Centre for Small State Conservatives

It’s great the new Government is trying to breath fresh life into devolving power from Westminster, but their new ‘Rewiring The State’ proposal doubles down on some big mistakes in Blair’s last attempt:

1, It adds more expensive extra layers of politicians who behave the same as the ones in Westminster, rather than passing power directly to the lowest practical level for each service instead.

2. It makes local authorities self-financing by giving them a share of local taxes (good) but stops them setting the actual levels of eg local business rates so they stand or fall on their own. The same goes for devolved governments too.

3. It centralises decisions away from local Councils, communities & historic counties into big ‘strategic authorities’ which is

a) the opposite of devolution &

b) prioritises bureaucratic neatness & convenience even though different public services work better on separate boundaries.

There’s a better, cheaper & more flexible answer which we’ve described here instead:

Blair’s devolution experiment is broken – and someone needs to say so