Devolution has to be built on a “strong foundational footing” when it comes to finances for local government, local government minister Jim McMahon has said.
Addressing the LGA Annual Conference and Exhibition 2024, McMahon said central government knows it must “rally in response” to the large number of councils who are “on the edge” financially.
Setting out the government’s overarching vision for devolution in England, McMahon said that the costs councils are facing on services such as temporary accommodation and children’s and adult social care was to a large degree the result of a “system failure that we need to get ahead of”.
McMahon commented: “That requires us to have an invest to save model that talks about prevention first, talks about reforming public services, and critically, is built around place, people and communities, and that’s where local government have an important role to play in the future.”
However, he warned that repairing the financial situation would take time as the inheritance Labour had received was “not a robust one”.
In his address, McMahon said that devolution was not just about the delivery of government missions but about “putting local government and our communities on a stable foundation for the future”.
Those areas that have already implemented a mayoral combined authority model have allowed the government to “genuinely make the case that there is a different way to govern England”.
He said: “If we want to change the way that we govern England, we have got to create the institutions that allow England to govern for itself and, for us, those are mayoral combined authorities. That is how we take the power from the centre and make it more local and more meaningful for the communities who need it most.
“If we want to change that balance of power [from central to local], it does need us to be bold. It needs us to be absolutely resolute, and to say that we want to create this new infrastructure, this new governance, to govern England in a different way that sees a genuine power shift.”
McMahon added that in the medium term, devolution would not just be a structural way of shifting power, but would provide “reform at a local level where we begin to change public services so they’re not built around government departments or institutions or silos. They’re genuinely built around place and community – that’s where we need to get to. The prize in all that is that we spend public money better.”
The session on devolution also featured Mike Ross, leader of Hull City Council, and Tracy Brabin, mayor of West Yorkshire. Ross outlined his experience of the “incredibly bumpy journey” to getting devolution agreed, but said it was essential so as not to miss out on investment and funding. One of his messages to government was that there is “a need for local government to be well funded for devolution to work”.
Brabin outlined the role mayors play and expressed her opinion that “devolution is really working”. But she agreed that mayors “cannot do our job of growing city and regional economies without our partners in local government being properly funded, because you are our partners”.
A Q&A session revealed that not all audience members were as enthusiastic about devolution, with issues such as district councils being potentially frozen out, maintaining identity, and having to set aside party allegiances raised.
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