By Coun Gary Porter
Leader of South Holland District Council
I usually enjoy writing for The Voice, but it is with a certain amount of sadness that I am penning this piece on devolution.
As regular readers will know, along with seven other councils, South Holland signed up to the Greater Lincolnshire bid to be able to bring our residents greater direct control over some government services and also to bring in hundreds of millions of pounds of extra government funding.
The bid would have created a combined authority (CA) covering the ceremonial county of Lincolnshire. The membership of the authority would have been made up of the leaders of the ten councils with one vote each. The chairman of the Lincolnshire Economic Partnership would have also sat on the authority in an advisory role, making sure that the business community had constant input into any CA proposed action.
There would also have been one other voting position on the CA, a directly-elected mayor. The mayor would have acted as the chairman of the CA making sure that decisions made by the CA were to the benefit of all, not any particular individual council. Because they would have been elected by all of the voters in Lincolnshire there would have been a direct line between them and the voter and central government, thus making them accountable both ways if, heaven forbid, anything went wrong. As well as this role there would have been an expectation that they promoted all of our interests to the wider world.
The CA would have cost approximately £600,000 a year to run (including the mayor’s office) and if the government had delivered what it had promised it would have brought in over £70million pounds of direct extra funding next year and at least £55million for the following four years and at least £15million a year for the following 25 years. I say at least because the authority would enter into separate deals and the numbers quoted above are for the first two deals.
It is probably worth pointing out at this stage that the ten councils in the Greater Manchester Authority are now on deal five.
This brings me on to the bit that makes me sad.
You will have seen at the top of this piece I said we, along with seven others had signed up. The last two councils to decide were South Kesteven and Lincolnshire County unfortunately on Monday last week they both confirmed to the Secretary of State (Rt Hon Sajid Javid) they would not be signing up to the deal.
On Tuesday I received an email from Sajid confirming that in accordance with the legislation, because we hadn’t all agreed the deal was being withdrawn. He also phoned me late on Tuesday night to explain more personally his disappointment that we hadn’t been able to conclude the deal.
On Friday the ten leaders met and we have looked at what to do next, but sadly this doesn’t include a devolution deal.
