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A council, a regional mayor, and a neighbourhood can all have evidence for what they want to do – and still disagree about what the place needs.
How would a ‘rewired state’ handle that?
The Local Government Information Unit (LGIU)’s new report, ‘Rewiring the state: unlocking local government’s role’, says ‘Rewiring should encourage messiness’. Both councils and strategic authorities will (inevitably) do strategy and delivery. It also proposes codifying the powers and responsibilities of each tier.
Those address different questions. Who can make today’s decision? And how can the arrangement change when it no longer fits the work?
Consider a possible care arrangement: national entitlements, specialist provision shared across a region, and support worked out with someone in their own home. Different decisions, different scales. That still leaves questions about who controls the money, who carries the risk, and what happens when the organisations disagree.
Asking which tier ‘owns care’ bundles all those questions together.
This is the continuing problem of balancing autonomy and cohesion. How much can each part decide for itself? What must be agreed with others? What happens when one place’s decision creates costs for its neighbours?
LGIU uses the term ‘embedded autonomy’: local autonomy supported by continuing intergovernmental cooperation. That explicitly goes beyond a one-off allocation of functions. Cooperation, though, has to mean something when agreement runs out.
The report proposes a statutory ‘Right to Propose’. Councils could put forward alternatives to national or regional approaches, and MHCLG would have to respond. That establishes a route for questioning the arrangement, while leaving further questions about how proposals would be decided (and the relative power of MHCLG in central government):
What evidence would count? Who could challenge a refusal? Would an accepted proposal change the funding and rules as well as the responsibility? Could it be reconsidered as circumstances changed?
This is also where the report’s observation that ‘capability is relational’ gets concrete. Capability includes what people and institutions can actually get done together, rather than simply the skills held inside each organisation.
One way to examine the proposed settlement would be to follow a disagreement all the way through it. Start with a resident’s experience, follow the decisions, identify which rules can change, and see where the authority to change them sits.
Where would the disagreement be resolved – and could what was learned change the division of responsibilities itself?
How will a rewired state resolve disagreements?
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