Devolution across Yorkshire falls way short of expectations - Yorkshire Post Letters

You are probably correct to refer to the important Hull and East Yorkshire mayoral election as “the most exciting in the region” but are wrong to see this as “the final piece of the devolution jigsaw”.

The so- called ‘devolution deals’ of the current and previous government are not devolution in any meaningful sense of the word. They do not involve any actual transfer of power, reasonability or staffing from Whitehall but simply provide to Mayoral Combined Authorities with very modest additional funding and powers.

With the exception of the Northeast, these authorities cover areas the basically equivalent of a pre- or post-1974 county, too small for any effective regional role, and provide no more and in some cases fewer powers than these counties had before the Thatcher and subsequent governments progressively stripped them of their funding and responsibilities.

As Micheal Meadowcroft notes in his letter of April 22, central government did not want real devolution, and Yorkshire with a population greater than that of Scotland or Wales needs and deserves genuine devolution.

The public have long been fobbed off with the myth of “an extra level of bureaucracy” but devolution does not add a level of government but transfers it closer to the people.

The functions devolved to the Welsh Government for example are not duplicated in Whitehall but take place in Cardiff, with the benefit not only of decisions being made closer to home but the boost to the local economy of local government employment.

The economic and social benefits of such genuine devolution are widely seen in countries like Spain and France which have gone down the devolution routes seriously.