Local government: night mayors

By Richard North - December 18, 2024

The way we are governed, and the governmental structures adopted, and how we are represented, are all constitutional matters. They impinge massively on the nature of our democracy and, to a very great extent, determine whether or not we are a true democratic state.

As such, changes should not be made lightly, nor at the whim of any one party – and particularly not on the basis of a vague passage in an election manifesto and a rushed White Paper which has not made the slightest concessions to public consultation, by a government elected by a mere 20 percent of registered voters. This is by no means an adequate mandate for change.

At the very least, such changes require extensive public consultation, on the back of an informed discussion – but even that is an imperfect process as the Royal Commission route adopted for the 1972 reforms has shown. But at least then, some attempt was made to secure public engagement.

That the public should be involved in decisions of such magnitude was recognised during the last major attempt to restructure local government, with the abortive implementation of a regional policy in 2003, when – as I pointed out yesterday – a series of referendums were planned.

This, at the very least, should have been done, and reflects practice in other countries of the world, particularly – but not exclusively – the United States, where the requirement for a referendum on any fundamental changes to the structures of local government is hardwired into state constitutions.

In fact, this has been the case in the UK, with previous governments. As of October 2021, there have 54 referendums on the core proposal of yesterday’s White Paper – the installation of elected mayors – which resulted in a mere 17 mayors being established, with 37 districts rejecting the idea.

Of the districts which agreed to a mayor, some had won the referendum on turnout of as low as 10-11 percent and, of the 17, nine went on to hold referendums on removing their mayors, resulting four posts being disestablished. Again, low turnouts were a feature of the contests.

In a parallel move, the regional policy adopted by the Blair government was abruptly brought to a halt by the North-east in their 2004 referendum, when the proposition was rejected by a decisive 78 percent of the voters on a near-50 percent turnout.

In the UK though, where we lack a formal, written constitution, set out in a single document, and lack any specific protections from constitutional vandalism by partisan governments, it was not surprising that the rejection of elected mayors by so many districts, and the decisive rejection of regionalisation, was not the end of the matter.

With the original idea of elected mayors being proposed by Michael Heseltine during the Major administration, we have seen successive governments of all parties pushing the same agenda.

Wherever possible, they sought to avoid the inconvenience and uncertainty of referendums so that, in March 2020, we had the five local authorities of West Yorkshire and the Johnson administration stitch up a devolution deal which imposed on the former metropolitan country area an elected mayor to preside over a newly-formed “combined authority”.

Needless to say, the 5 million of so citizens of West Yorkshire weren’t consulted and in the first election in 2021, a mere 36.5 percent of the electorate turned out to the vote, tacked on to the council elections, to deliver a first preference vote of 43.1 percent, delivering a plum job to Labour’s Tracy Brabin with just under 16 percent of the registered vote.

Even a change in the voting system in 2024 barely managed to alter the calculus, bringing Brabin back with 16.5 percent of the registered vote.

In the West Midlands mayoral election in 2024, the result was even more dire, with the victor, Labour’s Richard Parker gaining his post with 11.3 percent of the registered vote, while the Manchester election, which had the relatively well-known politician, Andy Burnham, gained only 20 percent of the registered vote.

One might think that the lack of enthusiasm for elected mayors might, therefore, give Westminster politicians pause for thought. But that would be to mistake the United Kingdom for a democracy. Oblivious to the past, and the obvious lack of popularity for this system of government, we have the newly-elected Labour regime powering ahead.

What is troubling though – if predictable – is the weakness of the political and media response. Answering the ministerial statement in the Commons on Monday, we had David Simmonds, Conservative opposition spokesman mildly complain that the White Paper did not represent “bottom-up local leadership” but was “top-down templates for local government”.

This is not, he said, “the chance to flourish as a place and a community with a unique identity and history, but an expectation of being subsumed into an anonymous structure that knows and cares little for local areas, focusing instead on Whitehall targets”.

“Through the back door”, Simmonds continued, “by stripping local politicians of a say over important planning decisions and by imposing financial assumptions that further constrain local decision-making, our local democracy is undermined”. “Instead of genuine devolution”, he railed:

…this White Paper sets out a reductive approach. It is a mishmash of new tiers and new taxes, taking decision making further away from residents. If the experience in London is anything to go by, it will cost them a fortune at the same time. More concerning still, the approach fails the key test of starting with a clear understanding of what we require our local councils to do.

There was more but, in the 15 Conservative interventions, there was no sense of outrage at this travesty of democracy nor any concerted expression of opposition to a proposal which effectively strips many local authorities of decision-making on important local matters.

The biggest disappointment, though, was the sole intervention by a Reform MP, in this case, the party’s least-experienced spokesman, James McMurdock. Instead of addressing the substantive issues, he sought to score a cheap political point on the delay in the expected elections, which would be brought about by the administrative changes proposed.

Given the self-declared importance of the local government vote to Reform, it would have been more helpful if the party’s leader had been in the chamber to voice the opposition to Labour’s proposal from a party which was not compromised by pursuing the same policy.

But Farage had more important things to do. He was in the United States with his Candy man ready to meet Elon Musk and talk about money, having completely missed the point about Labour’s proposals.

It was left the Telegraph, therefore, to make the point that Farage hadn’t made, that Rayner’s “reforms” would mean less democracy. Arguably, the paper said, local people are more interested in their services working well and being delivered at low cost with reduced taxes.

Were that to be the outcome of Rayner’s reforms, it observed, they might be welcome. But the history of these shake-ups indicates we will end up with more bureaucracy, less democracy, greater expense and the gradual Balkanisation of England into regions no one wants.

That editorial seems to have been the last of the scant coverage of this issue from the national media, which has now largely disappeared, with the media now devoting more space to the Farage-Musk meet than it did to the Rayner butchery.

Meanwhile, the electorate sits passively by, uninvolved and largely uninterested in a development which will, in time, have significant and adverse impacts on just about everyone in this country – apart from the gilded political classes.

Twelve years ago now, a group of us proposed The Harrogate Agenda, the provisions of which could have ensured that voters could prevent something like this from ever happening. But, despite early support, there were sneers and general indifference from many who viewed our proposals. Now we see chickens coming home to roost – again amid a huge wave of indifference.

The thing about democracy, though – like so much else – is that you must use it or lose it. And, confronted with this bureaucratic monstrosity, we are on the brink of losing a sizeable hunk of our democratic rights, as the “night mayors” are poised to make a poor system even worse, with no appreciable hue and cry.

They say people deserve the governments they get. At times like this, I am inclined to agree.