Last Word: COVID-19 and English Devolution
| Author | Arianna Giovannini |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820958824 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
40POLITICAL INSIGHT•SEPTEMBER 2020
Last Word
Over-centralisation in England is
not a new story. We are one of the
most centralised nations in the
developed world and the strong
concentration of power in London is the root
cause of growing regional inequalities across
the country. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic
has taken the challenge to a whole new level,
laying bare the failings of our centralised
system of governance.
Over the past months, Westminster has
almost instinctively entered in ‘top-down
command and control’ mode – centralising
even further decision-making in the face of
the stark regional dierences in the spread
and impact of COVID-19, without making any
use of, and often snubbing, devolved and
local government institutions in England. This
approach has also gone hand-in-hand with
further withdrawal of nancial support to the
local state, on top of a decade of austerity.
And yet, central responses to the crisis
have been poor and often contradictory.
Decisions imposed by the centre on local
authorities have often had negative eects
on local communities, from the appalling
management and distribution of Personal
Protective Equipment and continued delays
in the sharing of data on infection rates, to
the quickly-withdrawn promise made to local
authorities to ‘spend whatever it takes’ to
respond to the pandemic.
On their part, local leaders have been very
vocal from the start and challenged central
government on this position – refusing, in
some cases, to implement national policies,
and demanding more powers and a seat
at the table where decisions are made. But,
beyond rhetoric, central government has
essentially ignored calls from metro mayors
and council leaders for greater power.
Much of this imbalance in central-local
relations in England is rooted in the power-
hoarding nature of the Westminster model
and in the British political tradition. In practice,
this means that the local state has never
been fully controlled by local government,
and central government has a strong hold
over it. Indeed, on paper local government
in England need not exist at all. This strongly
centralised model of sub-national governance
has impacted on, and moulded, the process
of devolution in the larger nation of the
UK and helps to explain its piecemeal and
dysfunctional nature.
While in the other nations of the UK political
devolution was introduced over 20 years
ago, in England the process has developed
in ts and starts over the same period of time
and remains unnished. With a patchwork
of devolution deals matched by a local state
depleted by austerity and now bearing the
brunt of a pandemic, devolution in England
amounts at best to some form of ‘centralised
decentralisation’, which builds on a rhetoric
of local empowerment, whilst essentially
leaving all the levers of power in the hands of
ministers in London.
Dierences in the form devolution has
taken across the UK have become even starker
during the pandemic. Whilst the leaders of
the devolved administrations in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland have been able
to stand their ground and develop their own
policy approaches to manage the crisis, metro
mayors and local leaders do not enjoy the
same leverage and nd themselves between a
rock and a hard place. They want to be able to
do what’s best for the communities they serve,
but don’t have the powers to achieve this. So
they demand more clout, but the government
won’t listen – because it doesn’t have to.
In the run up to the 2019 election, Boris
Johnson pledged to ‘do devolution properly’ in
England. The English Devolution Bill expected
in the Autumn should be the fullment of this
promise. However, while many have called for
the Bill to open the way to a more inclusive,
bottom-up system, where devolution of
substantial power and funding is be made
available to all areas, recent debates suggest
that reforms might amount, once again, to old
wine in new bottles.
In a speech in July, laying the foundations of
the new Bill, local government minister Simon
Clarke posited that council mergers will be the
price to pay for local areas that want to get a
new devolution deal. A reorganisation of local
government into unitaries with more strings
attached to devolution would be quite the
opposite of what the Prime Minister vowed.
If all communities are to bounce back from
the current crisis and thrive, local leaders
should be in the driving seat rather than at the
back of the room. And if the government is
serious about its commitment to ‘level up’ the
country, then it should re-invest the local state
with the resources, power and trust it needs
and deserves.
However, while we’ve learnt the hard way
from the pandemic that Westminster does
not necessarily know best, so far central
government has shown very little willingness
to embrace the spirit of institutional re-
invention and radical redistribution of power
that would be needed to ‘build back better’.
Arianna Giovannini is Associate Professor in
Local Politics and Public Policy and Deputy
Director of the Local Governance Research
Centre at the Department of Politics, People
and Place, De Montfort University. She
tweets @AriannaGi.
COVID-19 and
English Devolution
The pandemic has exposed Westminster’s top-down approach to
devolution in England, writes Arianna Giovannini.
Political Insight September 2020 BU.indd 40Political Insight September 2020 BU.indd 4004/08/2020 13:2804/08/2020 13:28
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