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This BBC podcast is supported by ads
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outside the UK
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Was it scary?
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Did the car have a sunroof?
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It did, actually.
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Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
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Hello.
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As discussed on our last episode of Newscast, Andy Burnham is definitely, maybe almost certainly very close, almost into Downing street as Prime Minister. So we thought in this episode we. We would do a deep dive in podcasting parlance, into his big idea. Really, really radical devolution, spreading power out from Whitehall, Westminster and London to all parts of the uk, especially England. Newscast.
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Newscast from the BBC.
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I will resign as leader of the Labour Party.
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B
And what will you do? Stare at a wall?
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Humanity's next great voyage begins.
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E
You know, I like my buses.
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A
I'll come on to them.
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F
It's supposed to be me as a doctor.
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Ooh la about it. Like a panter helped.
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Do we play music now or what do we do?
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Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio.
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B
And it's Alex in the Westminster studio.
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A
Now, Alex, this episode of Newscast is actually your brainchild.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Did you. Oh, I'm glad you knew that. That's good.
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B
I did know that, yeah. I was chatting in the office to some of the newscast team last week and I was like, oh, do you know what I'm really interested in? And they were like, what? And I was like, devolution. So here we go. We're going to talk about it a lot.
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A
We're going to make everyone interested in it.
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D
Yeah.
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And you know what? Let's have a bit of stimulus. And the reason everyone's talking about devolution is because it's Andy Burnham's big idea. And by big, I mean it's like his central guiding philosophy, we think, for his premiership, which is inching ever closer. And here is his kind of elevator pitch for what he's on about.
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I am going to do things differently. I am going to break with the more of the same approach. That has got us here. I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs by building a more collaborative politics in Westminster, by taking power out of the centre and putting it in the hands of the people and places who can use it best, and in so doing, creating a new sense of agency, possibility and hope flowing around the country. We will make politics work for you and the place where you live.
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A
And joining us to help us unpack it all is Ant Breach, who's director of policy and Research at the Centre for Cities. Hello, Ant.
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G
Hello.
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A
What does the Centre for Cities do?
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G
We are a think tank that looks at cities and particularly their role in the national economy, why they differ and trying to come up with ideas on how to make them better and how to make the national economy more prosperous as well.
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A
This is about to become your season.
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G
Yes. Yes.
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A
And, Alex, we should be clear that normally when we talk about devolution, or the majority of the times that we talk about devolution in the UK sense, we're talking about the devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. This is not going to be a podcast about that, although maybe it will feature, because Andy Burnham has brought up that too. This is about devolution within England.
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B
Yeah, exactly right. Because that is a slightly different thing. And you're right, there is going to be a part of the conversation, conversation when Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister about what that does mean for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But I think the thrust of what he's talking about as one of his really key kind of economic platforms is the idea of handing more power from Whitehall and Westminster to the regions of England. And that's what we're going to attempt to unpick a little bit.
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A
And, Ant, we're often told that, that the UK and England is one of the most sort of centralized nations in the world. When people make that claim, what do they mean by it?
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G
So what they're saying when they say the UK is unus decentralized, is that we're quite unusual for a big democracy of our size. Just how many powers are concentrated within Westminster? That touches many different areas of public policy, whether that's health, whether that's education, whether that's things like transport. Lots of these decisions are taken in other countries at a more local level. Actually, the ministers are very important in the British system in making decisions in Westminster. But I think maybe one of the kind of starkest ways of illustrating this divide is of G7 countries. So the big countries that are probably closest to our peers internationally, we are by far the most fiscally centralized. So only 5% of our taxes are collected at the local level. That compares to about 11% in Italy, 25% in Japan, and then way more in places like Germany or the United States that have much more federal constitutions.
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A
And often this talk about us being the most centralized country of our kind is then linked to. Oh, and it comes with either a democratic cost to how people feel or it comes at an economic cost to how the economy performs. Is there evidence to back up those claims?
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G
Yeah, I think on both of those claims, both the democratic claims and the economic claims, I think there's increasingly good evidence that political alienation is increased by centralization, that the number of people who can actually make a difference in British politics is low. Because our state is so centralized, the idea that somebody can, in their community or in their city, get stuck and get involved and shape outcomes in their place is quite limited. But also, I think the economic cases, in some ways, kind of where I think Burnham is making quite a novel case in the UK context, where the idea that because our tax system is so centralized, the incentives for places to pursue economic growth are quite limited insofar as if you are a city council or if you're a metro mayor, if you grow your local economy, if you create jobs, if you support businesses, if you invest in your area, it doesn't actually mean that much for your budget as a local leader, which means you can't pay for more public services by taking tough decisions on growth, on investments and jobs, which means, ultimately, there's money left lying on the table that we're not picking up.
