Councillors, Combined Authorities and the British Political Tradition

Declining interest in formal politics in the UK has led to debate and controversy surrounding the nature and extent of ‘anti-politics’. More recently, this ‘anti-political sentiment’ has been linked to long-standing characteristics of the polity and its foundation in strong, centralising government and the concentration of power and knowledge in Parliamentary, and Whitehall- based elites- the British Political Tradition (Richards and Smith, 2015). Within this hypothesis of declining political engagement, attention has been mainly focused on central government institutions and actors, but its similarity to interpretations of central-local government relations which have noted the relative lack of significance for local actors is clear. The paper will use the British Political Tradition as framework to analyse the changing roles of Councillors in the UK amidst recent institutional reforms to local government. It will be argued that these have seen the continuation of not only of centralising tendencies, but of a further concentration of power into a small number of elite roles locally, which in turn facilitates easier control by central government, notably the Treasury. In this light, the paper will outline a timeline of concern for Councillor ‘quality’ which dates back to the growth of local government into ‘big business', in the post-war years, continued through local government reform in the 1960’s and 1970’s, representing a desire to professionalise and ‘managerialise’ Councillor roles, and further continued into New Labour’s separation of Councillor roles in to Executive and ‘backbencher’ in the 2000 Local Government Act. A new institutional reform – the creation of Combined Authorities by the new Conservative administration will be used, particularly focussing on the creation of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, to examine the continuation of this trend, and discuss the extent to which the British Political Tradition is useful in offering an explanation for this most recent development.