“There is no more enthusiastic proponent of regional devolution than myself. I have supported the idea of moving powers from Whitehall to East Anglia all my adult life. When on Budget day the Chancellor announced a draft deal for East Anglia I nailed my colours to the mast in the most literal way, flying the flag of East Anglia from Norfolk County Hall. However, remarkably, the institutional arrogance of central government seems set to give us a deal that cannot be sold locally. As it stands not one of the three counties that make up the ‘Eastern Powerhouse’ look likely to be able to sell the current deal to members or residents…

The current ‘devolution deal’ was the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the Scottish referendum result and bears no resemblance to any other form of devolution in the UK, other than the insistence on the office of a London-style mayor for rural England…

The office of elected mayor is fine for London but universally opposed in shire county England. Senior government ministers have said time and time again that in the past devolution has failed because it was top-down. They had learned, they said. This would be bottom-up. We could design our own deal. We would be in the driving seat, they said. When we urged them to consider any alternative to an elected mayor (because we couldn’t sell it to our citizens) they said it was non-negotiable. ‘No mayor no deal’ was the answer. They were not even prepared to consider changing the one word mayor for another title.”

First it was Prescott, now it’s Osborne. You can have any colour of devolution you want as long as it’s black. So black you can’t see what’s going on. The mayoral model is non-negotiable because it’s part of a London-party consensus that values opaqueness above all. The democratic model, taking decisions openly, in full view of the press and public, and transparently, subject to the forensic examination of political debate in council chamber or legislative assembly, is judged not fit for purpose. End all the politics, we’re told. Actions, not words. But efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things, and without continual accountability it’s very easy both to do things wrong and to do the wrong things.

Next month, we’re told, we need to reject the unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy in favour of, well, what? How is accountability unfolding here? We need to put our own, British values first, apparently. Values like privatising our schools and our NHS, transforming them into profit centres far beyond any hope of democratic redress.

We’ve been told many times that the dissolution of English political unity would be too high a price to pay for the benefits regionalism brings, even if the regions reflect deep-rooted identities like Wessex and East Anglia. Yet the displacement of our historic shires by ‘Greater Lincolnshire’, ‘North Midlands’, ‘Tees Valley’ and other mayored innovations isn’t viewed as a problem. (Nor is it viewed as part of the ‘euro-plot’, as would any attempt to give England the regional governments now standard across all large west European countries.) As Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, also writing in the Municipal Journal, noted, “The new rash of elected mayors for improbable geographies face some real challenges in getting noticed in any way at all.” That’s just it though. They’re not there to be noticed. A revolution in how England is governed is now underway as secret deals are lined up for sign-off. Personality mayors and commissioners for made-up areas will preside as local services are handed wholesale to global financial interests.

Do the public care? According to Ben Page’s data they do. Around half (49%) support the principle of decentralising local decision-making powers, with only 17% opposed. There are two main worries that are shared by 58% of those who don’t support devolution.

One is the spectre of ‘postcode lottery’ – the fear that services would start to vary between areas to an unacceptable degree (though it’s surprisingly acceptable for the Irish or the French to have different standards). Keeping the number of English regions well below double figures is one way to minimise this fear: the present hotch-potch of ‘improbable geographies’ is going to have to be sorted out sooner or later and the sooner the better. Another way is to make devolution real, so that regional politicians cannot blame Whitehall if they fail to match the standards of the best.

The second worry is that politicians in the provinces aren’t up to the job and so can’t be trusted with real power. That’s hardly surprising: real talent isn’t going to be attracted to run an ever-shrinking range of services subject to ever more intrusive interference from ministers and their civil servants anxious about poor performance. Breaking that vicious circle is easy. Tolerate responsibility through the ballot box, open up the opportunities and the talent will come. Or, to be more accurate, it will stay exactly where it is and not be lured to London.

Sue Jeffrey, chair of the new Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA), said she “absolutely agreed” with a National Audit Office (NAO) report’s finding that English regional devolution needed to be more transparent.

“We’ve all said that the deal-making process is very ad-hoc and all this behind-closed-doors, secret stuff isn’t very helpful at all,” the Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council leader said.

But she insisted the TVCA would deliver democratic accountability.

Ten English devolution deals have been agreed in the past 18 months, covering 16.1 million people across Greater Manchester, Cornwall, Sheffield City Region, the North-East, Tees Valley, Liverpool City Region, the West Midlands, East Anglia, Greater Lincolnshire and the West of England, and a further 24 proposals are being discussed.

The Tees Valley’s five councils, Darlington, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Hartlepool, and the TVCA which brings them all together, have backed a package handing powers over transport, economic development and skills and planning to a new mayor to be elected in May 2017.

Negotiations with Whitehall are continuing, ahead of public consultation later this year.

But there has been criticism of the lack of public involvement to date and in the North-East the process has been riven with problems. Last month, Gateshead Council rejected the offer outright, while the other six members of the North-East Combined Authority (NECA) voted to postpone a final decision.

Last week, six County Durham Labour MPs wrote to every Labour member of Durham County Council urging them to reject or delay the deal until further details were confirmed.

A NECA spokeswoman said discussions with Government were ongoing and good progress had been made. An update is expected when the NECA meets on Friday, May 13.

The NAO said devolution deals offered opportunities to stimulate economic growth and reform public services but were untested and Government could do more to “provide confidence that these deals will achieve the benefits intended”.

A Government spokesman said the report recognised the “huge progress made in our revolutionary devolution agenda”, but added: “We agree there is much more to do and we will continue to talk to areas so everywhere that wants to take part in the process can do so.”

