This article was first published in Sep 2014

Before I close down the blog it formed part of, I've republished it here because nothing much has improved since then.

Mr Gove, who must be a candidate to be moved on in a reshuffle in the coming year because he has clearly annoyed HM Treasury and presumably the Prime Minister, seems to have a plan. It could be this:

• Cover as much of the country as possible with combined authorities

• At some point, remove the bottom layer of district councils

The second bit would be resisted, of course. Perhaps he thinks that in the run up to a general election that is likely to produce a period in opposition, the loss of election foot-soldiers that abolishing Districts would bring about might be borderline acceptable?

Much more is needed: fair voting, stability, long-term planning horizons, and a shift from law-making to scrutiny and accountability as MPs' main focus.

However, the likeliest outcome is that we get the Combined Authorities for a while until their scope and remit is changed, which will then be repeated every couple of years, while they're driven to total distraction by constant competitive funding rounds for ever-reducing pots of short-term project money, reflecting whatever seems to matter to focus groups and people phoning in to LBC.

The original article follows...:

So the aftermath of the Scottish referendum is a debate about devolution of powers across the UK, including within England, in the pretence that the Scottish referendum, a purely political venture that backfired on Cameron, was borne out of some kind of genuine agenda which possesses integrity.

Cue interest groups based on specific segments of the deformity that is the elected UK public administration pitching in with absurd proclamations about theirs being the segment around which a re-organisation should be centred.

"Counties are the engine of growth".

"City regions are the economic drivers".

"Districts are the truly local parts of democracy".

Etc.

All tedious special pleading which doesn't merit a moment's attention.

During the last Local Government Review I worked for a District Council, based in one of England's most historic cities, which sought to achieve a three-unitaries solution in its county. Because one of the MPs in one of the other districts was one of the few remaining Government Ministers who hadn't by that time been engulfed by scandal, and his constituency party opposed the change, status quo won the day.

This was stupid.

So was the solution I was working to achieve.

Three councils with populations of about 200,000, two of which were almost entirely rural in character?

Three CEOs, nine to twelve (no doubt "strategic" or "corporate") Directors?

More than one hundred and fifty Councillors?!

Bonkers.

Perhaps not as mad as the two-tier status quo, whose costs and inefficiencies are hard to match under any alternative design, but still daft.

In this case, a unitary county was the sensible solution.

And any change now should be based on a simple formula which blends population size, physical size and economic size to produce a jigsaw puzzle of single tier government entities such that each possesses sufficient scale to be able to achieve operating efficiencies; each makes some kind of sense in terms of "place"; and each makes some kind of sense in terms of governing an economic entity.

Every version of such a jigsaw would be wrong, because the UK isn't a grid of equally-sized portions.

Perhaps no municipality would have a population of less than one million or more than two and a half million.

Perhaps none would have more than one town or city whose population exceeded one and a half million people.

I don't know what the formula should be.

What I do know is that it wouldn't favour any of the current entities or their lobbying collaborations.

We would be able massively to reduce the absurd numbers of elected representatives, which would at a stroke make the matter of improving the calibre of representation straightforward.

Less money would be wasted on the fatuous local procurement or management of operations whose only rational basis is regional or national scale.

Engagement with communities could be conducted very effectively by such municipalities on the matters over which they retained responsibility.

Will it happen?

Not a chance.

The domain that will determine what happens next with "devolution" is party politics, so our solution will be driven by the perceived short-term advantage to Conservative, Labour and other politicians.

The Civil Service, which deploys the country's political dynamic to its own advantage and has managed not to be reformed despite energetic pledges about its imminent reformation being made every time Government changes from one party to the other, will do nothing to help make the case for a rational solution.

"It was so annoying you lost the will to live at some points in this process" was Sir Bob Kerslake's verdict on the silo-based irrationality of civil service decision-making this week.

So don't get too caught up in the detail of the various propositions that the interest groups put forward over the next few months.

At the end of it, England will still have too many councils, inconsistently sized, with the wrong powers, run by far too many people, spending far too much time, effort and money all doing the same thing to run excessively small service operations which are more or less identical and which could and should be procured nationally or regionally.

Instead of combining to hold publicly-funded services to account, and engaging with people and communities to act as a link between the people who live here and the people who make decisions about how taxes are spent.

Shame, that.

26 September 2014