DEVOLVING POWER TO LOCAL GOVERNMENT IS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY AND GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY

Ed Miliband made an important speech yesterday about devolution of power to local government. It was a bold speech and long overdue. Devolving power to local councils is something for which I have been campaigning for over 25 years.

The centralising tendency of both parties over the last 100 years got completely out of hand when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government came to power in 1979. Our period in office from 1997 to 2010 did little to reverse that.

It is therefore excellent news that Ed has set out Labour’s intentions should we win the election next year. I have just come back from Lyon, which I was visiting with the CLG Select Committee as part of our enquiry into fiscal devolution. I was incredibly impressed by what they have archived and the scale of their ambition.

France is itself going through a transition from what they consider to be an over centralised state to greater autonomy at a local level. However, under the pre-existing arrangements, French local authorities were able to raise a far bigger proportion of their budget without recourse to their government. It is clear that the French value their public services and that government trusts locally elected representatives to make decisions on behalf of their electorate without meddling.

This is something we need to learn in England and Ed’s speech sets out an alternative vision that will see Labour will introduce the biggest devolution of power to English cities in the last century. We need our cities and towns to be engines of growth, so that we can create well paid jobs and tackle the cost-of-living crisis. At least £20billion will be devolved from Whitehall over the Parliament.

It will mean stronger local democracy, more and better economic growth and jobs, and public services that better meet the needs of local people.

If we also restructure local government to remove the two tier structure, that still pertains in many counties, we could free up valuable resources. This would also have the additional benefit of creating a system of local government that it is more easily understood by the public.

Our Victorian forebears built our cities, including their banks, parks, libraries, factories, and town halls. They were the engines of our industrial revolution, sources of our prosperity, and monuments to patriotic pride.

When the CLG Select Committee reports on its enquiry into fiscal devolution, it will add another useful dimension to the debate about tackling our overly centralised state, which is no longer fit for purpose – if it ever was!