Devon County Council is set to impose a new tier of local government despite the results of a public consultation that found majority opposition to its plans.
The Devon and Torbay devolution deal will take away control of housing and prosperity funding from Devon’s district councils, which include Exeter City Council, and move transport policy powers out of reach by creating a new, unelected local authority.
The deal comes with just £16 million of new funding, which amounts to £16.77 for each of the 953,800 people who will live under the newly-created Devon & Torbay Combined County Authority. The government will retain control over both the funding and the new combined authority’s delivery plans.
The county council was obliged to hold a public consultation on the draft deal, and consider its results, which show a majority of respondents disagree, strongly disagree or oppose the deal. The consultation also recorded widespread criticism of the proposed new combined authority governance and delivery arrangements in particular.
The county council cabinet ignored this outcome when it met yesterday, recommending instead that a special meeting of all Devon county councillors, to be held next Monday, should ratify the deal and submit it to central government for approval.
Maria Price, county solicitor, claimed that the consultation responses had been “fully considered” but said the exercise had only been about “engagement”.
Devon County Council Cabinet meeting on 22 April 2024 at County Hall
A cabinet report by county council chief executive Donna Manson says “unanimous support for the proposal is not a prerequisite to moving forward”, but it does not address whether majority support should instead be.
It admits that a “large proportion” of the consultation responses, in particular those of Devon’s eight district councils, had expressed concerns about the governance of the new combined authority, with a “significant number” making points about democratic representation and decision-making.
However it fails to reconcile the contradiction between its claim that the devolution deal would not impose top-down restructuring of local government with the restructuring that the deal entails and which the county council is set to impose on Whitehall’s behalf.
It also suggests that the proposed advisory groups, which have been extended to include voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations as well as health care providers and commissioners, would enable partnership working with the new authority, although they would not have any decision-making powers if they were established, which is not guaranteed.
It does not acknowledge that, should these groups end up as anything other than window dressing, they would constitute yet another unaccountable shadow governance mechanism, increasing the democratic deficit that comes with the combined authority either way.
The report also claims that the area covered by the devolution deal, which includes Devon and Torbay but not Plymouth, which pulled out of negotiations last year on principle, constitutes a “coherent economic area” simply by dint of its population and because it contains “a range of business sectors and a strategic transport network”. No economic geographer would recognise this.
It also admits that much of the detail related to the new combined authority’s governance and decision-making will not be dealt with until after the fact, with whichever government is in power by then calling the shots.
An accompanying consultation feedback report makes clear the extent of opposition to the deal, and that many of those who responded supportively appear not to have realised just how limited is the funding with which it comes.
It also employs well-worn subterfuges to obscure the survey findings, grouping together responses to questions asked separately to disguise their distribution and rounding percentages in favour of the county council’s preferred outcomes.
Survey respondents were asked to choose on a Lickert scale but instead of presenting the numbers of people who strongly agreed with each proposal separately from the numbers who merely agreed, and the numbers who strongly disagreed from those who merely disagreed, it lumped them together.
So when it says that 338 respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the deal’s skills proposals, and 351 disagreed or strongly disagreed, it isn’t possible to tell whether the responses tilted more strongly one way or another, only that more people didn’t like the proposals than did.
It nevertheless describes this crude distribution as “broadly evenly split”, perhaps because it rounds up the percentage in favour and rounds down the percentage against to present the difference between the two figures as 1% when it is actually much closer to 2%.
Other similarly specious survey results presentations follow. But the county council elects not to present numeric comparisons of the distributions of respondents’ comments at all. Perhaps this is because they are decisively against the proposals on six of the eight issues about which consultation questions were asked.
Governance tops the opposition charts on both metrics, with 48% against and only 36% in favour on Lickert scale responses and 65% against and only 35% in favour on comment responses.
Overall, while some individual survey questions yielded a balance in support, the responses against the proposals were decisively more numerous than those in favour.
Devon & Torbay Combined County Authority governance structure. Only the “constituent” members vote and make decisions. Source: Devon County Council.
All eight of Devon’s district councils also raised governance as a major concern in their consultation responses.
Exeter City Council said the legislation underpinning the new combined authority “creates a democratic deficit for all district councils” and that Torbay, with fewer residents than several Devon districts but three voting seats on the new authority when the districts have none, is “afforded disproportionate and inequitable democratic input” by the deal.
Mid Devon District Council said it was hard to know whether the failure to include the county’s housing authorities in the new governance arrangements while acknowledging housing challenges as among the most pressing issues facing the area indicates “dereliction or incompetence”.
It was among several who pointed out what it called “the policy paradox of government devolution diminishing the voice of local democratic institutions”. South Hams District Council added that the “proposed combined authority’s remoteness and lack of democratic accountability, including the lack of voting rights for district councils, further disqualifies it from being described as devolution”.
Caroline Leaver, who leads the Liberal Democrat opposition at County Hall and also sits on North Devon Council, told yesterday’s cabinet meeting that it was striking that all of Devon’s district councils agreed that the deal, which she described as a “power grab”, would result in a democratic deficit.
Carol Whitton, who leads the Labour county council group, said she was concerned residents would not experience the governance changes as devolution despite the county council’s attempts to present them this way.
Julian Brazil, who is also South Hams District Council leader, pointed out that the control government would retain over the £16 million funding which is attached to the deal clearly confirmed it could not be called devolution.
He then added that the new government would take a very different view of the situation when it came to power, instead favouring Plymouth as the region’s most significant economic actor.
County council leader John Hart, the deal’s midwife, who recently announced he is to step down after running Devon County Council for the past fifteen years, said he believed it would significantly change Whitehall’s view of Devon.
He added that the county was “already being talked about in London differently by some junior ministers” after negotiations with civil servants around its SEND deficit deal.
No other member of the Conservative cabinet spoke during the meeting, which approved the deal unanimously. It will come before a special meeting of all Devon county councillors, to be held next Monday, for ratification, and is expected to come into force by the autumn.
