Andy Burnham has criticised Britain’s “unaccountable state” that is at once too powerful and too distant from everyday life. He has made English devolution the central idea of his premiership, but his plan to give England’s mayors unprecedented power and money will have to confront a number of tricky realities, not least a landscape in which scrutiny of local government is vastly diminished.
As England’s devolution map has evolved, vital accountability mechanisms have withered. The abolition of the Audit Commission in 2015 deprived Whitehall of information about local government spending. The decision, taken by the then Tory prime minister David Cameron during his “bonfire of the quangos”, coincided with a period when cash-strapped councils were selling off assets and making risky investments. A succession of bankruptcies and scandals have since exemplified the dangers of governing in darkness, including the questions raised at Teesworks, the development led by Ben Houchen, a Tory mayor, where a “culture of excessive confidentiality” has prevailed, according to a damning 2024 government report.
There is wide recognition that greater accountability is needed. But Westminster has tended to create top-down mechanisms where accountability flows upwards and local scrutiny is infantilised. The “trailblazer” deals in 2023, for example, gave the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands greater flexibility over spending, but made them answerable to quarterly select committees of MPs. Under the current public accounting regime, the Treasury appoints an “accounting officer” to each government department, who answers to parliament for their department’s use of money, including that spent by local authorities. Located in Whitehall, these officers lack knowledge of the places such spending impacts.
Mr Burnham is right to try to wrest power back from the Treasury and recognise that those closest to a community best understand its needs. His government’s recent pledge to appoint the chief executives of mayoral strategic authorities as “local accounting officers” is welcome. But its plans to give England’s mayors a share of income tax generated in their area (a power that Lord Houchen has said he will use to fund rebates) will demand deeper forms of accountability. The English devolution bill in 2026 created a new Local Audit Office and introduced new powers for scrutiny committees. Both are improvements.
A fine place to end up would be the creation of “local public accounts committees”, an idea suggested in the Starmer government’s white paper in 2024. These could be modelled on Westminster’s public accounts committee, whose reports have exposed flagrant misuses of public money. The prime minister wants to take a “place-based” approach to public service delivery. Such local committees, if properly resourced and empowered, could be integral to scrutinising these initiatives.
Yet scrutiny isn’t solely the job of officials. The decline of local media poses another problem. Although new local reporting outlets have flourished in cities like Manchester and Birmingham, an estimated 4.4 million people in Britain live in areas without a dedicated news outlet. A robust solution, once mooted by the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, would be a tax on social media giants to fund local journalism. When mayor, Mr Burnham had a media capable of holding power to account. The same cannot be said for too many places in Britain.
