Does the Devon/Torbay devolution deal make any sense now?

A deal to allow Devon County Council and Torbay to combine forces to secure greater control for various responsibilities now seems confusing at best and redundant at worst.

A deal to allow Devon County Council and Torbay to combine forces to secure greater control for various responsibilities now seems confusing at best and redundant at worst.
Having been under discussion for two years, the Devon and Torbay combined county authority (CCA) formal came into being last week.
But this seems a curious move given the government’s bid to entirely overhaul  local authorities.
The CCA was initially approved by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, but hadn’t had formal sign-off when Labour won in July’s general election last year.
That put the future of the Devon/Torbay organisation on precarious footing, but prime minister Kier Starmer’s government promised that the £16 million in initial funding pledged would still be honoured.
While that cash will be welcomed – even though critics deride it as a pittance – the whole notion of CCAs now seems questionable.
A new world
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner’s plans to radically reorganise local government seem to jar with the concept of combined county authorities.
Firstly, the two councils that make up the CCA are Devon County Council and Torbay Council.
The county council is part of the two-tier system that Westminster now wants to sweep away, abolishing situations like Devon’s whereby a county council provides some services and district councils perform others in the same area.
Ms Rayner wants to create larger unitary-style councils, which are in charge of all the services in the area they cover. Torbay is such a council already. Devon isn’t.
So, one of the CCAs members looks set to be abolished, raising the question of how the CCA could continue.
Unfair advantage?
All Devon’s 11 councils are fighting for influence over the future of local government.
Plymouth, a unitary, and Exeter, a district, have both expressed desires to be unitary councils after reorganisation takes place, with both potentially grabbing a bit of neighbouring areas to help them get nearer the 500,000 population size that Ms Rayner wants the new larger councils to have.
The government is allowing some wriggle room and has suggested a number of cities, including Exeter, could be allowed to become unitaries serving much lower populations.
Both Plymouth and Exeter are under Labour control, and some politicians from other parties wonder whether they will get their wish given the changes are being introduced by the Labour government.
If the two cities are unitaries, that leaves the question of how to carve up and reshape the rest of Devon.
East Devon’s Liberal Democrat-led council wants to be a unitary council embracing Exeter, Mid Devon, North Devon and Teignbridge. That essentially suggests Plymouth, West Devon, Torridge and the South Hams could make another, maybe with Torbay too.
But could the newly formed CCA mean that East Devon’s suggestion, and any others, are going to be ignored?
Could the CCA – whose footprint covers the existing Devon County Council area and Torbay – be turned into a single unitary council?
Clear as mud
In a speech to parliament last week, Ms Rayner described the CCA as “foundational devolution”, although that description only adds more confusion.
The word ‘devolution’ in the government’s plans now refers to the notion of an elected mayor overseeing more than one of the new, larger unitary councils that it wants to create.
The Devon/Torbay CCA purposefully pursued a path without a mayor, a route allowed under the former Conservative government’s version of devolution.
So how can the CCA be ‘foundational devolution’ when there is no mayor but devolution now means having a mayor?
And if the CCA doesn’t eradicate the two-tier system of local government that Ms Rayner wants to ditch, what is its long-term purpose?
Richard Foord, Liberal Democrat MP for Honiton and Sidmouth said the CCA is a “legacy of the last Conservative government” and that it is “not devolution”.
He added that trying to create unitary councils overseen by mayoral strategic authorities is “flawed”.
“It is notionally about scrapping two-tier systems whereby county and district councils cover the same area, yet what we see emerging as an alternative is a series of proposals for overlapping authorities,” he said.
“They risk making local government so complicated as to bestow us with a Spaghetti Junction of responsibilities and accountabilities.”
Fellow Liberal Democrat Caroline Voaden, MP for South Devon, also raised a query with Ms Rayner over the county’s future.
“Devon is a huge rural area, and there are concerns that if it becomes a unitary it could end up devolving power away from people in a sparsely populated area, and moving the centre of power away from local communities, which does not feel like devolution,” she said.
Ms Voaden asked whether Torbay – one of the smallest existing unitary councils in the country – would be allowed to continue or whether it would be “required to be part of a greater whole”?
Ms Rayner acknowledged Devon is a “huge rural area”, and that she had issued a guide for the creation of unitary authorities, which was exactly that – “a guide, I have said that it is not set in stone”.
But, perhaps most telling was the next part of her answer, that stated Torbay “faces challenges” and that if it wanted to expand, the government “want to facilitate that”.
How might Torbay expand? Well, perhaps its CCA partnership with Devon County Council could become something more formal, and turn into a unitary council?
That could make life easier for the government, but what Devon’s district councils would make of that would be another story entirely.