Cllr David Page represents the Market Harborough West & Foxton Division on Leicestershire County Council.
Labour calls its programme devolution. I believe it is something quite different.
This is not simply a debate about council boundaries, planning reform or regional mayors. It is about a far more fundamental question. Where should power reside?
For me, the answer has always been straightforward. Power should sit as close as possible to the people it affects. The individual before the state. The family before bureaucracy. Parish councils before district councils. District councils before counties. Counties before regions. Westminster only where national government is genuinely required.
That is what genuine devolution looks like.
What we are witnessing instead is partial administrative decentralisation. Administrative responsibilities are being pushed downwards, but meaningful power remains firmly in the hands of central government. Housing targets, planning policy, industrial strategy, fiscal policy and the broad direction of the economy continue to flow from Westminster. Local authorities are increasingly expected to implement national priorities rather than determine local ones.
I have seen this at close quarters. Three models were consulted on for reorganising local government in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland: a three-council North, City, South split with Leicester kept to its existing boundary; a single unitary for Leicestershire and Rutland alongside Leicester on its existing boundary; and an expanded Leicester alongside one unitary for the rest of Leicestershire and Rutland. The Government confirmed the third of these on 16 July 2026. My own view was that the single county unitary, with Leicester kept to its existing boundary, was the better option, on the evidence of the service benefits and cost improvements it offered over the alternatives. That was not the model chosen.
Whatever the merits of the final model, the process proved the wider point. Communities did not choose their own structure of governance. It was chosen for them.
Alexis de Tocqueville argued that local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to learning. Democracy is not something people simply inherit. It is something they learn by participating in the decisions that shape their own communities. John Stuart Mill arrived at a similar conclusion. Liberty should always be the starting point. If government wishes to remove freedom from individuals or communities, it should bear the burden of proving why.
Those principles have underpinned Britain’s constitutional tradition for generations. Yet the direction of travel today points the other way.
Local government reorganisation is presented as modernisation. Planning reform is presented as efficiency. Regional mayors are presented as stronger local leadership. Viewed individually, each proposal can appear reasonable. Viewed together, however, they reveal a consistent philosophy. Decisions are steadily moving away from local communities and into larger institutions.
Nothing illustrates that contradiction more clearly than the proposal for No.10 North. If Labour genuinely believed in dispersing power, counties would become stronger, district councils would enjoy greater autonomy and parish councils would have a greater voice. Instead, another political headquarters is created, another strategic authority established and another layer of administration introduced.
Moving power from Downing Street to Manchester is not devolution. It is simply centralisation with a different postcode.
The same instinct is evident in planning.
Britain undoubtedly needs more homes. The real question is who should decide where those homes are built and how communities develop.
Planning is one of the clearest expressions of local democracy. Through elected councillors, communities shape the future of their towns and villages. They understand local roads, schools, drainage, flooding and infrastructure in a way that no national formula or regional strategy ever can.
Today, that discretion is being dismantled by statute, not merely eroded by drift. The Planning and Infrastructure Act, which received Royal Assent in December 2025, introduces a National Scheme of Delegation that removes the largest share of planning applications from committee altogether. Minor and standard applications must now be decided by planning officers rather than elected members, ward councillors have lost the power to call them in, and the number of objections a scheme attracts no longer guarantees it reaches committee at all. Local plans, meanwhile, are being subordinated to new National Development Management Policies. Where a council’s own plan conflicts with national policy, the national policy now prevails, and local plans are barred from repeating or departing from it. Housing targets, for the first time, are mandatory rather than advisory. Each change is defensible taken alone. Together, they remove the elected councillor from the largest part of the planning system and replace local judgement with a national formula.
Labour argues that this is necessary to deliver 1.5 million new homes. Perhaps it will make the system faster. But speed and democracy are not the same thing.
Local councillors are elected because they know their communities. Removing their influence does not remove the realities of overcrowded roads, overstretched schools or inadequate infrastructure. It simply transfers decisions to people who know less about the places they are changing.
Friedrich Hayek explained why this matters. His great insight was that knowledge is dispersed. No minister, department or regional authority can ever possess the detailed knowledge held collectively by millions of individuals, businesses and communities. Successful societies emerge from countless independent decisions, not from instructions issued by government.
No official in Whitehall understands Market Harborough better than the people of Market Harborough. No regional authority understands every town and village better than the communities that have evolved there over generations. The more government centralises decision-making, the more it assumes it possesses knowledge that, by its very nature, it cannot possess.
The same philosophy underpins Labour’s wider economic strategy, which begins from the assumption that prosperity can be organised from the centre rather than created by free people and firms.
History suggests otherwise. Britain became prosperous because governments created the conditions in which enterprise could flourish. They protected property, upheld contracts, maintained stable institutions and then allowed free people to innovate, invest and create wealth.
