfare, transport, and other services.
And double devolution? Our parent-led academies should be only the start. One guide might be the co-operative movement. We need a resurgence in co-operatives and mutuals. We need a new presumption that all government spending on everything from toilet paper to sandwiches, will go to a co-op, if suitable. We can create a huge market for co-ops using the spending power of the state.
A final word – the biggest resistance to decentralising power is that the view that people are not interested enough, or not wise enough, or not educated enough to exercise local power. All the evidence suggest the opposite: ‘ordinary’ people are capable of extraordinary things if given the platform. Yet we will need to address the skills gap. The lesson from the ‘big society’ is that it means nothing if people do not have the tools. So we need to revitalise citizenship training in schools.
You will recall the Crick Report stating ‘we aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence on public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting’.
That should be restated as our goal.
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Paul Richards is a writer and political consultant. He is author of the Memo on … column, part of the Campaign for a Labour Majority; read all his pieces here. He tweets @LabourPaul
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Photo: UK Parliament
Dead right apart from two things. We need an assert lock in the form of a promise to safeguard assets for future generations, to avoid selloffs (but perhaps have rules to allow like for like replacements). We also need schools to belong to the whole community not just a set of parents.
But where is there evidence of demand for decentralisation? In a decentralised country, such as the US, divergences in levels of public service are regarded as natural and inevitable. Here they’re the consequence of a ‘postcode lottery’, and a Very Bad Thing.
The chief motivation for grassroots activism is resisting change. Thus, though at a national level the need for new housing is rightly a major issue, locally nothing arouses more organised opposition. The platoons of the haves defending what they’ve got far outnumber and out-organise those of the have-nots. Since being on the side of the latter is one of Labour’s main reasons for existence, we must accept that promoting their interests requires a large dose of paternalism. I fear De Tocqueville got it right on decentralisation, describing it as something ‘the leaders of the people always promise and never give. To get it and keep it the people must rely on their own efforts and, if they have not the taste for it, there is no cure for the ill.’