Devolution and Localism in England

David M. Smith, Enid Wistrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472430793
• eBook ISBN: 9781317151654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Combining historical and policy study with empirical research from a qualitative study of regional elites this book offers an original and timely insight into the progress of devolution of governance in England. With particular interest in how governments have tried and continue to engage English people in sub-national democratic processes while dealing with the realities of governance it uses in-depth interviews with key figures from three English regions to get the 'inside view' of how these processes are seen by the regional and local political, administrative, business and voluntary sector elites who have to make policies work in practice. Tracing the development of decentralisation policies through regional policies up to and including the general election in 2010 and the radical shift away from regionalism to localism by the new Coalition Government thereafter the authors look in detail at some of the key policies of the incumbent Coalition Government such as City Regions and Localism and their implementation. Finally they consider the implications of the existing situation and speculate on possible issues for the future.

Chapter 1
Decentralisation and Governance in England and the UK

Localism and Globalisation

The study of nation states has been dominated in recent years by two strong trends: globalisation and decentralisation. Held et al. (1999) argue that they are opposite ends of a continuum from global through regional to local and that ‘the driving forces of globalisation … are creating new pressures on governments to decentralise’ (Cheema and Rondinella, 2007, p.3). So it is argued (Hooghe and Marks, 2001) that centralised authority has given way to different forms of governing in which formal authority has been dispersed both up to supra-national institutions and down to regional and local governments with the result that ‘over the past fifty years, we have seen a rapid and extensive worldwide trend towards decentralisation of government’ (Scott, 2012, p.38).

Most European national states have each been formed in a historic process which drew regions together under a single government, and many of these still retain a strong identity. Thus Belgium has Flanders, a Protestant, predominantly Flemish speaking region, and also Brabant which is Catholic and French speaking; Spain has distinctive historic regions including Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country, and Germany was created in the nineteenth century from a number of kingdoms and principalities such as Bavaria and Saxony. This also applies to recent members such as Poland and Romania (Bradbury and Le Gales, 2008). The regions of European countries have achieved varying degrees of recognition and power in each country, from a federal form of government in Germany since 1946 to defined powers for regions in others. As we will see, Britain is no exception. Although Britain has traditionally been seen as a highly unified state, historically it derives from the incorporation of a number of distinct ‘nations’ under predominantly English rule. However, it was not until the 1990s that significant powers were devolved to any of the constituent regions.

Decentralisation

Treisman (2007) has identified several dimensions by which decentralisation can be classified as follows:

a) Multi-level governance

This approach originated in political science and public administration theory from studies on European integration and was developed by Hooghe and Marks in the early 1990s as a way of examining how authority structures work in the global political economy through mutual interaction to produce entanglement between domestic and international levels of authority. Multi-level governance within a nation is seen in terms of a partnership between government and non-governmental forces and the process of interaction between them. For Rhodes (1997), governance is about governing with and through networks, consisting of both formal and informal policy connections between government and others, which are structured around a shared interest in making or implementing public policy. Thus policy emerges from the bargaining process. ‘It’s about participation, stupid!’ as Edlar-Wallstein and Kohler-Koch (2008) claim.

b) Administrative decentralisation

Administrative decentralization is often used to refer to the way in which authority is distributed within an organization (Richards, 2008), but at government level it refers to the transfer of public functions from the central government to government agencies, subordinate levels of government, semi-autonomous public authorities or to regional authorities, etc. Sometimes it is further divided into three types: de-concentration, delegation and devolution. De-concentration redistributes decision-making authority among different levels of the central government. Delegation is when central governments transfer responsibility for decision-making and public administration functions to semi-autonomous bodies which are not entirely under central government’s control but are ultimately accountable to it; for example, public corporations, housing authorities, transportation authorities, regional development corporations. Devolution usually transfers responsibilities for services to municipalities that elect their own authorities, raise their own revenues and have a degree of independent authority.

c) Political decentralisation

The aim of political decentralization is to give more power_and influence in the formulation and implementation of policies to citizens or their elected representatives (World Bank website, 2013). It refers to the partial transference of political power and authority to sub-national levels of government (European Commission, 2007).

d) Fiscal decentralisation.

Fiscal decentralization is often called ‘fiscal federalism’ and means decentralisation of revenue raising powers and/or expenditure to lower levels of government while at the same time maintaining financial responsibility at the higher level (Oates, 1972).

The categories advanced by Triesman (2007) have been useful in differentiating academic studies. However, some have pointed to the dangerous tendency for disciplinary specialists to ‘compartmentalize decentralization’ in their studies, with different disciplines focusing on different forms of decentralization and so failing to achieve the coherent picture which can only appear if the different dimensions are studied in an integrated way (Smoke, 2003).

