The board of HM Treasury needs updating as it’s over 3 years out of date. And if the personnel are still the same, then the lack of local government experience speaks volumes
You can read the biographies here
Government to abolish district councils – says the FT
See Jen Williams here. The line that left me furious/speechless was as follows:
“Many also wanted more fiscal levers, such as being able to have a tourism tax, but people involved in the discussions said the Treasury was not currently open to such a move.“
Jen Williams for the FT, 13 Dec 2024
I’m picturing the conversations now:
Above – Sir Humphrey vs Sir Bernard on ‘Regional Government’
The Government’s devolution policies will fail if The Treasury maintains its stranglehold on taxation and spending policies
It’s up to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to change minds – supported by the Deputy Prime Minister. In the case of Cambridge – which the Minister for Housing and Planning is paying extraordinarily close attention to for a Minister of State, his ambitions for Cambridge (irrespective of how he chooses to define it) will fail if all he creates is a sister unitary to Peterborough City Council with the same limited powers and funding. Because that great cathedral city where Queen Katharine of Aragon is buried, is facing a catastrophe.
Note Peterborough’s MP Andrew Pakes – who spent two years campaigning in the city and had huge support from surrounding constituency activists including from Cambridge, scraped in by a whisker and has a majority of only 118 votes. More worryingly for Labour was not that the Conservatives came a very close second, its that over 10,000 votes were divided between two new and more hardline political parties outside of the Greens and LibDems – who came 5th and 6th respectively.
It’s not more grant funding from Central Government that a new Cambridge Unitary council needs, rather it’s new powers to tax the huge wealth generated within the economic sub-region
The media optics of Cambridge getting what seem like huge sums of money to pay for new infrastructure at a time when the rest of the country is struggling, looks absolutely awful. And yet in 2022 the University of Cambridge boasted about how it – along with its member colleges had raised over £2billion in donations. Note the senior officers of the University of Cambridge combine the sums when it suits them, and separates them when it suits them too – such as their failure to pay for the long-promised West Cambridge swimming pool. While it may seem like a minor accounting and timetabling issue for some in the institution, the students who compete for the University are feeling the financial hit as Varsity explain here, along with the rest of the city and district which are still waiting for a long-promised leisure facility.
The problem for Ministers and The Treasury is that it’s not just local obsessives, mavericks, and people who don’t get out much/have no friends or social lives like myself who go on about this stuff.
As I found out earlier this month, the Director of Strategy and Major Projects at Addenbrooke’s / Cambridge University Hospitals Trust Clare Stoneham told the Cambridge Biomedical Campus open forum ten days ago that our Accident and Emergency Unit is currently serving four times the number of people it was designed for. That outstanding problem is on the desk of The Treasury because as a department they were the ones that pulled the funding for previous plans to expand the unit and they were also the ones who refused to provide the funding later on down the line while ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government and successor departments were fine for Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire to carry on building houses at such a fast rate.
Local residents don’t care who is responsible – The Permanent Secretary, the Chief Secretary, the Health Secretary, the Local Government Secretary, or local council chiefs. When they see ‘the state’ enabling things to happen that make it harder for existing residents to access doctors, dentists, school places for their children, social housing for their ill relatives, they get annoyed. Even more so when no one individual or institution seems to be ‘in charge’. The rhetoric around metro mayors – and the political justification for them, has been about having ‘one person in charge’ but the reality has been that successive ministers have provided combined authority mayors with neither the legal powers, the structural responsibilities, the financial powers, nor the influence to function as that ‘accountable visible to the public person in charge’. As an NHS Doctor and former local councillor, Nik Johnson (Labour’s CPCA Mayor) is more aware than most of where he lacks the powers, funding, and competencies to respond to as an institution (as the mayoralty is) to the needs of the CPCA area.
“Will Treasury budge?”
Again, that’s the institutional problem that HMT has – few if any of their senior management have extensive experience of local government – especially in two tier areas. When I transferred down from the Cambridge regional government office to London in my civil service days in the mid-2000s, several of my then soon-to-be former colleagues urged me to ensure my new team in London (who were probably the most highly competent and highly-driven team I’ve ever worked in – hitting the ground running and running very fast), understood the needs of two-tier counties when writing new guidance for the them previous Labour Government’s reform programme for councils. This was Strong and Prosperous Communities, published in 2006. My way around it was to invite in one of the most competent and fearless younger senior council officers from a nearby two-tier area to join the Whitehall programme board responsible for signing it off.
