The beginning of the end for regions?

Home Front
By Philip Johnston(Filed: 08/11/2004)
Daily Telegraph

England is a country of shires, not regions
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The resounding raspberry given to John Prescott's planned regional assembly in the North-East signified an emphatic rejection of big government. The argument that a regional tier of administration would somehow devolve power to people was always pretty thin. If the assembly had gone ahead, district or county councils, which have the merit of being smaller and more accessible, would have been abolished. Elected regional assemblies were not being proposed as a means of making local government more accountable but to enable the Government to complete its programme of devolution for the UK by balkanising England.

The fact is that the English regions are totally artificial constructs. England is a nation made up of shire counties, villages, towns and cities. Indeed, if there is one part of the country that could be considered to have a strong regional identity, it is the North-East; the mistake was to believe that this meant the people wanted their lives to be governed at a regional, rather than local, level.

The danger now is that a bruised and humiliated Government will slink away and wreak its revenge by failing to address the problems inherent in the centralisation of so many functions that should be run locally. There is an opportunity now for a complete rethink of local politics. By definition a parochial subject, it is not one that always grabs the imagination of ministers, who prefer to embrace ``big picture'' politics that allow for grandstanding but do precious little to change people's lives.

Whitehall may find local government tiresome, but it affects our daily lives far more than its national counterpart. In one form or another it spends most of our taxes, raised both nationally and locally.

So, where do we go from here? Given the animus towards remote government expressed in the referendum (and imagine what that means for Tony Blair's chances of securing national endorsement for a European constitution) the way forward is clearly towards smaller and more locally accountable governance. Much of central government policy is still going in the other direction. There is, as many will know, a network of unelected regional assemblies in England. John Prescott's idea was to give these bodies – which comprise local businessmen, councillors and officials – some democratic legitimacy by making them directly elected. But what last Thursday's referendum showed is that people do not want regional government, whether directly or indirectly elected. Yet the Government has only recently passed strategic planning powers from the counties to these regional bodies, which have no grasp of what might be wanted in various parts of their bailiwick. The South East England Regional Assembly (Seera), for instance, covers an area from Kent to the northern borders of Oxfordshire, whose interests are rarely going to coincide.

Last Friday, the unelected Eastern area "assembly" meeting in Southend approved plans for 478,000 new homes in the region over the next 17 years. Representatives from local authorities in Hertfordshire and Essex tried to reduce the number of homes earmarked for their areas, but these were rejected. Later today, the Draft South East Plan goes before Seera's regional planning committee with a proposal for up to 720,000 new houses in the South-East over the next 20 years. Shire leaders say the papers submitted by Seera are ``incoherent, riddled with errors and inconsistencies, and lack any environmental audit''.

These unelected regional assemblies, established in 1999, grew out of the old Government Offices for the Regions, which were established to co-ordinate those local strategic matters for which Whitehall was responsible. But what they have succeeded in doing is to stifle local decision-making. The message from last Thursday is these bodies should be dismantled. They cannot continue in their current form if they lack support from the people they purport to represent.

There are other lessons. There is momentum behind the so-called ``localism'' agenda, which seeks to give powers back to communities that have dribbled away as financial control has increasingly passed to Whitehall. But how can this be taken forward? There are suspicions that government ministers are merely paying lip-service to the concept, given their recent decisions on planning. The Tories see an opportunity to atone for the years in which they played a significant part in the centralisation of local decision-making, largely as a counter-weight against the militant Left takeover of local authorities in the 1980s.

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative regions spokesman, says the notion that ministers and London-based (or regional) civil servants know what is best for local communities is well past its sell-by date. As an example of how far this has gone, consider the establishment by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) of a chewing gum action unit,
"a multi-stakeholder group… which is part of a wider cross-government campaign to help clean up local communities".

Last week, it published a 160-page report from something called the Gum Droppers Segmentation Survey, analysing why people chew and discard their gum. Alun Michael the Defra minister, said: "Used gum dropped irresponsibly is an unpleasant nuisance for the public and a major headache for those that have to clean it up.'' That is unquestionably so; but is this really a matter for central government?
Mr Jenkin says Labour's idea of ``New Localism'' is not the answer because it is defined as "local decisions within a national framework", simply confirming Whitehall's unwillingness to loosen its grip. He senses an unmissable opportunity for the Tories to rediscover their civic roots.
``Real decentralisation means independent local government, local accountability and local democracy, with councils raising the majority of their own revenues and spending them as they see fit,'' he says. ``The restoration of genuine shire and city self-government would rekindle the kind of civic society that used to be the bedrock our party's strength.'' Judging by the vote in the North-East last week, this is what people want, but do national politicians have the courage and vision to deliver?