Government and Governance

The idea of government has also been opened up beyond democratically elected institutions to a much wider range of institutions of governance (Kooiman, 1993; Rhodes, 1997; Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999). Traditionally the term was used as a synonym for government (Richards and Smith, 2002; Leach et al., 2007), but in recent years it has come to mean something much more distinctive. Governance is now seen to include not only government but also other societal institutions, including the private sector and civil associations (Cheema and Rondinelli, 2007). Stoker (1997) argues that government refers to formal institutional structure and authoritative decision-making, while governance focuses on the relationships between governmental and non-governmental forces and how they work together. In other words, ‘governance usually involves a range of actors wider than elected representatives or appointed officials’ (Loughlin, 2007, p.35) and therefore involves different kinds of partnerships at various levels. One useful definition of governance is given by Chhotray and Stoker (2009), as follows: ‘Governance is about the rules of collective decision-making in settings where there are a plurality of actors or organizations and where no formal control system can dictate the terms of the relationship between these actors and organizations’ (p.3).

Partnerships, then, have become a standard feature of policy and decision-making which typically ‘gather representatives from the public, private and civil society sectors, often relying on voluntary participation and mutual agreement’ (Giguere and Considine, 2008, p.1) Governance is a partnership between government and non-governmental forces and the process of interaction between them (Edler-Wallstein and Kohler-Koch, 2008) governing through networks where there are multiple centres of policy making (Rhodes, 1997), though some feel that even that is too narrow a definition (Kjaer, 2011). These networks are frequently referred to, following Rhodes (1997), as ‘policy networks’, and they consist of formal and informal policy linkages between government and other actors, structured around shared interests in making or implementing public policy with a degree of autonomy from the state. Policy itself emerges through bargaining between network members. Rhodes (1997) argues that there is a mutual need: the government needs legitimated spokespersons, and the groups need the resources and legislative authority of the government.

The concept of governance has gained increasing prominence in recent years, ‘in large part reflecting the transition from state-centre governing relationships … to a greatly more complex constellation in which states and their governments are but one important group of players and centres of political power’ (Debardeleben and Hurrelmann, 2007, p.1). It raises questions about how able the state is to steer policy on its own and the extent to which networks and partnerships of both public and private actors are able to co-ordinate and self-govern themselves (Pierre, 2000). Hirst claims, on this basis, that democracy itself needs to be rethought as one which ‘shares power with increasingly salient sub-national governments with proliferating forms of networks and partnerships’ (Hirst, 2000).

Unified State and Decentralisation in the United Kingdom

The ideology of Britain as a unified state has been deeply embedded both in the official mindset of the political elite (O’Neill, 2004) and in popular political culture (Gartside and Hibbert, 1989). In Britain the largest and dominant entity is England, which has had a single national government since the Norman conquest of the eleventh century and currently holds more than 80 per cent of the population. Wales was annexed by England in 1536 by Henry VIII. Despite Henry VIII’s attempts also to impose English hegemony on Ireland, it remained largely Catholic though the infamous ‘plantation’ of Scots Protestants into Ulster (1609) led to the seizing of local Catholic Chieftains’ lands (Ó Siochrú and Ó Ciardha, 2012) and created a significant Protestant minority in the north. Then after the Protestant William of Orange had replaced the Stuart dynasty in England, he defeated Catholic James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. The thrones of Scotland and England were united in 1707, when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England.. The Acts of Union of 1800 produced a merged parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with effect from 1 January 1801. The UK has a long history as a single national state but it ‘is not a unitary state’ (McLean and McMillan, 2005) precisely because it depends upon these two constitutional contracts of the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1800 (McLean, 2010). One other change should also be noted. The partition of Ireland in December 1921 followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and created the Irish Free State. At the same time, the British union was extended to include Northern Ireland as part of United Kingdom (McLean and McMillan, 2005).

In recent years the British experience might be seen as following the international and European trends outlined above (Scott, 2012). From being a highly centralised state (Hazell, 2006c) it has moved to one in which different powers are devolved in various ways, so that the UK has been described as one of the most complex examples of ‘asymmetric autonomy’ (McGarry, 2012).