“You gave one of my Grade 5’s a roasting on this in Cambridge, picking up all of the points that needed to be picked up. Want to come down to Whitehall and help us write this thing?”
She told me my invitation was completely unexpected given their previous dealings with Whitehall, but knowing that someone from local government with experience of working in a two-tier area was co-authoring the guidance had a positive impact in the working relationships – certainly in East Anglia. Also – and although I didn’t realise it at the time, it was something significant for a local government officer with no previous central government experience, to put on their CV.
Ministers have been talking a lot about innovation – yet in and around Cambridge our innovation communities have huge issues with infrastructure
We know this because earlier today the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge just announced an event for 31 January 2025 at the other end of Station Road to discuss them
“Investment in infrastructure in East Anglia lags behind other regions, with deficits identified in housing, transport, and digital infrastructure, as well as the infrastructure required to both protect the region from climate change and move towards achieving Net Zero.
“How can we make sure that the benefits of innovation are spread fairly across the region? And how can we ensure that investment in infrastructure is able to support the inclusive growth of the region?”
Above: Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge, 13 Dec 2024
Either The Treasury relaxes its stranglehold on taxation and spending policies and enables whatever new unitary council for Cambridge to have significantly greater powers to tax the wealth generated within our economic sub-region, or Treasury civil servants and ministers will continually have extra work created for them by lobbying organisations demanding meetings and discussions. One of the things my time in Whitehall taught me was the number of functions civil servants did (especially assessing grant funding bids for competitive pots) that could be distributed according to need by formula grant based on sound data, evidence, and statistics. (Which is why the Census is ever so important – more than a few grants use the data collected from them).
Put simply: Either let more local/regional tiers collect revenues from a wider range of sources to meet local needs, or continue to create more work for civil servants and ministers in central government. And have obsessives like me crawling over every ministerial announcement you make about my home town. I’m sure people in Westminster and Whitehall have got better things to do than be irritated by me.
Abolition of district councils
Let’s face it, this wasn’t really unexpected, but when you had ministers attending a social event with the District Councils’ Network only a few weeks before…that’s going to hurt. (Even though it was celebrating 50 years of the current structure of district councils established by Sir Edward Heath’s Government in 1974)
It need not be the end of the world for those in the district councils. Not least because parish and town councils (as wide and varied as that sector is) will remain. As far as I am aware anyway. Getting rid of that tier would involve amending primary legislation – i.e. inserting clauses into the Devolution Bill, something that would be hotly contested. Furthermore, even Redcliffe Maud’s proposals in 1969 acknowledged the importance of parish and town councils as advisory and scrutiny organisations, especially on planning. Furthermore, I’ve written about how that most local tier of government – the one closest to the residents, could become more empowered and more important within a unitary structure. See below:
“How might a “Great Cambridge” Unitary Council simplify lines of accountability for city, towns, & villages?“
As I’ve said in many previous blogposts, my vision is similar to that geographically of Redcliffe-Maud in 1969:
Above – detail of Redcliffe Maud’s proposals – Maps for Vol 1 (1969) HMSO
Put simply, in 1970 it was the policy of, and a manifesto commitment of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government to create the above map in the event of Labour being returned. So the above map *was once Labour Party Policy*. Ministers are more than welcome to look at Redcliffe-Maud again (see links here to digitised copies minus Derek Senior’s minority report) and use that as the basis for new unitary boundaries. when they ultimately go out to consultation.
Cambridge: A globally-recognised city run like a market town
As I wrote back in August 2024 here, the City of Cambridge needs a masterplan – perhaps one that is incorporated into a wider one for the new unitary council. In particular that plan needs to state clearly what we don’t have but need, and where any new buildings and facilities should be located. Hence why I wrote that Cambridge needs a second urban centre with a number of new civic buildings and institutions to anchor them that are not dependent on retail or consumerism. (City councillors seem unconvinced by this, thinking that smaller local centres will do the job well even though our growing city will need to make room for new, larger regional-sized facilities to serve people from across East Anglia).
“Anything else of note?”
The FT says to look out for:
- New powers for Combined Authority Mayors including the ability to overturn planning decisions made at local authority level (only London has this)
- Incorporating suburban rail lines into metro systems such as what London did with London Overground
- Take on affordable housing budgets currently held by Homes England – an executive agency of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (back in my day it was the Housing Corporation)
- Possibly something on powers/responsibilities with further education (16-19) – although I would like to see significantly strengthened powers on adult education and lifelong learning. Ministers really don’t need to hold onto these powers.
Anyway, the FT says Monday is the day of the announcement so have an easy weekend.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 