While most of the lobby were salivating over Andy Burnham’s brutal dispatching of Starmerites in the cabinet, civil servants in a quiet corner of Marsham Street were given the rare opportunity to dust off barely taken down name plates as Angela Rayner and Jim McMahon returned to Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government – just 46 weeks after Rayner had to leave under a cloud of unpaid stamp duty.
They return as the Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) process they started reaches fever pitch as Steve Reed’s last act in charge saw the publication of plans for 14 areas described by nearly every other party as gerrymandering in favour of Labour councils.
This begs the question, so what next? To answer that question, we need to understand the key players and their views at this crucial point in the entire agenda.
Rayner and McMahon
It’s no secret that McMahon in particular had no time for Reed – a point he made very clear when Reed tied himself in knots over the botched attempt to delay this May’s local elections. It was also McMahon who initially introduced the 500k criteria; though before county leaders get too excited, it was also McMahon who hinted this could be lower (350K) to ensure a “urban anchor” for each new council.
Reed’s departure from the original criteria set out by Raynor and McMahon is currently the bone of contention for many in the sector and the primary argument in most of the JR’s issued to date. The concern across the sector is that Reed, in pursuing a housing growth agenda (his argument for urban land grabs) has created a set of new councils that will be financially unviable from day one.
McMahon will have some sympathy for that argument, but whether it’s enough from him (and Rayner) to reverse the current trajectory is yet to be seen – but if the JRs (and it will probably only take one to derail the process) prove to be successful, they can at least point to Reed as the cause.
Andy Burnham
The first thing to say is that LGR is not devolution, and Andy is all about devolution. In the run up to his coronation, Burnham’s team greenlit the Reed announcement on LGR, but stopped a similar announcement of Spatial Development Strategy (SDS) footprints. The reason was simple, SDS is the cornerstone of the Mayoral Combined Authority agenda (MCA) and Burnham wants his new No.10 in the North department to have the final say.
Indeed, MHCLG has been stripped of any role in devolution – which sort of makes sense as they have been traditionally fairly bad at persuading the rest of government to play along.
In a pub in Harlow yesterday, the new Prime Minster was asked what he thought of the level of disquiet surrounding proposals for reorganisation in the area (especially given that Harlow joined the JR gang earlier in the week). His answer was to point out that he had inherited the agenda from the previous government, and that he would take a look at concerns he knew were being raised.
But for those who saw this as a message of hope that he was willing to overturn the entire process, he went on to say that he had experienced similar in Manchester, but that now those concerns had gone away.
The Councils themselves
Which leads us to our final set of key players, the council themselves. Reed’s recent announcement saw only one county survive intact (Gloucestershire), and in many cases the only view he really listened too was that of local labour party organisers (who are understandably delighted).
Now there is no doubt that at county level there is real concern that these proposals not only go against the guidance they worked too (and arguably fought 10 years to secure) but also create real risk of service failure due the unprecedented level of disaggregation of council services. Afterall, no one has ever cut up social service department 5 ways, and certainly not in 14 council areas all at the same time within an 18-month window!
So, there will be an inevitable second wave of JRs as county councils (most of whom are now Reform or Lib Dem) happily attack an agenda them don’t particularly have time for anyway.
But, while outwardly dismissive of Reed and his attempts to protect Labour enclaves, many leaders are looking at those new maps and privately eye up where they could potentially end up winning.
For, as Reed was looking to carve out pockets of Red, he inadvertently created Rural council areas where Reform in particular could do even better than before – and, in a number of county areas where they currently find themselves short of a majority, discover that Reed’s new boundaries remove large chunks of the opposition vote.
So, what does this all mean?
Burnham wants Mayors, and mayors we will get. I suspect that he will look to have mayoral elections in most areas by next May. His entire plan for this parliament is to break up the Whitehall monopoly on power that has frustrated him for so long – and he is in a hurry to do it!
For Reed, Mayors and LGR went hand in hand. Even Raynor and McMahon saw the need for both to happen in parallel. But that’s a very MHCLG view of the world. Now those agendas sit in very different places, indeed in very different parts of the UK.
There is a real probability that LGR is derailed by one of a dozen JRs that could eventually be in play. Any slippage in the LGR timescale and the LGR agenda becomes detached from the MCA agenda (which will be run by the PM himself) as that has no such legal obstacles to overcome.
At that point LGR becomes a potential headache with no discernible gain. Reed removed any hope of financial savings, and Mayors with SDS responsibilities will become the focus for delivering housing. Burnham doesn’t really have any interest in giving councils more power, for him its Mayors shaped in his own image that are the hope for local communities.
So, the entire agenda now depends on whether MHCLG have their ducks in a row, and whether they can withstand the JR tsunami. Past evidence from the delayed election fiasco would suggest not putting money on that – and indeed those councils seeking legal recourse often point to that capitulation as a sign of weakness.
If I was a betting man (though not sure betting and politics is a good idea!) I would think that civil servants are currently working on a plan b, where some councils get through in a phase 2a while the more messy ones (especially with boundary changes) are deferred to a phase 2b – and like nearly every LGR programme that came before we end up with a handful that go the distance, while the rest become an interesting footnote in the annuls of local government history.
Time will tell…