Join the full conversation on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/p/egSeRCHH
My pessimistic prediction for English local government: abolish two tiers, then recreate them at a larger scale, with less local autonomy. Tell me I’m wrong?
I don’t expect care to stay with unitary councils. I expect a national care service, increasingly joined to health, with control devolved selectively to mayoral strategic authorities that climb the ladder of Whitehall alignment and compliance. Those that don’t qualify remain more directly controlled. And more and more direct funding and services go to the recognisable, familiar Mayoral level.
Underneath: unitary councils reduced to bins, potholes, and planning applications (to be overruled from above). The strategic tier hogtied to Whitehall; the local tier barely governing.
That’s my forecast, not the announced settlement. But the machinery exists: graduated powers and centrally defined eligibility tests. Integrated settlements bring freedoms within outcomes agreed with Whitehall, with intervention powers retained.
Austerity, leading to funding that failed to match need, has weakened councils. Council tax remains anchored to 1991 valuations. Financial distress brings them back to Whitehall for exceptional permissions and support that comes with conditions.
So losing care could feel like rescue. Financial exhaustion could make councils willing participants in their own hollowing-out.
I fear the ladder would reward leaders who reassure Whitehall, then require them to secure the same compliance below. Local disagreement becomes a threat to the next tranche of powers. Evidence that national policy is wrong gets translated into a local delivery problem. The centre’s own competence is conveniently outside the assessment.
What is happening here is that we are abdicating the work of dynamically balancing autonomy and cohesion. Every scale needs room to respond to its circumstances, obligations to others, and ways to renegotiate both. Allocating strategy upstairs and implementation downstairs evades that work – but suits the style of central government.
Nor does compliance with Whitehall’s separate departments make their demands coherent in a place.
The better possibility needs national guarantees, redistribution, reformed local taxation, and protected local powers. Poorer places need the means to govern too.
It also needs permanent arrangements through which neighbourhoods, councils, regions, and the state negotiate responsibilities and resources as circumstances change. Local experience must be able to change national policy. Councils must practise the autonomy they demand when dealing with their own neighbourhoods.
A national care service could support this. National entitlement needn’t mean centrally prescribed ways of living and being supported.
That settlement would have to survive the challening case: a place meeting its obligations, making a choice Whitehall dislikes, and keeping the means to carry it out.
