Devolution – a thousand flowers blooming?

Promodo

June 14, 2016

The approach to public sector reform from this Government and the previous Coalition has been characterised by two factors. There is a push factor- create sufficient heat to make it too uncomfortable to maintain the status quo and a pull factor – create the belief there is a better place to be. All those classically trained in change management will recognise this framework – fear of staying where we are and comfort there is a safe place to go to. We saw this in City Deals, Combined Authorities and now in Devolution Deals.

However, there is much yet to understand about the balance between the push and pull factors being deployed by the Government. The push factors are strong, well defined and unrelenting. They are characterised by the narrative of austerity – we cannot afford the public services we currently have and a public welfare narrative that the State and its officials are a necessary evil and must be seen and treated as such. The evil is defined in terms of self-serving, wasteful, a drag anchor on social and economic progress. The necessity lies in the safety net of services for those who remain on the outside of economic and social opportunity. The public welfare narrative has characterised thinking over successive governments since the late nineteen seventies. The breakdown of the post war welfare consensus and the associated shift from the state representing the collective will of the people to one where the individual is in transactional and consumer relationship with the state is embedded in the citizens view and in the view of the public institutions that serve them. The austerity programme is of course a relatively new phenomena and device. It helps create the conditions to translate discontent with the State into action for change. The scale, depth and longevity of the austerity programme require the discontent to be high and sustained. Without it the reasons for change will lose energy and commitment.

Any of us engaged in strategic change at an organisational level understand those dynamics and the associated risks. A compelling case to change things only remains compelling so long as there is no realistic alternative which allows things to stay broadly the same. Resistance to change, momentum, resource and time passing all act as factors to undermine the case for further change. The only way to mitigate those risks is to consider the strength of the pull factors. How attractive is an alternative. Too many change programmes fail because those instigating the change believe the pressure not to stay where we are is a sufficient and sustainable motivation to go to another place. The reality is that people and institutions will move away from the heat of the fire created from the austerity and public welfare narrative – but only so far as it needs to be to allow them to be at a comfortable temperature. After all a fire at the right distance is a warming, comforting place to be – particularly if you face the fire and can manage that distance.

Are the Government and Local Authorities going to make this mistake in their public sector reform agenda? Are they concentrating too much on the push factors and not enough on the pull factors? The Government has assiduously avoided the opportunity to define the future of devolution. There is no vision being articulated which paints a picture of what devolution looks like and how the nature of English governance will be transformed by it. Instead the Government has responded to these questions by arguing it’s not for government to define the future. The Government states that it doesn’t want a top down, standardised approach. It wants to see the vision and the ambition to be bottom up, to be stretching, challenging and innovatory. And all this comes only with a requirement that it must include a directly elected regional mayor and it must be “fiscally neutral”. Within these parameters let a thousand flowers bloom is the call of Government. Notwithstanding the concerns and issues about elected regional majors, this approach has its attractions to localities – particularly the possibility of greater local control over local destinies. This is the meat and drink of politics. The cake may be much smaller but at least it will be my cake to decide what to do with. But there lies the rub. In the absence of a vision and stated intention about a new constitutional settlement, the negotiations become centred on the question of control and not whether that control will deliver transformational change in the opportunities and successes of localities. The Government frames the debate as a series of asks that Localities may have. Each of these asks are in themselves a subject of debate about feasibility, desirability and controllability. To debate these factors the asks must be tangible and measurable and as such they become about programmes and projects. The asks must conform to the existing Whitehall Departmental organisational arrangements and to the existing policies of those Departments. As such new, different and joined up forms of delivery become difficult if not impossible asks. Through the negotiations the constraints increase as each new factor is taken into account and the opportunity for real change is eroded. The Localities are failing to counterpoise this process with a stated vision and expectation that can challenge this incrementalism by the limitations to their shared view of the locality. Leadership, desirability, controllability and benefit play out and the drive for consensus curtails the opportunity for real transformational challenges to Government.

There are significant voices in all this who whilst sharing this view of the limited and incremental nature of the devolution agenda argue it’s a point in time issue. If we go with this then over time and in new relationships things will change further. One measure of going further is fiscal devolution and the authority to raise local taxes. But this does not take account of the primary risk factors to real change – resistance, motivation, resource and time. The significant risk is the imperative for change is lost and the position becomes settled as the new status quo – a regional major with a set of decentralised responsibilities and powers fixed at a point in time.

The doubts, uncertainties and misgivings within localities arising from the questions over what devolution amounts to are leading to, amongst other things, defensive assertions about the nature of Combined Authorities, Majors and the relationship between them. A number of localities are asserting that the new arrangements will only require powers to be ceded from Government not from the constituent Local Authorities. Questions of control and balance of powers between the Mayor and Local Authority Leaders will also be contested space. Questions of feasibility, desirability and controllability become the currency within the localities as well as between the localities and Government.

This does not seem to me to be the ideal conditions to see a thousand flowers blooming. There is inevitability about the attention given to tactical political and managerial considerations. If this cannot be offset by a real, colourful and compelling vision and mission for a devolved state then progress will be limited in scope and time and the garden will lack the colour of a thousand flowers blooming.

Dr. Dave Smith

Managing Director

Promodo Ltd

June 2016