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A
In other words, if the economy grows in a local area, that leads to people earning higher wages, but income tax goes to the treasury and then the government in Westminster decides how that tax money is distributed to the rest of the country.
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G
Yeah, precisely. And while it's obviously the case that local leaders up and down the country are trying to work hard for their area, the fact that there's no link between the local economy and local public services means that even if a place does do well, if it does create jobs, because we hand money on the basis that money should flow to poorer areas, places get penalised, that they actually lose money if they do a good job for their local area.
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A
And, Alex, you must experience that all the time as you're traveling around the country for any questions on a Friday and chatting to people in that village hall, or when you're doing your other job, which is to cover Westminster politics, but how it plays out outside Westminster.
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B
Yeah, because it's worth remembering that the way that areas of local government are funded at the moment in England, a lot of it, I mean, some of it for councils, for example, will come from the council tax. So how much they increase council tax by. But a lot of it comes from the money that they get from central government. So whether that's kind of funding streams for roads or schools or whatever it might be, or other pots of money from central government, they're quite dependent on that as a hefty chunk of the way that they're funded. And so therefore you do have these arguments about the way that money is allocated. Is it fair? Is X region or X town or X village getting more than why? What's the reason for that? You know, and I think that's sort of one of the questions that Andy Burnham may, and we have a sort of very vague idea of what he might look at at the moment, but it's not wholly developed, but may sort of be trying to address, because there are lots of arguments about regional disparities and we know that there is regional inequality in the United Kingdom and in England specifically. So I think maybe looking at some of this stuff around funding might be part of what he sees as a solution to some of that.
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The stark imbalance in resources between national government and local government is holding back growth. If councils can't fix potholes, what chance do they have of bringing forward major regeneration schemes to get growth going? While national government has got bigger, particularly since the pandemic, local government is threadbare and without the resources to fulfil even statutory responsibilities. This is not just bad for councils in the areas they serve, it is bad for everywhere. It is bad for London and the South East. The whole country suffers when the regions and nations are not meeting their potential and Londoners are left with an overheated economy and an overcrowded housing market. It is actually bad for national government too, because we will never get the growth up to the level Britain needs unless every single postcode in the land is set up to contribute to it.
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A
And, Alex, just dive more into what we think Andy Burnham is going to do. And I know that's a very broad question, but also a very sort of not fully laid out set of policies yet, but pick out some of the clues.
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B
I mean, everybody in Westminster is trying to guess what Andy Burnham is going to do. Of course, it is like the central essay question at the moment, moment. But on devolution, we certainly know about his ambition. We know that it's worth saying the speech he gave. When he really talked about devolution and this idea about transferring power outside of Westminster to the English regions, that was the speech which was billed as his sort of economic strategy insight speech. So we know that he thinks this is actually really important to economic growth, to getting, you know, the country growing as a whole. So in terms of what he might do, he's talking about things like regional power over employment, something actually that they he's had in Greater Manchester. He's talking about the relationship, relationship between different parts of the United Kingdom and the Treasury. So he doesn't want the treasury to have so much control, by the sounds of it, over money and powers that local authorities or mayors might have. We know he's shifting. He's talking about a number 10 in the north that we don't know what that means for devolution, I. E. Transfer of powers. But it's about cementing, I think, this idea of the regions around the country having as much clout as Westminster and Whitehall does at the moment. And then there are questions about whether he may look at some sort of fiscal devolution. That's like the fancy pants term for what Ant was just talking about, which is whether or not local layers of government, whether that's a mayor, for example, could have some more power over taxes that are raised and choose how they might spend that money, or even potentially, and this is a big question mark in a contentious area, but something over the way they raise taxes and revenue themselves.
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A
And if we're still waiting to get more details from Andy Burnham, although Alex is a very good job of pointing us in the direction of where he's going to go there. Why don't we look at the situation now and let's look at what control local authorities currently have over their money, what they raise and what they get.
