“… The ad hoc, piecemeal and rapid process of decentralisation in England is generating a new institutional landscape.

Since 2010, institutions have been abolished as the regional tier was dismantled, new institutions have emerged, existing institutions reformed and new areas of public policy been brought together creating new arrangements involving Combined Authorities and LEPs with metro mayors to come as well as connections between new policy areas, for example health and social care (Figure 6). Echoing historical experience in England, this further episode of institutional churn, disruption and hiatus has reproduced many longstanding issues including loss of leadership, capacity and momentum as well as instability and uncertainty with negative impacts on growth and development.

The new institutional landscape is raising serious questions of accountability, transparency and scrutiny – the ‘achilles heel’ of decentralisation. Decisions are being made by a narrow of cadre of actors behind closed doors, involving a mix of elected politicians, appointed officials and external advisors.

Deals and deal-making are being conducted, negotiated and agreed in private by a small number of selected participants in closed and opaque circumstances and in a technocratic way. Decisions involving large sums of public money and long-term financial commitments are being taken without appropriate levels of accountability, transparency and scrutiny.

Although uneven in different places, many institutions and interests in the wider public, private and civic realms feel left out and marginalised. These include business and their representative associations (alongside the uneven involvement of LEPs), environmental organisations, further and higher education, trade unions, and the voluntary and community sector.

Equalities and representation concerns are evident in relation to gender and diversity. The wider public knows little about decentralisation of the governance system and is becoming increasingly disengaged and lacking faith in the ability of politics, public policy and institutions to make their lives better. Those better informed and engaged worry that power and control has simply shifted a little from elites in central national government to those at the local level.

Concerns that the decentralisation efforts in England failed in the early 2000s due to the limited nature of decentralisation on offer and lack of public engagement and support are mixed with fears that the current process risks repeating this mistake.

Accountabilities are lacking, weak and under-developed. Wider discussion, scrutiny and challenge by the public and/or relevant institutions have been largely absent. Anxieties are being articulated that the exclusive, opaque and technocratic way decentralisation is being conducted is reinforcing such concerns.

More inclusive, transparent and accountable ways of doing decentralisation need to be found, developed and adapted to local circumstances. Means need to be explored to allow and enable a wider set of voices to be heard and more interests and opinions considered in order to make decentralisation accountable and transparent and more sustainable.

International evidence illustrates that inclusive deliberation and dialogue supports better and more robust decision-making for public policy and more effective and lasting outcomes27. Decentralisation must not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to better economic, social and environmental outcomes for people and places across England and the UK. …”

“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.