That is why I find Labour’s attitude towards the City of London so perplexing. If Britain’s overriding objective is economic growth, why are we not beginning with the greatest engine of wealth creation this country has ever built? I am referring not to Greater London, but to the City of London itself.
The Square Mile occupies around 0.001 per cent of the United Kingdom’s landmass, yet generates approximately four per cent of our national economic output. Few places anywhere in the world produce such extraordinary economic intensity. It has taken centuries to build its reputation, legal certainty, deep capital markets and international standing. It is one of Britain’s greatest strategic assets.
The reluctance to say this plainly is not really about economics. It is ideological. A political tradition built on the argument that inequality is manufactured by concentrations of private capital struggles to accommodate a square mile that does exactly that, and does it more successfully than almost anywhere else on earth. The City does not fit the story. It was not built by government design, it cannot easily be redistributed without destroying the thing that makes it valuable, and its success is a standing rebuttal to the idea that wealth is a fixed quantity to be shared out rather than something that has to be created first. Rather than reconcile that fact with the case for redistribution, it is simpler to change the subject. Ten-year industrial plans, national housing targets and new strategic authorities rearrange the administrative furniture and generate announcements, but they do not answer the one question that actually matters: what creates wealth, and how do we get more of it? A regional strategic authority is a structure. The City of London is a result. Confusing the one for the other, or promoting the first while quietly resenting the second, is not a strategy for growth. It is a way of avoiding the question.
My instinct is not to constrain it. It is to liberate it. Brexit returned powers over financial regulation that previous governments simply did not possess. The challenge for government should now be to make the City of London the most competitive, innovative and trusted financial centre in the democratic world.
That means proportionate regulation rather than unnecessary bureaucracy. It means competitive, stable and predictable taxation. It means creating an environment in which global businesses choose to domicile here, international investors choose Britain first and entrepreneurs see this country as the natural home in which to build wealth and create jobs. The objective is not a race to the bottom. It is a race to the top.
It is worth being precise here, because the argument could easily look like a contradiction of everything said so far. Dispersing decision-making power is a constitutional and democratic question: who gets to decide, and on what authority. Where capital and enterprise choose to locate is an economic question, answered by millions of independent decisions, not by a minister’s plan. Objecting to Whitehall or Manchester deciding what happens in Market Harborough is not inconsistent with wanting government to get out of the way of a market that has already decided, over three hundred years, where it wants to concentrate. The two are answers to different questions, not the same question answered twice.
Nor should our ambition stop at the boundary of the Square Mile. Greater London already generates almost a quarter of the United Kingdom’s economic output. Together, the City’s financial strength, London’s wider business economy, its universities, technology sector, creative industries and global connectivity create an economic advantage possessed by very few countries anywhere in the world.
This is not an argument for London at the expense of the rest of Britain. A stronger City attracts more international capital. A stronger London creates more investment, more exports, more employment and higher tax revenues. Those revenues fund hospitals in Yorkshire, schools in Cornwall, roads in Leicestershire and public services in every county of the United Kingdom. Britain does not become more balanced by restraining its strongest economy. It simply becomes poorer.
Labour increasingly frames Britain as a contest between North and South, between haves and have-nots, as though one region’s success somehow explains another’s difficulties. I do not accept that analysis. There are prosperous communities throughout the North and deeply deprived communities throughout the South. Jaywick in Essex, Hastings and parts of Cornwall remind us that deprivation is not regional. It is local. Investment should follow need, not political geography.
Edmund Burke warned against governments imagining they could redesign society according to abstract theories. The City of London is exactly the kind of institution he had in mind: one that evolved rather than was designed, and that should be strengthened rather than constrained.
Margaret Thatcher expressed a related principle in more practical terms when she observed that no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. He had money as well. She was not celebrating wealth. She was recognising that prosperity must first be created before it can be shared.
Britain undoubtedly needs reform. But reform should disperse power, not concentrate it. It should strengthen counties rather than diminish them, trust local communities rather than override them, encourage enterprise rather than expand bureaucracy and build upon Britain’s greatest strengths rather than apologise for them.
Ultimately, this is not a choice between North and South, or even between Left and Right. It is a choice between two different ideas of government. One believes prosperity is created by concentrating power, directing economic activity and expanding administrative control. The other believes prosperity is created when government understands its limits, protects liberty and creates the conditions in which success becomes commonplace.
I know which Britain I want to build. A Britain that governs less from the centre and trusts more at the local level. A Britain that liberates the City of London to compete with the best in the world, because when Britain creates more wealth, every community has the opportunity to become more prosperous. A Britain that measures the success of government not by how much power it accumulates, but by how much power it has the confidence to leave in the hands of its citizens.
That, to me, is what genuine devolution, genuine conservatism and genuine national renewal should look like.
(UKR)