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G
So local authorities currently have kind of two major taxes that drive lots of their revenue. There's council tax and there's business rates. However, both of these are subject to pretty extensive control by central government. Councils are only allowed to increase it by council tax by 5% every year, which actually means they've got a very strong incentive to increase it by 5% every single year, otherwise they lose that increase forever. Business rates, it's a bit more complicated in that some of it is kind of recirculated locally, temporarily and before it's reset by central government. So even if you build lots of warehouses or office space in your place, you only get a small boost to your funding for a short period of time. But the other Half of business rates is actually allocated by grant to different local authorities around the country based on what government thinks is the gap between their council tax revenue and then their local need as determined by central government. So it's this kind of very circular system where it's all kind of property tax based. And so it's quite difficult to then untangle any bit of the business rates or council tax system without pulling the whole thing apart. What that means, I would argue, from a fiscal devolution point of view, is we need to be thinking about how can we share taxes that national government is collecting, particularly ones that are not property taxes, things that are more closely connected to the local economy, and use those as a way to provide a kind of a replacement for some of these grants that places are getting, but that would really reward economic growth.
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A
So what are some of those sources of income that are more locally based then that are not income tax or business rates?
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G
So what we see quite common across Europe and indeed other G7 countries, as kind of a workhorse for local government finance is income tax. So you could allow places to keep a fixed share of the income tax that's generated in their local area without any ability to kind of increase or decrease the bills. That gives places a strong incentive to try and increase the number of income taxpayers in that area. You could do that a few ways. You could get more people moving into your area, you could get people who are currently not in work working, or indeed you could try to raise wages in your local area. And that would all feed into kind of more resource for the, for the local authority. That can be complemented, we would argue, with actually a share of corporation tax, so that as businesses do better in your area, as you get more businesses locating and selling to customers in your patch and abroad, actually that grows the profitability of those businesses and therefore your business tax base as well. Those two things are quite complementary and provide a very strong incentive for growth.
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A
And Alex, on that point, about different rates of income tax, at first you think, oh, that would never happen. You can't imagine having like a Bradford rate of income tax and an Islington rate of income tax until you realise we already do have that in this country because Scotland and Wales have got different or additional income tax rates.
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B
Yeah. And actually the governments in Scotland and Wales have chosen to exercise the power that they do have to vary the income tax rates to different extents. So in Scotland you have got six different income tax bands because they can vary the level at people within the kind of overall bracket that people start paying income tax depending on their salaries. I think there are a couple of kind of challenges with this. Just a couple, just a couple with this sort of model, though, of whether or not, for example, local authorities or mayors, and I think we are primarily talking about mayors rather than local authorities might have the power to actually change tax rates as opposed to just keep their share of taxation and then choose how to spend it. And, and actually there are problems with that as well because obviously, as I've already mentioned, there's quite a lot of regional inequality in the country. And there are areas which are very urban, which may, just by their geography or the way that they are kind of set up, have more ability to raise income tax or business rates or have more, you know, they might naturally attract more businesses because they're great big cities that are sort of, you know, with all the infrastructure and roads and places that businesses might want to locate. What does that mean for rural areas that might have less ability to kind of pull on the levers to generate economic growth and therefore receive some of the benefits of it? And then there's also things about how you, you might manage, for example, if different neighboring areas set really, really different levels of, for example, business rates, does that mean that all the businesses are going to go to the area with the lower business rates? What does it mean for the kind of neighborhood? So that's why all of this is quite complicated and needs to be looked at and worked through quite carefully. And we don't know what Andy Burnham is going to do in this space. We just know what he set out, which is his ambition, that there is somehow a much more enhanced transfer of, of power to the regions in order to generate economic growth. These are some of the questions that he's going to have to tackle.
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A
And Ann, on your point about corporation tax, how could you then design a system that fosters kind of competitive advantage and areas being able to specialize in something? And what I'm getting at is do you have to have a really complicated tax regime where local areas can pick a sector and say life sciences or engineering and say, oh, your corporation tax is going to be less to lure those people into that area?
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G
So I think it's important to stress that as we proceed down the fiscal devolution roadmap, which is sort of what some of the wonks are calling it. We definitely think it's right to start with just sharing the revenues, not touching the rates at present, as we've just been discussing, it gets very complicated once you start allowing different places to Vary rates between places, we may want to get to there in future. And we see other places do allow places to vary their rates, but simply having a tax sharing basis with some degree of what again the wonks call equalization. So guaranteeing a minimum floor of resource in some places is what places like Poland do. It's what places like Switzerland do. There's lots of models around the world for how this could work. Well, but to your question about do we want a very complicated system, absolutely not. We want to keep it as simple as possible to give quite clear incentives to local leaders, help local voters hold their elected leaders accountable for the money that they're raising. But I think one key thing we would stress is that every part of the country is good at something. So we don't need to expect the tax regime to be designed to accommodate very different parts of the country and supporting very specific types of businesses. What we need to do with fiscal devolution is set up clear incentives that allow places, if they grow, if they do well and become a better version of themselves, they get a bit more resource that they can invest back into public services wherever they are and wherever they're starting from.
