Weighted votes and weak mayors? The DPP consultations
Policy Director
This might have slipped under your radar — and who could blame you if it had — but there’s been some developments in the “devolution revolution” just lately. Central Government announced the members of its initial Devolution Priority Programme (DPP) a few weeks ago and is publishing consultations around the changes being proposed in each place. Take a look at these, and you will find some of the tensions which have made devolution so hard to roll out in the past.
Cumbria’s plans are already fascinating. The whole area was reorganised a few years ago, going from a single county with six district councils to two separate unitary authorities. Now the county is being glued back together again to form a Strategic Authority (SA) — one with only two member councils to attend the board meetings, alongside a new Mayor of Cumbria.
To make the decision-making process more meaningful, each of those two councils will be able to appoint two representatives to the SA. Presumably we can expect these representatives to vote similarly, so this measure still leaves the possibility of direct deadlock between the constituent authorities, with the new Mayor given an effective casting vote. On the other hand, it seems strange that the Mayor with a personal mandate will have half the influence over board decisions when compared to constituent authorities.
It is difficult not to conclude that this is simply the wrong scale for a regional tier in the Northernmost parts of England. This Strategic Authority will be the old County, plus a Mayor, governing a population of 500,000 (the guideline population scale for Local Authorities in the recent English Devolution White Paper, not Strategic Authorities).
Similar arrangements are planned for the other two-council Strategic Authority on the priority list: Norfolk and Suffolk. Both of these Counties will send two representatives to the SA board to sit next to a new Mayor.
Unlike Cumbria, this is still a part of England with ‘two-tier' local government: there are seven districts in Norfolk alone. These District Councils will be permitted to participate in committees as non-constituent members, but will not play a part in decisions before they are gobbled up by the reorganisation process. This new SA will have a larger population of around 1.7 million — a good fit for what the White Paper wanted from these new regions, but not what most people would call genuine regional governance.
Elsewhere in East Anglia, there is a new plan for ‘Greater Essex’ (population: 1.8 million). This brings together Essex County (which still has a dozen districts in its two-tier system), along with Thurrock and Southend.
I think we can expect some reaction to the effective ‘weighting’ that is being created on the board for this new Strategic Authority. The larger Essex County Council will have three representatives on the board, while smaller Southend and Thurrock will have two (albeit this may change post-reorganisation if Essex becomes a number of unitary councils, which will be consulted on separately). All of the constituent authorities will outgun the new Mayor’s single vote. But there is a hint of a principle here: the larger your constituent authority, the more power you should expect to have within the Strategic Authority decision process.
This is very different to, for example, the ‘one council, one vote’ system in Greater Manchester. Manchester City Council has a population of well over 500,000, but it does not get more votes than, say, Bury (population a little under 200,000). Can we expect this to change? And would the prospect of involvement in a Strategic Authority lose its lustre for smaller councils if and when it does?
We have our own proposals for smarter decision-making in Strategic Authorities, coming soon. Meanwhile, you can see the case we are making for bigger regions across England in our recent essay, Rebooting Regionalism.