By Victor Anderson

Among the many contributions John Prescott deserves to be remembered for, one that often gets forgotten is his 2002 White Paper on regional devolution in England.

The set of eight regional assemblies he proposed never happened. The one for Great London had already gone ahead and was elected in 2000, along with the London Mayor. It was expected at the time that the second-most likely to have public support was in the North-East, but the referendum there in 2004 threw out the proposals by 78% to 22%. So the North-East Assembly never got off the ground, and the plans for the others were abandoned.

The decades since then produced a variety of arrangements for different parts of the country. The Prescott regions seemed too big, and there has been a general tendency to create new bodies at a ‘sub-regional’ level, which you might almost call ‘counties’. If you look at a map of England soon after 1066, it looks incredibly familiar in its structure of counties, and their reinvention felt long overdue.

This takes us to the current Government’s “devolution” proposals. The English Devolution White Paper was published in December 2024, and intended to pave the way for an English Devolution Bill in 2025. The rhetoric of devolution is still there. But how genuine is it? There are two major reasons for believing it is not genuine at all.

The first reason is very plain and open in the White Paper. At the same time as proposing to devolve some central government powers to directly elected mayors, the Government also wants to get rid of most district councils and push their powers upwards to the counties and mayors. Areas with a long history of local self-government would automatically lose it, with reportedly even authorities with a third of a million or so people being regarded by the Government as too small and in need of a merger with some other area. And the mayors would be executive mayors, taking power away from councillors, who are elected on a much more local basis. Larger local government units of course also means larger wards and fewer councillors to represent people.

Whatever else this might be, it’s not devolution. Overall and on balance, it’s the opposite, and so the use of the word ‘devolution’, although it sounds nice, becomes misleading at best and even Orwellian.

The second reason for doubting the genuineness of the Government’s commitment to devolution is that it’s clear that what actual devolution there is (to executive mayors) is designed to be subordinate to the overall strategy of prioritising economic growth over everything else. As part of this strategy, the mayors are basically supposed to deliver the central government’s agenda in their areas.

However, if they are to be genuine representatives of those areas, they might strike the balance differently between the pursuit of economic growth and other objectives, such as concern for the environment or quality of life or poverty reduction. This of course is not what the Government wants, and perhaps not what it would allow them to do.

The crunch here is coming on airport expansion, a disastrous policy for the environment, both globally (through carbon emissions) and locally (through noise and air pollution), especially at a time when it is more necessary than ever to send a clear message rejecting what Donald Trump represents, including his trashing of the environment. The Mayor of London does have some real powers and is standing up against Heathrow expansion, apparently with the support of a large proportion of Londoners and London MPs.

The new overemphasis on GDP growth brings many difficulties for the Government. One of those will be the huge additional question mark it puts over the rhetoric about devolution.

Victor Anderson was elected to the London Assembly when it started in 2000.

Image: Thousands say ‘No’ to Heathrow expansion. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hacan/3666970579 Attribution: HACAN/hacan.org.uk Licence: Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-ND 2.0 Deed