Today Keir Starmer will chair the first meeting of the Council of Nations and Regions (CNR). It’s an innovation with an important message about Labour working to deliver across the UK. But how much difference will it make to the way the United Kingdom and its nations are run?
The Council has its origins in Gordon Brown’s report on the future of the UK which recommended ‘a new and powerful institution to drive co-operation between all its governments – a Council of the Nations and Regions.’ I was critical of Brown for not being radical enough but I also warned that ‘Labour in government is usually less radical than in opposition’. That’s certainly the case with the new Council.
Brown wanted the Council of Nations and Regions based in statute, with an independent secretariat. It was to be part of a series of constitutional changes, including stronger legal protection for the devolved parliaments, the replacement of the Lords with a union-wide second chamber, a new Council of England to represent English mayors and local government, and a new body to bring together the First Ministers with the UK Prime Minister.
Today’s Council was reportedly set up without even informing the Scottish government and will, it seems, be run out of Whitehall’s Cabinet Office by the recently demoted Sue Gray. While Brown’s Lords reform did raise some serious difficulties, the King’s Speech contained no proposals to give the CNR legal status and the rest of Brown’s proposals have, for now at least, disappeared.
Far from being at the heart of a refreshed four nation union in which deeper devolution goes alongside stronger cooperation, today’s CNR is an odd-looking body.
Chaired by the UK Prime Minister, it brings together the First Ministers of Scotland ,Wales and Northern Ireland (and NI’s Deputy First Minister) with England’s twelve directly elected mayors.
Yet First Ministers and English Mayors have vastly different powers and sources of authority. The First Ministers are chosen through national parliamentary elections and are responsible for nearly all domestic policy in the devolved nations. Their powers are devolved by statute, and they are responsible for huge budgets (£60bn in the case of Scotland).
Even the most powerful of England’s mayors has a budget smaller than some large English councils and has few powers devolved by right. Indeed, the total spending power devolved to all England’s mayors at the end of the last financial year was just £2.6bn.
Tony Blair did not endear himself to Welsh Labour when he likened the newly established Welsh Assembly to a parish council. It remains to be seen how keen the elected leaders of the devolved administrations will be at being lumped together with relatively minor players in the governance of England.
The SNP are already asking why Scotland’s major cities are not included. National leaders will surely want a stronger and more focussed collaboration with the UK government. The UK government will need it too: Labour’s missions are UK wide, but they can’t be run from London. They won’t be delivered without the whole-hearted engagement of the devolved nations and their elected leaderships.
England’s mayors have welcomed their seat at the table. The last Government forced directly mayors on any worthwhile devolution ‘deal’ but it never wanted to give them a collective voice. Keir Starmer has now done that. But there may be trouble ahead.
Much of England’s local government south of the Severn-Wash line – covering many newly elected Labour MPs – has so far rejected the idea of mayors. This makes the mayoral map decidedly skewed. As important, not even the most advanced Mayoral Combined Authorities have anything like the powers and resources needed to achieve growth, build homes and play their part in the other missions.
The devolution ambition needs to be stepped up across England, not scaled back, and with robust but flexible governance arrangements. But there are worrying reports that the Treasury could be trying to clawback control over even the limited ‘single pot’ trailblazer devolution deals put forward by Michael Gove.
Labour needs to resist the Treasury insistence on controlling the purse strings that has undermined every devolution initiative since the 1990s. It seems an invitation to the CNR has not stopped some mayoral teams briefing against the government. There needs to be a better way of shaping devolution policy.
The danger is that the CNR satisfies no one: neither the vehicle for inter-governmental cooperation across the UK, nor the place where English devolution gets thrashed out.
The good news is that Labour can make more radical change. For the first time since 2005 Labour has a majority in all three British nations, making it easier to push through some of the constitutional protections for UK devolution Gordon Brown envisaged.
The new English Devolution Bill could devolve powers and resources to local and combined authorities across England by right, not just by permission of the centre. It could create a statutory body for devolved English local government to work with the UK government to agree policy.
The creation of the CNR carries a message that the Labour government wants to work across the United Kingdom to achieve its missions. But, on its own at least, it’s not enough to deliver success.
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