“Is the government’s “devolution revolution” stalling? The National Audit Office’s new report on English cities’ devolution deals, published last week, suggests it could be. The report makes clear what council leaders have been telling the government for months: many councils don’t know what powers are on offer to them, when they may get them, or how they will pay for them.

All these concerns should have been addressed much earlier in the process. Last year, the Tories blocked Labour amendments to the cities and local government devolution bill that would have made devolution work much better.

We called on the government to let areas choose whether they wanted a mayor or not, to publish a full list of services available for devolution, and to devolve resources alongside powers, so local areas aren’t just left to take the blame for government-imposed cuts. We also called for more devolution, beyond town halls to communities, giving people more control over the services they use.

Despite demands for more transparency, government ministers have become ever more secretive. In the past month alone, the communities secretary Greg Clark has refused two parliamentary questions and a Freedom of Information request to publish a list of which councils he’s talking to about devolution.

Transparency matters because you can’t devolve powers to communities if they don’t know anything about it. Involving communities will lead to better devolution deals because local people understand their own communities better than Whitehall does.

Polling by Ipsos Mori demonstrates a close link between awareness of devolution and positive attitudes towards it. Being open about devolution builds support, while doing deals in secret breeds opposition. That’s why the most successful transformations in public services are coming from local, not central, government. Plymouth council, for example, has set up more than 30 energy co-ops working with their community; Rochdale has recently mutualised its housing stock to give tenants a real stake in ownership, and Oldham council has improved care for older people and better conditions for care staff in its ethical care company.

Rochdale joins staff and tenants together as biggest mutual in housing
As leader of Lambeth council until 2012 I learned that giving communities a bigger voice leads to better public services. A tenant management board gave residents the power to lead the transformation of Blenheim Gardens housing estate in Brixton, improving repairs and rent collection, and cutting crime. A community-led youth trust is creating new opportunities for young people and tackling gang crime in some of the south London borough’s most disadvantaged communities.

This is real devolution – people getting the chance to influence decisions that affect them, and making the professionals who run those services listen more carefully to the people they serve.

The NAO raises concerns that devolution has been so tightly controlled by the chancellor, George Osborne, excluding even other government ministers, that it could go into reverse if there is a change of chancellor. How ironic that an agenda based on letting go is being so tightly gripped by a single over-controlling individual. And there is no consistency to the government’s approach. At the same time as the devolution bill was going through parliament last year, the government was pushing through a housing bill that centralised more than 30 powers in Whitehall.

Labour has argued for more ambitious devolution that shapes a new relationship between citizens and the state and redefines the relationship between local and national government.

We believe in devolution by default. That means a new approach that assumes powers will be devolved unless there is a compelling reason not to. We want to see resources devolved alongside powers, with fiscal devolution that ensures funding follows need. And we want devolution to mean something more than a transfer of power from one set of politicians to another – communities need a new right to request control.

Maybe Jenkin and fellow MPs will remedy this when they sit down to deliberate, but already they seem to have fallen prey to Whitehall’s chronic disease – myopic departmentalism. That’s odd because under Jenkin, the former public administration select committee singled out lack of strategic co-ordination as one of the centre’s besetting faults.

In 2016, to see the size and capacity of the civil service you have to look at what is happening to the rest of the public sector, including the devolved administrations. If English devolution goes further, Whitehall’s numbers, function (and culture) will be affected – yet the terms of reference for the Jenkin committee inquiry don’t mention the D-word.

Of course devolution isn’t a given. Localists have taken umbrage at the sceptical tone adopted in the National Audit Office’s (NAO) progress report on the devolution deals, especially its observation that there isn’t a great deal of rhyme or reason to some of the arrangements. The money being passed out to the (unaccountable) local enterprise partnerships far exceeds the supplementary investment grants going to the consortia of councils. Even in Greater Manchester, the most advanced and best favoured deal, the NAO can’t fathom what influence, if any, the new combined authority and mayor are going to have on NHS budgets. As for schools, the NAO notes dryly that proposals from councils to retain their role “have not been accepted by central government”.

Without clarity and local scrutiny we risk the prize of devolution
Here’s a paradox of devolution and one that really does get the localists foaming: handing over power (and even just promising to hand over power) requires the centre to have more bodies. The cities and local growth unit, run jointly by the communities and business departments, has 155 civil servants plus another seven in the Treasury dealing with devolution. All those departments are losing numbers, raising concerns about capacity to negotiate and implement deals.

There’s also accountability. When Lord Bob Kerslake was permanent secretary for the department of communities and local government, he asked some wide-ranging questions about who was in charge, as public services are contracted out and fragmented. The NAO comptroller and auditor general, Amyas Morse, recently refused to sign off the accounts of the Department for Education due to his opinion that “the level of error and uncertainty in the statements to be both material and pervasive”, which bears out Kerslake’s concern: Morse says he simply does not know whether academy schools are spending public money well enough.

The newly appointed permanent secretary for the Department of Education, Jonathan Slater, will have his work cut out. It’s not clear whether his previous experience as a senior officer in Islington council will be a help or hindrance. But his boss, education secretary Nicky Morgan, is adamant that forcing all schools to become academies will cut central interference – which ought to mean Slater will need even fewer civil servants.

The NAO poses a big question for Jenkin: what effect will devolution have on Whitehall’s departmental structure?

Another big question is what happens to the wider field of public management? If city regions and combined authorities are now doing things formerly dealt with in Whitehall, will their managers need different skills; will they be a different breed? To find out about the future of the civil service, the MPs will have to look outside Whitehall.”