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A
I'm just wondering, Alex, if there's a rhetoric versus reality thing going on here because you listen to Andy Burnham and he sounds like he wants to redesign the whole country, but then you listen to Ant, who actually knows what he's talking about in terms of what's possible and what's feasible and actually it sounds a little, little bit more modest.
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B
Yeah. And. And to be fair, like I say, I mean, Andy Burnham hasn't said that he wants to go down the full fiscal devolution route. And it's also just worth bearing in mind a couple of things. So first off, actually, there has been a sort of program of devolution under successive governments already. So you know, we had the previous Conservative government that started rolling out and creating mayors. We've then had this, including Andy Burnham's old job. Yeah. That was actually created under George Osborne when he was the Chancellor and he had this big dream about the Northern House and they created the Greater Manchester mayoralty as well as a whole, a whole load of others in that first range. Then actually the Conservative government set up another program of devolution and said, look, come on. Other areas, if you want a bit more power and clout, then we'll look at giving you some kind of devolution arrangements then so called city deals, the so called. God, you're like a pro, you're an expert. You've done your reading. I love it. And then we also had Keir Starmer come in with then Angela Rainer, who was at the time in charge of the Department for Local Government and Housing and Communities. And they launched what they called a devolution revolution. And that involved this whole massive shakeup of the way that local government is organized in England, because they wanted to change all the structures of councils and then allow combined authorities, which are authorities that would sit over like an umbrella of several different councils, and then have mayors at the head of those. And then they said they would get a whole load more powers and clout to make sure that their area can prosper and grow. So we've already been on this kind of pathway of devolution and what we're hearing from Andy Burnham, I think, is that he wants to kind of turbocharge that. And like I said, we don't know what his plans, if any, might be for fiscal devolution, I. E. Allowing those mayors or local authorities to keep more tax revenues or whatever else it might be. We do know he's talking about transport skills, housing, so giving them more power to make decisions in their local area. And like I say, some areas already have that, like Greater Manchester, others don't. It's a real patchwork at the moment in England. And so I think what I think he's talking about is trying to make sure that every part of the country gets the kind of powers that he thinks can lead to a more kind of prosperous local communities.
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A
And ant on transport, we heard every single hour of every single day during the Makerfield by election about the Bee network, the integrated transport network in Manchester that Andy Burnham, I wasn't going to say created, but takes credit for. Just explain to us what actually happened there in Manchester with the buses and the public transport network, and then we can talk about how maybe that could apply in other places.
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G
Yeah, sure thing. So back before the Bus Services act was passed in the middle of the 2010s, you had essentially one bus regime for London and a different one in other parts of the country. In other parts of the country, you could either have local authorities run their own buses, which was expensive and difficult, or you had kind of a private market, free for all in terms of competition for routes, which meant a bus
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A
company could just cancel a bus route because they weren't making enough money for it, and then everyone would be stranded.
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G
That's right. And the situation in London was different in that the Mayor of London and TFL had the power to designate specific routes and contract out, essentially franchise out those routes. Two different companies who were in competition with each other to bid for the right to operate those routes. But under the strategic guidance and operation of Transport for London, who ultimately controlled the farebox, which was the revenue stream that comes from the passengers, what this meant was that they could provide a much more integrated network across the whole of London. And particularly kind of think about cross subsidizing the most, use the most profitable routes to help pay for subsidies for less popular routes, which are ultimately still an important part of a network.
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A
And also you could have a political element of decision making there, like, okay, this community here would benefit from a bus route, which a private operator might not be willing to do because there wasn't enough money to make.
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G
That's right. And a crucial kind of part of this is that the mayor was accountable for this, that if you didn't like how the buses were being run, you could blame the mayor of London, whether that was Ken Livingston, Boris Johnson or Siddiq.
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A
Right. And so what has happened in Manchester is that the Transport for London model now applies in Manchester. So could it just be as simple as saying, oh, that model applies in Leeds, Newcastle, everywhere.
