As Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner announce an end to the “levelling up” agenda and seek to usher in a new era of devolution, he says every region in England should start from Wyss Minster takes over key powers.
The prime minister and his deputies will meet with mayors across England on Tuesday on his fifth day in office as the party drafts a devolution bill to be introduced as part of next week’s King’s Speech.
Starmer and Raynor will use the meeting to highlight their desire for a new wave of deals that could see local authorities take over everything from public transport to infrastructure to skills funding.
The Prime Minister has pledged to make economic growth a priority for the government and believes giving more powers to local authorities will help drive this forward.
Starmer said before the meeting: “My fundamental belief is that the people involved know best what they need… [that’s] Why I have made meeting all the metropolitan mayors a priority in my first week as Prime Minister.
“By resetting these important relationships and putting more power in the hands of local leaders, I am determined to ensure they have the support they need to play their part in driving economic growth across the country.”
Communities Secretary Rayner has launched an attack on the previous government’s upgrade plans as she prepares to rename her department to omit the words.
She said: “For too long, Westminster’s tight grip on control has limited opportunity and potential in towns and villages across the UK.”
“It means bad decisions destroy working people’s lives, while our elected local leaders are forced to beg for scraps at the whim of Whitehall.”
She added: “We will now continue to accelerate our manifesto commitments to transfer power from Whitehall to our communities and take back control through forthcoming devolution legislation.”
Starmer and his cabinet spent much of their first days in government fleshing out their plans for growth.
Rachel Reeves announced an immediate end to England’s de facto onshore wind ban on Monday as part of wider plans to deregulate the planning system.
The Prime Minister also said she would reintroduce mandatory population-based housing targets for local authorities as the party aims to oversee the construction of 300,000 new homes a year for the first time since the late 1980s.
Starmer, meanwhile, spent the day touring the UK and meeting national leaders from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
In Northern Ireland, the Prime Minister pledged to repeal the controversial Heritage Act, which provides conditional amnesty to soldiers and paramilitaries involved in the Troubles, and to “reset” relations with the Irish government.
“One of the biggest issues over the past 14 years, especially the past six to eight years, has been instability, a lot of disruption and change,” he said. “That ends today.”
Labor officials say much of their first months in power will be devoted to tackling what they say are the legacy of the outgoing Conservative government, from the prison crisis to NHS waiting lists.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting will meet with the British Dental Association on Monday to discuss how to eliminate so-called “dental deserts”, where NHS dentists in large parts of the country no longer see any extra patients.
The BDA said afterwards that Streeting had recognized that underfunding was exacerbating the crisis and that although the health secretary was also looking for ways to end the dispute with junior doctors, it was unlikely to get much extra money to spend.
Starmer hopes devolution will be a way to boost economic growth without spending huge sums of money and plans to use his meetings with English mayors, including Tees Valley Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, to prove the case at this point.
Local authorities will be encouraged, but not forced, to make proposals about which powers they want to take over.
There have been occasional tensions between the Prime Minister and some of the most high-profile Labor mayors, including Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. However, Labor officials say his chief of staff, Sue Gray, has been helping to smooth those relationships since taking office last September.
Starmer and Rayner have made tackling regional inequality a priority, given that the gap between the most and least productive regions of the UK economy is wider than in almost every other developed country.
Over the past five years, the Conservatives have tried to reduce regional inequality by setting up a number of multi-billion pound funds from which local authorities can bid for funding. However, the plans have been plagued by problems and delays from the start, with a recent report finding that only 10% of a total of £10bn has been spent.
Previous governments led by Labor and the Conservatives have been more successful in striking deals to devolve powers to much of England, although many areas have so far been excluded.
Starmer’s government is likely to first focus on finalizing a deal with parts of the UK where it already has a deal, including Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Lancashire and Surrey.
Experts say the government should focus on city areas where there are no deals at all, including Brighton, Leicester, Portsmouth and Reading.
Akash Pan, program director at the Institute for Government think tank, said: “The government should aim to extend devolution to other parts of England.
“There has been good progress over the past decade, with deals now covering around 50% of the country. If they reach 85% by the end of parliament that will be good progress.
