The Week 1 November 2024

Well then. This was hardly a quiet week for the policy world.

Like it or loathe it – and we at Reform thought it was a pretty mixed picture in our snap analysis – it’s clear that we will all have to live with Rachel Reeves’ era-defining Budget. It sets a whole new tempo for the rest of this Parliament.

This week, though, local government watchers were pretty much left in the dark about the critical changes and spending decisions that are on the way. The Budget gave clues, but no closure.

We are expecting more dramatic changes to the planning system to help kickstart growth – changes that will have big implications for local authorities. But we’ll have to wait and see what those look like.

We know that multi-year settlements are on the way, but the detail isn’t there yet.

Labour’s manifesto promised to “replace” Business Rates. Well, the Budget coincided with a discussion paper that hints at a bit of a reform programme, at least – and we will have to wait and see what that actually looks like.

We’ve been told that there’s a big plan brewing for the future of social care – a massive driver of the financial crisis that afflicts English councils, which is short nearly ￡25 billion of spending. What we got this week for social care was… ￡600 million.

And we have been told to prepare ourselves for a new era of “devolution revolution”. Here, at least, we shouldn’t have to wait too long. The English Devolution White Paper is expected within weeks. And, judging from the Budget, some of what’s in there may be quite radical.

The most controversial bit? A single sentence in the Budget document substantiated a story this week that Government is looking at structural reorganisation of the sector.

That’s code for ‘unitarisation’ – the end of two-tier local authorities, and even for consolidating smaller Unitary Authorities. As we made clear in our recent work, it’s right to think about structural change for local government. There’s a window of opportunity to do so now, and it’s positive to see the Government diving straight through it.

But it will be just as important to get the reorganisation right. We can’t afford to end up with a system where the local state is simply composed of fewer, larger councils – with a new layer of increasingly assertive Combined Authorities over the top.

We need to examine the importance of a hyper-local tier, too. That could work in a lot of different ways – we will be setting out our specific ideas soon! But bluntly, doing away with Districts and small Unitaries would, in isolation, be a mistake. This policy debate is only going to get hotter – so watch this space.

Onto the read of the week…

For our read this week, I recommend?this thoughtful piece?from Nesta's James Plunkett. The piece argues that policies are, counter-intuitively – more complex than medicines because social systems are ultimately less predictable than biological systems. It’s all too common for policy ideas to fail to account for human behaviour, social context, and feedback loops within society. This results in unintended consequences. The model Plunkett sets out envisions policy making as a more ‘live’ and iterative thing, producing experimental interventions. And he's right, policy should requiring continuous testing, adaptation, and a willingness to respond flexibly to emerging effects the real world.