George Osborne’s “devolution revolution” has become the latest Treasury policy to run into trouble in the face of Tory opposition, piling pressure on to the chancellor as the row over his Budget drags into a second week.
Launching the latest wave of devolution last week — which extended plans to counties and cities in the south of England — the chancellor said during his Budget speech that “the devolution revolution is taking hold”.
But just days later a Conservative-controlled council decided to reject the devolution deal that Mr Osborne claimed had been agreed.
Cambridgeshire County Council voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday not to accept the East Anglian plans proffered by the Treasury, making it the latest in a string of councils to knock back the chancellor.
Mr Osborne is understood to have postponed a planned visit to East Anglia to launch the devolution deal after the local doubts became clear. Cambridge’s city council had already demurred.
The chancellor is facing pressure from Tory MPs to revise his plans. They have urged him to send out a signal to local councils that he understands that the deal for Manchester — his flagship devolution project — does not suit all parts of the country.
Many councils and Westminster Tories are unhappy about the chancellor’s insistence that devolved areas must install elected mayors.
Another Tory-run county council, Hampshire, withdrew its support for a deal in the Solent area earlier this week, while Cumbria County Council turned down a devolution offer earlier this month.
Gateshead Council also rejected a devolution deal earlier this week, a decision which leaves a hole at the heart of the planned North-East Combined Authority and could see the wider area’s plans called off altogether.
That risk intensified on Wednesday when Durham council, whose leader Simon Henig is also chair of the Combined Authority, deferred a decision about whether it would participate in the deal.
The Sheffield city region is pressing ahead with plans for a mayor although three of the nine authorities declined to participate fully, meaning the mayor’s writ will not run there.
An aide to Mr Osborne said on Wednesday that it was up to local councils how they structured their devolution deals, but elected mayors “bring local accountability to a particular area, and is a successful model”.
“If they don’t want to go ahead with that structure, then they don’t have to,” she said.
Not all the devolution deals are in trouble: a deal with the West Midlands is expected to go ahead, while Manchester already has an interim mayor.
The councils still have time to revisit the offer from Westminster by renegotiating the deals’ terms. Steve Count, leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, said he would renegotiate and return to the council with “the best deal I can get”. The council has until the end of June to take up any further offer, he said.
One of the party’s most experienced figures, Lord Tebbit, said on Tuesday that “we do not need an elected mayor for East Anglia”. The plan would “only raise costs [and] introduce another layer of government”, he said.
Jonathan Carr-West, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, a think tank part-funded by local authorities, said that councils voting against the devolution deals they were meant to be part of “reveals a fragility in the process”.
The secrecy surrounding the deals and last-minute changes driven from central government “have left many councils feeling bounced into deals they are not convinced by”, he added.
Individual local authorities risked finding themselves isolated and financially exposed if they were left out of successful combined authorities, but if enough councils voted against deals “it risks derailing the whole devolution agenda which we desperately need to improve public services and grow local economies”, Mr Carr-West warned.”
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