One of the key debates in democratic government over recent decades has been the restoration of the profile given to cities. If not quite on a par with the city states of renaissance Italy, cities are nevertheless clearly recognised for their role in the new global networks. When we talk of cities nowadays we mean the city-regions or ‘metros’, the whole conurbation or extended economic area that surrounds them. There is a new recognition that local authorities within these areas must come together to jointly tackle economic and social challenges and support growth.
In the United Kingdom this has been in large part due to the work over more than fifteen years of the Core Cities group, work which is now beginning to pay off in the commitment of all the main parties to devolution for the cities. In the UK we had to contend with the disastrous politically motivated abolition of metropolitan government in 1986, but this may at least have had the much delayed benefit that it leaves the landscape clear for developing new models. But around the world, we see the development of Bruce Katz’s ‘metro revolution’ in the United States of America, the new Metropoles in France (created by central decree with strong devolved powers in January of this year) and the governance challenges of the mega cities of China, India and elsewhere.
But city government is much more complex than that. It requires city leaders to bring together the social and the economic and to manage the enormous diversity of public services delivered locally. And it needs to be about engagement, self-determination and empowerment for diverse communities as well as efficiency and economy prosperity.
That is why in Birmingham we have developed what we call the ‘triple devolution’ model of city government. It recognises that these metro areas will need to operate simultaneously at three levels: city region, city and neighbourhood, where powers must be devolved from the local authority. Our future council programme is developing a vision for the future of Birmingham city council based on this model.
The model brings the opportunity to create much more streamlined principal authorities, concentrating on strategic leadership and working through partnerships to deliver services and tackle issues such as social exclusion, health and learning. A key role will be targeted support to enable people to access the range of services available.
Governance will shift to a new network approach, replacing top down service delivery, with a diversity of local service providers, rather than relying merely on the large-scale corporate driven outsourcing of recent years. Combined authorities will provide the means to work together at a city region level, not only on the economy, skills and infrastructure but also to redesign services such as health, social care and criminal justice in a more integrated way, linked to local access points. Such a model will be more affordable but also better able to deliver the outcomes we seek in the future. The alternative of simply cutting services within the old model will not protect those who most rely on them or provide a platform for future development after the cuts.
But, welcome as the government’s moves towards devolution are, this model for the cities cannot be successfully delivered without a sustainable finance system. The current path will undermine devolution by continuing to undermine critical local services such as social care and health and leading to further false economies as preventative services are cut in favour of statutory ones. Instead the spending review should be concentrating on delivering adequate ‘whole place’ budgets for cities and other local places, enabling us to join up services, focus on prevention and deliver both social and economic outcomes in the years ahead. That would be the progressive agenda for local governance.
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Albert Bore is leader of Birmingham city council
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