One Day Like This

The best day in fifty years. Now: seven hypotheses on where local government fits — and one challenge for each.

There’s a reason “One Day Like This” gets played at every Greater Manchester moment of collective feeling. It’s an anthem about a day so good you can’t quite trust it. One day like this a year would see me right.

Today was that day. The Cabinet’s Rewiring the State delivered fiscal devolution nobody dared predict in November, devolve-by-default with Secretaries of State forced to justify what they keep, a Civil Service preparing to become genuinely porous, and police, fire and health boundaries potentially finally aligned. I want to say, without the reflexive hedging our sector is famous for, it’s good. Genuinely, unqualifiedly good.

But the lyric is a trap if you take it literally. One day like this a year will not see us right. The announcements were the easy day. What follows are seven hypotheses about the other 364, about where local government fits in the rewired state. The premise of all seven is that the settlement is good; the question each one tests is what we do with it. Every hypothesis comes with a challenge.

1. The centre is relocating, which means it can be met

The tell is the hashtag on the Cabinet Secretary’s own post: #Number10North. For the first time in most of our careers, the centre of government is physically moving towards us, a Manchester hub, mayors holding assigned income tax, strategic authority chief executives becoming Local Accounting Officers with the standing of permanent secretaries.

A centre in London could be lobbied. A centre in the North can be joined. The distance between a council chief executive and the machinery of national decision-making has never been shorter.

The challenge: stop writing to the centre and start turning up in it. The councils that thrive will treat No 10 North as a working address, not a press release.

2. The Civil Service is coming to us, so the exchange must run both ways

Read the Cabinet Secretary’s response on Linked In as an offer, because it is one: new career paths making movement between central government and the wider public sector “the norm”, a Civil Service that wants to become “more porous” and to learn through interchange with local government.

Whitehall’s people flowing into strategic authorities will bring capability we need. Treasury literacy, legislative craft, delivery discipline. But porous means two-way. Local government holds the knowledge the centre has never had - what a decision looks like on a doorstep, how a place actually works, what it costs to hold a relationship for a decade.

The challenge: put our best people on that escalator going up. If the interchange runs one way, strategic authorities become Whitehall’s culture in northern postcodes. If it runs both ways, they become something genuinely new. Count the secondments in both directions in three years; that ratio is the test.

3. Councils get to choose what they now are and the choice is live for exactly one generation

The blueprint mentions mayors around forty times and councillors once. Strategy and money are moving up; a neighbourhood duty is moving down. It would be easy to read that as a squeeze.

Read it instead as a question the settlement puts to every council especially the twenty-one new unitaries being designed on blank paper right now: what is a council for, when the mayor holds the strategy and the neighbourhood holds the relationship?

There is an answer available. The council is the connective tier, the only institution that can translate between a mayor’s manifesto and a street’s story, the convenor that makes the strategic legible locally and the local legible strategically. No mayor can do it; no parish can do it; nothing in Whitehall has ever done it.

The challenge: write that role into the new constitutions deliberately, starting with the councillor role definition, community facilitation and leadership first, decision-making second. Blank pages this size come once. A council that defaults to “delivery unit” in 2028 will find the role has been set for a generation.

4. The community empowerment half of the Act is ours to write and our own record is the case for urgency

The Act’s devolution half arrived yesterday with a balance sheet. The empowerment half, the community right to buy, the section 62 neighbourhood governance duty is still waiting for regulations and money. Some will call that neglect. I’d call it something better: unwritten.

Before we ask Whitehall to write it, one number in the mirror. Under the old right to bid, administered by local government since 2012, fifteen in every thousand listed community assets actually reached community ownership. The tool was weak but the relational infrastructure around it was weaker, and that part was ours.

The department has said the white paper will be co-produced, and has named parish councils among those it wants at the table. The empowerment half of the Act is, right now, the largest unclaimed authorship opportunity in English public policy.

The challenge: turn up with the draft. What the section 62 regulations should enable, what they must never standardise, what the funding route is.

5. Consultation is being retired and relational participation is ours to own outright

Cabinet will replace consultation-by-default and consider revoking “performative statutory duties to consult”. The honest practitioner response is relief. Twelve weeks, a portal, four hundred responses, a report noting the responses, the original decision. Nobody will mourn it.

The same statement promises an “AI-powered future”, and machine-scale listening, dashboards, sentiment analysis, summarised correspondence will rightly be part of what replaces the old model. Let the machines do what machines do.

But notice what has just been vacated: the entire territory of participation that requires presence. Rooms, relationships, trust built over years, the conditions the neighbourhood governance evidence says actually determine whether local power works, and which cannot be procured. No AI holds a relationship. No dashboard convenes a street. That territory now belongs to whoever occupies it first, and local government is the only institution positioned to.

The challenge: build the relational infrastructure before the statutory duties are switched off, so the reform arrives as liberation rather than as a gap. The councils that treated consultation as the relationship will be caught out. The councils that treated it as the paperwork around the relationship will barely notice.

6. Greater Manchester proves the model works and its real export is the forty years, not the org chart

The Prime Minister governs from the one place in England where the mayoral model demonstrably delivers, and the confidence radiating from that is an asset for everyone. But be precise about what Greater Manchester proves. Its structure is the visible floor of a house whose foundations were poured in 1986, four decades of councils voluntarily coordinating, surviving abolition, building trust across parties before any mayor existed.

That is not a reason the model can’t travel. It is the instruction manual for making it travel. Beliefs and relationships underneath, structures on top, Greater Manchester did it by accident of history over forty years. The rest of us get to do it on purpose, faster, because the lesson is now written down.

The challenge: every new strategic authority and every new unitary should ask one question before its first structure chart: what is our 1986? Where does the relational accumulation start? For the new councils the answer is now before vesting day, while relationships can still be built without a restructure running in the background.

7. Legitimacy is about to become the scarcest commodity in the system and local government is the only tier that can mint it

Here is the endgame, and it is the sector’s greatest strategic opportunity.

Mayoral elections turn out roughly a third of voters. Whitehall’s legitimacy runs through a general election every four or five years. Both tiers of the rewired state will govern on thin consent, real, but occasional and remote.

Thick consent, presence, participation, the sense of having been in the room, can only be generated at neighbourhood scale. And the only institution with the statutory duty, the local knowledge and the convening power to generate it is local government. Section 62 is not a burden at the bottom of the settlement. It is a licence to manufacture the one commodity everyone above us will shortly run short of.

The challenge: treat neighbourhood governance as a founding decision of every new council, not a constitutional appendix because within a decade, the mayors and ministers who succeed will be the ones standing on a neighbourhood layer somebody bothered to build.

Be the tier they are standing on. That is where local government fits.

The other 364

The rewired state has moved power closer to us than it has ever been. The tier that turns that power into legitimacy, street by street, relationship by relationship, is ours to build, nobody else can build it, and the window is now.

So throw those curtains wide. It really was one day like this.

Then get up and build the other 364.

Connect before consolidate. Change lives, not lanyards.