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G
So the big step that was taken in the 2010s with Burnham was the creation of the Metro mayor office, not just in Greater Manchester, but in other kind of big city regions within England, gave these places the power to essentially run those kind of bus services in the same way that London does. That is now being rolled out, was first rolled out in Greater Manchester after a series of court cases, a lot of technical governs about buying the depots and rolling them out borough by borough. Now that that model has been proven to be implemented in a metro mayor area, you are seeing other places now starting to introduce it. So Steve Rotherham in Liverpool City region,
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A
he's introducing Burnham's best mate.
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G
Andy Burnham's best mate is introducing bus franchising in Liverpool and Merseyside region. And so, you know, other metro mayors are picking this up as well. It does require capacity and leadership and resource from at the local level because
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A
it's a big job to implement it.
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G
It is a big job to implement it. So we are seeing some Metro mayors are saying, thanks, but no thanks. This isn't right for our area, which is fine. But one of the initiatives which touches on is local government reorganisation point that Alex mentioned that what do you do about these places that don't yet have Metro mayors? The government has initially responded to that by saying, well, local authorities can now run these bus services without a Metro mayor. Which raises the question of, well, what do you do about accountability in these places?
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A
But also because you don't have a directly elected council leader in most of them.
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G
Quite. Exactly. But as well as that sort of the future of devolution in these places where we don't have these metromea structures yet, where local government boundaries are still a bit up in the air, how devolution is rolled out in these other places is going to be a sticking point for the Burnham government.
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A
And Alex, back to your point about not everywhere is the same. It's like you can see a lovely integrated transport system in a mostly urban area, but then that's a very different proposition in a very rural area where you might need loads and loads and loads of bus routes to serve everyone because they're more scattered about the place.
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B
Yeah, totally spot on. And I do think that kind of question of geography is quite a vital question to the whole devolution agenda, really. Because where you have got maybe some of the most high profile regional mayors, they have largely, though not exclusively, been based in and around the city region. So Andy Burnham, who was obviously the mayor of Greater Mansion Manchester, you had previously the. My God, I've forgotten his name. Andy street, so high profile, just had a mind blank on him. Who was the mayor of the West Midlands. Now it's a Labour mayor called Richard Parker. You've had to be fair. Ben Houchin, Conservative mayor in the Tees Valley, which is less of a city region, but there is this idea about a kind of big urban centre which could in theory act as the site of driver for growth and like you say, the kind of. Of geography that almost makes a lot of sense. So that if you've got a transport network, there's a sort of obvious geographical region that it would apply to. Same with, like housing. What then happens in the much more rural areas or the areas where there isn't one obvious urban center or a natural geography? What about the places where there's a question of identity? So there's a really active discussion at the moment between Devon and Cornwall, or there has been about what they would do about having a mayor, because Cornwall has said quite clearly that they don't want a mayor for Devon and Cornwall because of the distinct identities of those counties. So Cornwall are resisting that idea and now Devon are pressing ahead with a mayor. So there's lots of questions about whether or not you can really just pick up the Greater Manchester model and put it on other parts of the country where questions of geography and identity will really, really come into force. Now, we don't know that that's what Andy Burnham is suggesting, but obviously a lot of his experience is based in Greater Manchester. And I think when you look to other parts of the country, it's possible it becomes much more complex. And we are seeing that play out a little bit with the Government's plan to reorganize local councils. There've been quite a lot of local rows and wrangling about what the boundaries and the borders should be and what town or village or county or area should. Should sit under what structure. And that stuff is actually quite important when it comes not just to how people feel about their place, but the way that services work and are delivered in those areas.
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A
I just always remember when David Cameron was Prime Minister and there was one of those regular reviews of constituency boundaries for seats at Westminster, and the geography and the population meant that maybe there was going to have to be a constituency that was partly in Cornwall and partly in Devon, across the River Tamar, which obviously is between Devon and Cornwall. And David Cameron was caught off mic saying, come on, it's just the River Tamar, not the Amazon. And that was one of the most controversial things David Cameron ever said in the southwest. And I remember being sat down to cover the controversy. But that was a very, very formative lesson for me about local and regional and national identity.
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B
It matters. It really matters.
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A
Ant. Yeah. Let's talk about the metro mayors then, because it seems like these going to be the vehicle for a lot of this stuff. There's a vibe at the moment that mayors are great and they become much more visible and they can really galvanize things and look what it did from Manchester and the West Midlands. But then you look at Bristol and they got rid of their mayor. And I know it's a little bit more complicated than that, but just explain to me what Bristol tells us.