Decentralisation in the United Kingdom is usually referred to as ‘devolution’, though sometimes the term ‘federal’ is used in debate. At the formal institutional level, any devolution of political power ‘involves the dispersal of power from a superior to an inferior political authority’ [and] ‘the transfer to a subordinate elected body or geographical basis of functions at present exercised by Parliament’ (Bogdanor, 1979, p.2) as well as the creation of an elected body subordinate to Parliament. Devolution is therefore different from federalism (Kincaid, 2001; Elazar, 1979) in that it attempts to preserve the supremacy of Parliament intact (Bogdanor, 1979) rather than dividing power between parliament and various provincial bodies, each of which has sovereignty within the area of its responsibilities (Bealey, 1999). The British Government’s insistence that, at least technically, the devolved bodies are subordinate to the Westminster parliament is indicative of this (McLean and McMillan, 2005; Hazell, 2006b).

While it has been argued by some that the United Kingdom does possess some features of a federation (Bond, 2011), albeit apparently an asymmetric one (McGarry, 2012; Unlock Democracy, 2011; Peeters, 2007), it lacks others (Watts, 2006). Indeed, Watts (2006) argues that as yet it does not even meet the requirements necessary to be called a ‘quasi-federation’ (Weare, 1963). Yet federalism as an idea has been a consistent feature of constitutional debate in the British Isles (Kendle, 1997) though much of the focus historically was on Ireland or the far off reaches of the Empire (Kendle, 1997; Burgess, 1986). Joseph Chamberlain proposed federation early in the 1880s as a possible solution to the movement in Ireland for political independence. The Imperial Federation League was established in 1884 to promote the permanent unity of the Empire through some form of federation, but its proposed scheme for a Council of Empire comprised of the self governing colonies was rejected in 1893 by Gladstone, the British Prime Minister. An Imperial Parliament and a federal government were again proposed in 1910 by Lionel Curtis of the ‘Round Table’ Unit. However, by the end of the First World War this had been superseded by the movement from Empire to Commonwealth. The idea of national parliaments in Ireland, Wales and Scotland and regional assemblies in England, all within an Imperial Parliament, had been promoted by both Winston Churchill and Lloyd George in 1912 (Burgess, 2007), but the continuing struggle for Irish independence ended the movement for a federal structure in the UK. Federalism within Britain has never reappeared as a serious political proposal for an overall government structure, though its influence has remained. As Pinder suggests, ‘British understanding of the process of reforming institutions has been clouded by misunderstandings of the word federal’ (Pinder, 2001, p.166), which is viewed as an alien, European concept.

England in the United Kingdom

England as odd man out

Nevertheless, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries there is a general recognition that the UK consists of four separate ‘nations’ in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is not, of course, a nation in any sense. The ‘Catholic’ community has close cultural associations with the Irish Republic and the ‘Protestant’ community with Scottish Protestantism. However, the term ‘nation’ is often used in this context for simplicity.

In the short period between 1997 and the present time, much of UK government has been transformed (Bradbury and Le Gales, 2008). First the conflicts in Northern Ireland over a possible union with the Irish Republic led to the settlement of 1997 when Northern Ireland’s self government was established with links to both the British and Irish governments. Then in 1999, both a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly were elected for the first time, each with differing powers for their areas. However, there were no proposals for devolved power at the English level. England became ‘a gaping hole in the devolution settlement’ (Hazell, 2006a, p. 1) and left what is called the English Question (Henig, 2006; Hazell, 2006d). The English question is quite complex (Hazell, 2006d), but to put it briefly, England continues to be ruled solely by the Westminster Parliament, which is responsible for all the UK, with no clear central democratic body to represent England as opposed to the other ‘nations’. So, laws which only relate to England are passed by a Parliament with the participation of Scottish and Welsh Members of Parliament (MPs).

The Labour Government of 1997–2010 did have proposals for limited devolution within England to directly elected regional assemblies, but these fell through when a proposal in the northeast region for an elected Assembly with substantial powers was rejected by a local referendum, leaving England as the odd one out (see below). In fact, democratic regional government within England was not a new idea. The Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in England (1969) chaired by Lord Redcliffe-Maud had proposed provincial councils for the eight provinces of England, to be elected by the main local authorities in the provinces, with at least 20 per cent of their members co-opted from industry and the professions. These were to produce strategic plans for development in the spheres of economic growth, industrial developments, housing, transport, further education and cultural facilities. These plans would then be approved by a Minister, after which they would become binding on their constituent local authorities. This proposal for a regional tier of English government was not, howeve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Decentralisation and Governance in England and the UK
• 2 Is there a Role for English Regional Governance?
• 3 English Regions, Sub-regions and Issues of Identity and Engagement
• 4 A New Broom? Coalition Policy and the ‘Death of the Region’
• 5 Cities, City Regions, Growth and the Devolution of Powers
• 6 Devolution, Localism and Good Governance in England
• 7 Conclusions
• Index