Labour leadership candidates will today flesh out their plans for devolution at a hustings in front of the Local Government Association Conference. Liz Kendall set out some of her vision, particularly with regards to fighting welfare reforms, earlier this week, and Burnham and Cooper are understood to be making clear their pitches later today.
Andy Burnham
Burnham will say the test of candidates in the Labour Leadership election is whether they can offer bold solutions to the challenges the country faces. He will criticise where power lies at the moment, saying “Britain is the most centralised state in the western world.”
He will claim to take power out of the “Westminster bubble” by devolving powers to local leadership, which include giving local authorities the ability to borrow to build homes and removing the caps past governments have put on local authorities’ ability to build houses.
He will argue that power can no longer be concentrated in Westminster, saying:
“Westminster has had a corrosive distrust of local government for far too long.
“And the product of this is that local government has been left with a disparate string of unfunded services – spreading the discontent people have with Westminster to local government.
“George Osborne talks a good game on devolution, but he is making local government a scapegoat for cuts.
“If he is going to trust local government, he must allow it to manage its own finances in a sustainable way – that’s what these plans will do”.
“The way we take Labour out of the Westminster bubble is by putting forward policies that takes power away from the Westminster bubble”.
“If we are going to invest in the homes we need – and the transport and infrastructure we need to grow – we need a massive shift of power away from Westminster and towards Councils, cities and communities.”
Yvette Cooper
Cooper will focus on extending the devolution of power for education and energy policy areas – while also extending powers to more rural areas rather than just cities and city regions. She plans to task Whitehall with assisting regions local authorities to achieve devolution deals.
The Shadow Home Secretary wants to give combined authorities greater powers for driving schools standards, rather than push forward on the current free schools agenda, as well as giving those authorities greater powers over where further education colleges are based.
On energy, Cooper will call for a Local Authority Energy Unit within the Department for Energy and Climate Change that brings together guidance for cities and local authorities relating to energy supply, heat delivery, energy efficiency programmes, renewable energy deployment and access to finance. This is a move that has been championed by the IPPR think tank.
She will say:
“Rhetoric about devolution at the same time central government shelves major regional transport is just not good enough. We need sustainable investment and devolution for all parts of the country and it should go further than the government plans so that towns can be involved as well as cities, and so that energy, skills and policing are all included too.
“Northern cities and towns have faced deeper cuts than the national average. Osborne promised rail improvement schemes before the election that he has cancelled barely two months afterwards.
“Most areas have not yet achieved real change despite years of rhetoric from the Chancellor – and many other areas have received a second class devolution deal purely because they won’t buy into elected mayors.
“I want to lead a party that will really embrace the power of our cities, towns and counties to change their own future.
“Too often ideas such as those of Lord Adonis on growth and economic devolution weren’t seen as core to our agenda. Our own Local Government Innovation Taskforce on using devolution to promote efficiency and preventative spending and early intervention in local government didn’t go far enough.
“We need a clear, open and comprehensive offer that works for all parts of the country. And it needs to break new ground in devolving skills for younger people, powers on energy policy, skills and education standards.”
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