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G
Yeah. So in Bristol, they got rid of the local authority mayor who runs the City Council there. There's still the metro mayor of the west of England, who is Helen Godwin now, which sits in a tier above the city government. Andidas. Andy Burnham as mayor of Gredham. Manchester sat above Manchester City Council and Steve Rotherham as Liverpool city region sits above City of Liverpool. The idea here is that the metro mayors are meant to be the strategic layer of government, that they include both the sort of urban core where there's lots of jobs, lots of employment, but also the surrounding suburbs where lots of people live who ultimately work in that central area in the Case of the Bristol referendum. Bristol was one of the few places to get a local authority mayor back at the start of the Cameron government, after a kind of fairly tumultuous period locally, politically. Eventually there was a campaign to abolish the office of the mayor and there was a local referendum and the office was scrapped and it's been replaced by a more kind of councillor led model that's not changed the metro mayor tier at all. But I think it does show that ultimately, you know, these local governing arrangements are still a little bit fragile in some ways, it's a little bit new.
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A
And also, Alex, we have to be quite precise with our language as journalists, because one mayor is not the same as another.
- [29:46]
B
No. And even one mayor is not the same as another. So you get like ceremonial mares who are the ones that you might see in the chains that, you know, turn up to important local events. Then you have, for example, that. Exactly, as Ant was just saying, so mayors of council areas, so directly elected, but they're to do local authority councils. And then you've got like these metro mayors like Andy Burnham was, or like Ben Houchen is in the Tees Valley, and they are mayors that sit over councils with a sort of more strategic regional responsibility meant to be the kind of championship. So, yeah, there are different kinds of mares and even by just outlining that, it shows you the kind of complexity that's involved in all of this. And there are some people, I mean, like the. The direction of travel from successive governments of different colors has been this move towards devolution. Some people would argue it's not been fast enough or bold enough, but it has been this kind of move towards devolution with this mayoral model. But there are some people that say, and the public in some instances, like in Bristol, say, do we need this? You know, what does this mean for me? Is this a sort of another layer of bureaucracy on an already quite complicated system of local government? And even when we've got mayors that we should call the same thing, like the metro mayors or the regional mayors, like the Andy Burnham model, even they have different powers. So even what they control in area by area is different at the moment. So it is a real patchwork and it is quite complex. And part of the argument for these more high profile mayors, the regional mayors or the metro mayors is that they can be seen by the public and they're visible and they can, you know, fly the flag for their region and they can be held accountable. But of course, given how complicated the whole system is, you know, they really do have to be visible for the public to know who they are and then to feel able to hold them account, to hold them to account properly for what they do or don't do in an area.
- [31:36]
A
And newscaster Lauren has messaged to say, with Mayor Mamdani doing so well in New York, although maybe people on the right would say he's not doing well. And former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham looking set to be Prime Minister. Why is this the era of the mayor?
- [31:50]
G
Well, this is the era of the mayor. I mean, this is certainly the era of cities. You know, all around the world, we see that cities are becoming more important to the national economies of places, indeed the global economy. I think there has been this kind of change in political and economic thinking that has recognized this increasingly over the past 10, 15 years. So this is why central government has led with the mayoral model. They see it does improve accountability, it does where it works well, does seem to have an impact on better provision of services and ability to drive growth within local areas. But, yeah, I think we are unusual internationally. I think it's still important to remember in just how centralized our state is, that it might seem kind of our system is complex. It might seem that these metro mayor institutions are still quite novel. But actually what we're proposing is not that we embark on some crazy experiment. We're actually suggesting that we've become a bit more normal and a bit less kind of unusual in the degree of our centralization compared to our real peers.
- [32:54]
A
And there's another way of thinking about centralization beyond just the flow of money, Alex, is the flow of responsibilities. And you and I have spent years talking about how local councils are basically told by central government what they've got to spend lots of their money on. And the bulk of that is funding for special educational needs and disabilities and adult social care. So actually, councils don't have a lot of discretion about what they even do.
- [33:17]
B
No, that's completely right. And that increasingly has become the case over recent years as demand for those services, the cost of providing those key services has gone up. And they are the services that councils are obliged to, to provide by law. So you get lots of people in local government at council level saying, like, our discretion over what we've got left in our budgets and what we can spend that on is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And there's another argument about all of this too, which is that quite often coming back to the way that local government has been funded, you. You get big ideas from central government about plans to Think back Boris Johnson level up the country. When he was talking about addressing regional inequality and giving local areas more clout, the big criticism of that idea was that what local authorities were having to do was bid for pots of money from central government and sort of compete against each other for these funding pots. And therefore some areas got them and some areas didn't. And there were some conditions in some cases on what that money could be used for. And all that kind of held up getting the money out of the door onto the ground and it making a real difference. And then there's the secondary question to all of that, which is just, just how much money might be available. So we've already heard Andy Burnham talk about this big council house building idea when he wants to get, you know, this big program of new council houses built. How is that funded? Is there enough resource? And when you look back to where, you know, devolution ambition has been in the past over again, successive governments really, there's quite often from the people that are tasked with delivering change on the ground in local communities. This question about, well, is there enough money really to make a real difference?
