As the days tick down until Christmas, most participants in the collective nervous breakdown we call politics will be easing up the pace.

Nigel Farage may hope to catch a few rays at Mar-a-Lago ahead of the New Year. David Lammy will want to wish the new rulers of Syria a very happy Hanukkah. Kemi Badenoch will be dreaming of a festive getaway somewhere soggy bread, her ethnic enemies, and faithless hacks can’t reach her. But against this Yuletide slackening, one politician stands alone.

Step forward Angela Rayner, with her one-woman campaign to tarmac the countryside (or at least the bits of it that vote Tory), supplant Keir Starmer and boldly go where Edward Heath has gone before. Yesterday she announced her plans for a “revolution” in local government organisation.

She aims to instruct areas covered by two-tier governance to propose a plan to merge into unified authorities of populations of half a million plus. Services will be streamlined, and new regional mayors will be handed powers over housing, youth clubs, transport, and more. Devolution will become a “default” rather than being “at the whim of a minister in Whitehall”.

Naturally, this has come in from criticism from those councillors who would find their positions abolished at, erm, the whim of a minister in Whitehall. Despite Rayner’s pledge to work with local leaders, she reserves the right to “knock heads together” and create combined bodies where they will not agree. Dread them, run from them: unity authorities arrive all the same.

Nobody denies that England’s current system of local governance confuses everyone except our own peerless Harry Phibbs. As Eliot Wilson has highlighted, there are 317 local authorities of no fewer than five types. Most of the country is covered by a two-tier county and district approach, with the division of services between them. Others have unitary bodies responsible for all.

The Tories also created 11 combined authorities, each with their own elected Mayor, which bring together all the councils in a particular area which more powers. Erstwhile podcaster Ben Houchen’s popularity in Teesside proves this can be successful. We aimed to grant every area that wanted one a devolution deal by 2030. Currently, about half the country is yet to be so covered.

Rayner is deploying Whitehall’s clunking fist to change that. Sniff the whoff of grapeshot. The Deputy Prime Minister has positioned herself as Napoleon’s ginger sister, here to complete Heath’s work in rationalising our local democracy. Our patchwork governance and stubborn district councils stands against her hopes of building 370,000 homes a year and attracting investment.

How this will be squared with devolving planning powers to new mayors is not wholly clear. As our Deputy Editor has pointed out, a performative transfer of power out of Whitehall can all too often be an elaborate exercise in buck-passing. As he put it, councillors “have the worst possible incentives” when it comes to delivering infrastructure essential nationally but unpopular locally.

Having dropped their ambition of achieving the fastest growth in the G7, Labour may already be preparing their excuses for 2029 as to why voters still feel worse off than they did twenty-odd years ago. Just as she now points to polls suggesting that devolution is popular amongst voters, so will Rayner be cursing her new crop of mayors when they fail to match her own YIMBY standards.

Whether the new Reform mayors soon to grace Essex and Kent, where these proposals are first to be implemented, will be just as keen as her on new social housing remains to be seen. What can be said is that all this triggers obvious complaints: larger bodies away from where voters live strips them of a local voice at the cost of more bureaucracy and less influence.

Just as Michael Heseltine robbed us of our historic counties to appease his power hunger, so too will Rayner further reduces the complexity of our local democracy to make the lives of the civil servants in the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government a little easier. This is as much a threat to our national idiosyncrasy as the tide of Deano boxes she aims to unleash.

Moreover, whilst this ‘rationalisation’ may provide a few bored Labour backbenchers with welcome opportunities for double-jobbing, it won’t resolve the deep structural problems with our system of local government. Our local democracy remains uniquely feeble and depressing.

As Tom Forth explains, in the post-war period, the various responsibilities of the once-great local government corporations were nationalised and privatised as duties and assets were handed over and handed out by Whitehall. Today, local government is reduced to fulfilling central government duties over social care and housing alongside bin collections and filling potholes.

Less than half of local expenditure is raised where it is spent, uncoupling the work of local authorities from those who pay for them. Turnout at local government elections remains low as more than half of voters claim to have little idea about their duties. At great expense, we provide an annual referendum on the Government’s performance, with sorting out the bins as the victors’ prize.

With so much of local government an outpost of Whitehall, there is no incentive for ministers to swap subsidies for local taxation, to make councils stand on their own two feet and raise what they spend. In a country with an aging population, where adult social care accounts for seven-tenths of local budgets, the Government cannot allow a hundred Birminghams to bloom.

All the heat and light generated by Rayner’s ‘revolution’ will do little to solve the real problems of English local governance. The gradual slide of our councils into bankruptcy will continue on a larger scale, alongside the wider enshitiffication of our public realm and the alienation of voters from their representatives. Most will hate their new authorities, if they bother to find out what they are.

Your council tax will go up as the quality of the services you receive declines. Potholes will remain unfilled, social care will remain in crisis, and Rayner will remain unrepentant. Our next generation of local leaders will continue to look more like Joe Wilkinson than Joe Chamberlain. Everything will continue to get worse, whoever the buck is now passed to. Feliz Navidad! 

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