Party time
Its party conference season again, and Core Cities are holding events at all three. The debate and polemic are high this year, with much at stake for each of the parties and for many of the other stakeholders, not least of all our major cities.
The economy tends to divide political opinion, but there are some critical issues that all parties do agree on, and one of them is, increasingly, devolution to cities and their local authorities to drive growth. Core Cities Group worked with the Coalition Government and the Opposition over the Summer to refine an amendment to the Localism Bill which aims to achieve exactly this. Championed by Lord McKenzie (Labour), Lord Shipley (Governments Adviser on Cities – Lib Dem), Lord Tope (Lib Dem) and Baroness Hanham (Conservative), it went through debate in the House of Lords with unanimous support – I believe the only amendment to this Bill to do so.
This will be a very significant change to legislation, and allows for the delegation of ministerial functions and transfer of public services to single or combined authorities, for the purposes of economic development and wealth creation, or to increase local accountability. This will be subject to guidance and competency tests set out by Government, and in the case of more significant transfers, subject also to parliamentary scrutiny. It would therefore be open to any place that could demonstrate it met the criteria. Once guidance is set out, authorities will be able to submit proposals to Government.
This amendment is a major step forward in real decentralisation, and the kind of localism that should set big cities free to play their full part in driving national economic growth. It has been supported by the new Minister for Cities, Greg Clark MP, and cities are already thinking through how they can make best use of the amendment for economic purposes. An amendment can be quite a dry, technical thing, but in this case what it leads to will, I hope, be very exciting indeed and a cause for future celebration.
See a related blog below from Chris Game, Visiting Lecturer, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.