By Dr Phil Catney, senior lecturer in politics at Keele University. This article first appeared as a Personally Speaking column in the Stoke Sentinel in December 2024.

Not many homes in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire will have been talking about local government over Christmas dinner. Still, the government’s recently published White Paper on English Devolution signals the biggest shake-up of local government since 1974.

Decentralising has been very much in vogue in the language of British governments for most of my adult life. But the gap between rhetoric and reality has often been jarring. For all the talk of decentralisation or localism, successive central governments have determined the shape of our local councils, pushed models of how they are internally governed, specified how they should spend money and tightly constrained their tax-raising powers. This has left the local level of government at a point of crisis. Talk of devolution hence provokes understandable scepticism.

While we may not have experienced much of this in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, devolution beyond London is nearly a decade old. Mayors to our north and south have done well out of the devolution process for their areas and the White Paper advances further their powers. The White Paper is clear that those areas not currently covered by a devolution deal will need to come up with one if we are to receive the kinds of investment other areas are benefiting from. This might not be in the form of a directly elected mayor, but there will be a need to enhance ‘collaborative working’ through combined (or 'Strategic Authorities') forms. This could be on top of our existing structures of local government and would need to cover a significant population size (around 500,000 people – roughly the population size of North Staffordshire).

The White Paper clearly favours mayors, giving them significantly more powers than other vehicles for devolution – strategic authorities would be the lowest minimum the government expects. The issue for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire is how far we are willing to engage in the kinds of collaborative work that are expected to achieve the best deal from central government.  
The understandable criticism of this agenda is one centred on questions of local democracy. Despite acknowledging that England is one of the most centralised systems of government in Western Europe, the White Paper frames the issue not as an issue related to democracy - a phrase used only five times in a document running to 118 pages - but in terms of economic growth (mentioned 207 times).

While igniting growth machines in our towns and cities is important given the stark differences in economic performance between different parts of England, the White Paper does not go very far in addressing concerns about protecting local democracy. Yes, local government in England is a fragmented model that falls short in both public esteem and the much sought-after 'economies of scale' that the government sees in larger units. While the White Paper does not compel mergers but merely 'invites' local areas to bring forward their own proposals for change, the pressure to bring forward change will be hard to resist given the financial stress on local areas. Seeking greater investment in our public transport infrastructure, among other things, will probably prove too tempting to ignore.

The push to remove two-tier councils in favour of more unitary authorities based on the county level may make the centralisation worse if this new tier of government is not properly empowered. This would require that freedom also entails genuine local choice and finance to match. The White Paper is lacking in identifying a clear and fair system for financing this devolution process. Without a clear sense of how investment will be made, the goal of reducing economic disparities in England will prove hard to achieve. Reckoning with our system of local government and how it is to be funded is due. The Ghost of Christmas Past continues to haunt the Ghost of Christmases Present and Future.