Cornwall gets its devolution deal – but who will foot the bill?
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Version 0 of 1. They are putting flags out in the streets of Newquay, Redruth and Looe, to celebrate Cornish devolution, signed off by communities secretary Greg Clark. How many of them are red? In its dying throes as an independent local government watchdog the Audit Commission launched comprehensive assessments of the country’s local services, using flags on its website to highlight performance. Cornwall got a green banner for skills, training and further education but two red banners for housing and its record in safeguarding children. The watchdog concluded that senior managers “had not been effective in ensuring that quality assurance and performance management procedures are followed” and said poor quality of support had contributed to increased pressure on social care staff. Related: Serco out-of-hours GP service failures create spike in Cornwall A&E use That was five years ago. Perhaps there has been some miraculous transformation since. We don’t know because the Audit Commission disappeared and it has since become fashionable to decry inspection of local authority performance. We do know top managers at Cornwall council have come and gone at a fast rate. The most recent county council chief executive, Andrew Kerr, has just departed after only 18 months in post, and the historic devolution deal will unfold while an interim holds the fort. You could hardly call Cornwall’s politics stable, either, with the Liberal Democrats running the county in coalition with independents despite their Cornish MPs having been ejected at the general election. So where will the managerial brilliance and the money required to transform public services in Cornwall come from? The case for Cornwall laid by the county before prime minister David Cameron is an odd mixture, combining claims that Cornwall has a wonderful (if unspecific), bold scheme for its future, with begging for the centre to provide more money for a county that is poor, ageing and sparsely populated. It’s all a bit magical. Cornwall council has to cut £200m over the next four years. All its calculations about the NHS also assume major savings, which trusts elsewhere in England are finding it impossible to make. Yet this is a county with more residents over the age of 75 than the England average (a group that will grow by a third in the next eight years). As well as the public sector its economy depends on tourism, offering low and seasonal earnings. It has (as the Audit Commission noted) a housing problem associated with holiday and second homes. Cornwall is also a hotbed of anti-European Union sentiment – yet the case for Cornwall (pdf) makes mighty assumptions about the enhanced flow of funds from despised Brussels. It puts the total EU-related economic growth package at 603m euros over the next six years – the largest allocation outside London – with a match-funded contribution of £57m (82m euros) from the council. What is missing, as in the Devo Manc proposals, is any detail on exactly how changing “governance models” will produce cheaper, more user-friendly services on the ground. Community nurses are still going to have traipse through high-hedged country lanes to isolated cottages, whoever employs them – even if telemetry might in the future help diagnosis and patient monitoring. Gadgets and new technology, welcome though they are, won’t eradicate the chronic health conditions that characterise Cornwall or remove the deep pockets of deprivation concealed in those charming towns and villages. Related: Devolution could be just another path to privatisation of public services The one thing Cameron did not promise on his visit was review of the funding formula in favour of Cornwall. Clark knows full well that favouring Cornwall would mean having to disfavour Manchester and the cities. One reason Cornwall was red-flagged by the Audit Commission was because it is a peripheral and relatively deprived area, that does not raise enough in local taxation and where public services have often struggled to recruit good people. Even if the hype around Devo Kernow were appropriate and this was something like a “total place” package of devolved powers, a brutal fiscal fact remains. Localism in most places in England depends on a strong, redistributive centre willing to channel funds to areas in need. David Walker was formerly a managing director in communications and public reporting at the Audit Commission. Sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic |