Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.
Andy Burnham says that he believes in putting power into the hands of local people – but not, apparently, if local people want to keep more of their own money.
Following the Prime Minister’s announcement of more power for local mayors, the brilliant Conservative Mayor of Teesside, Ben Houchen, said that he’d use it to let people keep more of their hard-earned cash. That suggestion was quickly slapped down; while local mayors will be able to put your taxes up, they won’t be able to cut them.
For Burnham and his Labour colleagues, devolution isn’t about giving people proper power over their local areas. It’s about finding an excuse to put up everybody’s taxes.
If the Prime Minister really wanted to help areas that are struggling, he’d start by looking at the national problems which are making life worse for everybody.
Many places across the country are suffering as a result of the same bad policies – housing policies which make it expensive and difficult for people to move in search of opportunity, energy policies which drive up everybody’s bills, and a seemingly endless stream of new rules and regulations, to name but a few. Those problems, all the result of decisions made deliberately by the Government, drag every part of this country down.
And they won’t be fixed by clumsily dividing the country up into advantaged regions and disadvantaged regions. Not only is this kind of politics pointlessly divisive, it also inevitably results in over-simplistic narratives about which places are doing well, and which places aren’t.
Despite the Prime Minister’s talk about the north-south divide, according to the last census, many of the places with the highest levels of deprivation are actually on the south and east coast – places like North Norfolk, Thanet in Kent, and South Holland in Lincolnshire. On the same metric, Trafford, in Greater Manchester, ranks slightly higher than Tunbridge Wells.
The latest stats on full time wages show that, on average, people in the north-west of England have higher wages than those in the south-west. Meanwhile, when it comes to education, in 2025 it was the Isle of Wight which had the lowest proportion of higher-grade passes at A-Level. Places like Suffolk did a little bit worse than average, and places like Lancashire did a little bit better.
Average outcomes in places which are very close to one another can also differ widely; that’s true wherever in the country we’re talking about. In Hastings, the average man will die at 77; an hour’s drive north in Sevenoaks, the average man will die at 82. In Burnley, it’s 76 and in neighbouring Ribble Valley, it’s 81.
This isn’t to say that the north of England is actually richer than the south; that clearly isn’t true. It’s to say that it’s just not possible to draw sweeping conclusions about whole areas of the country, and to take tax on that basis from some places to spend in others. When we make policy, we should be making it for the country as a whole – doing things which allow talented and ambitious people to flourish, wherever they live and whatever their background.
So, if the Prime Minister is set on devolution, he should think bigger than letting local mayors put up taxes ever further, or spending money in places that he’s decided are disadvantaged. A nation is too complex to be arbitrarily divided up into areas in which money is spent, and areas from which money is taken.
Instead, he should devolve power back to the individual – giving people more control over their own lives, and their own money. He should fix our broken housing system, which makes it expensive and difficult for people to choose where to live, and stop creating absurd new rules, which prevent enterprising people from making money and creating jobs. You can’t get much more local than that.
(UKR)