- [34:54]
A
And Ann, just on, it's called skills, which I always think seems quite jargony, but that's basically giving people the skills to have a job. So it's incredibly important. There's a lot of talk about devolving provision of skills. Now I sort of know in theory what that is, but I then find it quite hard to then turn that into a practical thing that makes sense to anybody, for example, somebody who wants to get an apprenticeship. So what would be in your ideal world, a really devolved skills model?
- [35:25]
G
So I think maybe the easiest way to explain this is to think first about university system, which is very centralized. People choose a course they want to do, they pick university, they go off and they study it. What we know about people who don't go to university is they're much more likely to stay in their local area and nevertheless kind of, if they can get training, particularly in specialized and kind of rare skills, they can still have a good quality of life, high incomes and progress in their career in their own way. A problem with the local skill system, the non university system, is it's not particularly tied into what the different specialisms of different local economies are. So the argument for devolving the skills system, so basically say for further education colleges and similar, and apprenticeships, is to create more connections between local government, particularly the mayors, local employers and then local skills providers to say, hey, what is it that businesses really need from their place. You know, do some places really need welders? Or do some places really need people who are lab technicians or, you know, do some people need a completely different skill set? Oh, we're going to. That's expensive to provide. We'll help pay for the colleges or similar to provide more of those skills relative to other parts of the country. We'll develop a kind of cluster of knowledge in that particular settlement so that we can then say to potential applicants, hey, here's a guarantee that if you come here and you do this kind of maybe quite strange or quite technical course, we know there's a job waiting for you on the other side of that. On the other side of that training. And actually we think this is a real strength for our area and you can go far while staying here where you live.
- [37:00]
A
Oh, very good way of explaining it. Although there's a. That relies on a few things that relies on people on an area having specialism that they can then get some funding for some specialist training. And maybe not every area has an amazing unique ceramics industry or amazing chip building industry also. Presumably that also then needs people willing to move around the country as well to go and look for those jobs. Even though you were saying a lot of it is about people wanting to stay where they are. So again, that's quite a different kind of culture from the one that we've got, isn't it?
- [37:33]
G
It's quite different. I mean, people move around a lot for university at present. Right. We know graduates move all over the place when they both go to university and then when they leave it as well. I think it definitely. It's a way of kind of building on what we already have. As I said before, we can see there are kind of economic strengths in every part of the country. We don't need every part part of the country to perform in the same way. And places should absolutely be thinking about how can they grow new businesses and new specialisms, especially under a kind of more devolved model where that becomes more important.
- [38:06]
A
And Alex, all of this is just making me realise how important it is who ends up being Andy Burnham's Chancellor, because it will have to be somebody who's willing to give away some power and to give away quite a lot of pounds. Control over a lot of pounds.
- [38:20]
B
Yeah, exactly. Whether it's like direct funding or whether it is control over the funding, you're completely right. And it was really interesting that when Andy Burnham did give his first kind of speech after the Makefield by election, which he was talking about this idea of shifting power away, he was really clear. And obviously he's coming at this as a man who's had an experience of being almost on the other end of the devolution equation as one of the mayors for best part of the last decade. And he was sort of pointing to subtly, clearly the fact he's had some battles with the Whitehall machine in the treasury as he as mayor was trying to wrest power or funding or whatever it might be away from them. And the message that he was quite clearly giving was that he doesn't want that to be the case anymore. He was talking about no more of that, no more of, of Whitehall and the treasury trying to like, hold on to power and funding. He wants it to get out there across the regions. And, you know, he's obviously a man that speaks from a personal experience in that respect as the mayor of Greater Manchester. And he also made the point that whoever here points to his cabinet while he's taking, he says, a very different approach to governing and that he wants to be a lot more collegian at Collegiate with backbench mps and listen to everybody and take everybody's perspectives into account. He was clear that he was going to set the direction of travel as Prime Minister. So, you know, you can imagine with that, that. And given how central he's put this whole notion of devolution to his very early signs that we're getting from him about what he wants to do in government, you can imagine that he's going to want to drive this forward, but his Chancellor is clearly going to be crucial in being prepared to do it and then making it happen. Because lots of governments have talked up the idea about devolution as a way of solving regional inequality and really giving people a sense of, you know, pride in their community and feeling like things are really changing on the ground. It has run into hurdles as they've attempted to do that. I'm not saying it hasn't happened like I say it was under the Conservatives. We got some of these big mayors created in the first place and this government has been working towards this big shake up and a push for devolution already. But there have been hurdles, so. So, yeah, it's going to take quite a lot, I think, to push this through in the way that Andy Burnham is suggesting that he wants to ant.
- [40:22]
A
As our guest, I'm going to give you the last word. Give us something to look out for that would be quite obvious and quite easy for the layperson to get their head around. That would prove that Andy Burnham is really serious about this agenda.
- [40:35]
G
Well, you know, if he can't do it, no one else can. Right. You know, the fact that, you know, his career has been built on kind of making a success out of Greater Manchester, I think, suggests that. That how he does with his devolutionary agenda is how he will be judged by the electorate. Indeed, his legacy.
- [40:50]
A
This is his thing.
- [40:51]
G
This is his thing. I guess the one single thing to look out for over the next few months, I think it's actually. It is some of the fiscal devolution stuff and thinking about how not really the rates or kind of allowing places to flex the tax rate, how broad is the tax base that he's going for? Are we thinking about income tax as well as corporation tax as part of the new model for funding the minorities? Because, as we just heard, he wants to do quite a lot of stuff, quite a lot of responsibilities being devolved to the local level. Some of the details can be worked out in how to do that. As you said, the big question is exactly how we fund that. And to make this a coherent agenda, one that improves growth but also improves public services, you're going to need to have quite a different model of funding these services and indeed, allowing places to benefit from growth to fund those services.
- [41:41]
A
Interesting. I also just think even just talking about it starts to make a bit of a difference in how it all feels and then the decisions can come after that. Ant, thank you very much.
- [41:51]
G
Great to be on. Thank you.
- [41:52]
A
Alex, thank you very much for having the brainchild of this entire episode.
- [41:56]
B
You're so welcome. I'm pleased I gave birth to it.
- [41:58]
A
And good luck for the next few years as this now becomes everyone's thing. And finally, let's catch up with some more supporter reporters, which does not involve devolution, because we're actually going in the other direction, out into the world. We've got a message from Anna, who says, hello, I'm Croatian, but I've been living in Montreal for over a decade. I hope that qualifies me as a supporter reporter, though the wonderful Lis Doucet has already claimed Canada. True, Anna, well remembered. The good news, she says, is that I'll be back in Croatia for my summer holidays in just a few days, arriving just in time for the finals, even if, sadly, neither Croatia nor Canada will be there. Anna then says she's a devoted newscast listener and waiting to hear if Chris Mason is going to say Blimey. Is one of the highlights of her day. And then we've had a message from Jacqueline, who says, I'd like to be the reporter supporter for Czechia in the World Cup. I still call it the Czech Republic. She says she's Scottish but lives in Prague and works in an international school, which she then says is a bit of a loss on all fronts, to be honest, a reflection of the fact that neither Scotland nor Czechia did very well in the World Cup. And then we've had a message from Gordon who says as a fairly recent listener, oh, welcome aboard. Thank you. As I always enjoy listening to the relaxed but informative reporting on the news on my drive to work. He says I can represent Japan, having lived in Fukuoka for several years. He says I can also fill in the Scotland hole if needed because he is originally from the Isle of Arran. Gordon, thank you very much. I think we'll accept your application to be the supporter reporter from Japan. Right, that's all for this episode of Newscast, apart from to say we still have a few slots left in our World cup feature, so if you are in any of the remaining countries, get in touch newscastbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 033-01-239480 and Laura and Paddy will be back with your Saturday helping of Newscast very soon.
- [43:52]
B
Bye bye.
- [43:53]
A
Newscast.
- [43:54]
B
Newscast from the BBC.
- [43:56]
F
You've come to the end of Newscast. Some people, and you know who I mean, might say you ooze stamina. Can I encourage you to subscribe on BBC Sounds and you can get in touch with us anytime. Email us@newscastbc.co.uk, you can WhatsApp us on 0301-239-480. Foreign
- [44:21]
D
how has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250 year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.