Levelling Up: If Scottish and UK governments don’t work together, the money will be squandered – Brian Wilson

The great paradox of Scottish devolution is that it has led to more centralisation than ever before.

Power in Scotland is increasingly centralised within St Andrew's House, says Brian Wilson (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA)

Local government has been stripped of money and powers. Once-mighty public bodies are now poodle quangos. Regional policy barely exists. As one SNP luminary put it, “Scotland is our localism”, which sums up the mentality.

Maybe it is more predictable than paradoxical. The separatist aim may be to transfer all power from Westminster but since that is a distant agenda, the immediate expedient has been to hoard powers previously distributed within Scotland.

That helps explain the SNP’s hostility towards the UK government’s Levelling Up strategy of working direct with local authorities. Their contention is that everything should be routed via Edinburgh. Any breach of that sacred principle is, we are told, an affront to Scottish democracy.

That presumption needs to be challenged and the true battlelines should not be between Scotland and Westminster. The challenge to Edinburgh centralisation should come from within Scotland itself and many who recognise that are quietly happy to deal direct with the UK government simply because it creates an alternative.

Take the question of elected mayors and strengthening of regional powers in England which the White Paper envisages. The idea of something similar in Scotland would be greeted with horror by Ms Sturgeon’s faithful. Yet Scotland’s cities and regions are crying out for leadership, both to work with the Scottish government and – crucially – to challenge it.

There is no local politician in Scotland nowadays who comes close to being a household name. They are administrators of budgets pared to the bone, with councils deprived of the ability to be creative and innovative, or even protect core services on which poorer communities disproportionately rely if there is to be the remotest prospect of “levelling up”.

It wasn’t always like that. The most effective forces for change in Scotland’s governance were regional councils which, for more than 20 years, had the muscle, money and local knowledge to make a difference.

Their leaders were big figures who knew how to fight governments. They were to Scotland’s regions what Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen are now to England’s, and we need them back.

All common sense says the two governments should work together to deliver structural funding as effectively as possible. Prior to Nationalist control, there was a regional approach to allocating EU funding with input from local authorities to inform strategic priorities.

These regional bodies were closed down by the SNP so that everything went through Edinburgh, to be re-branded as political largesse.

It is entirely understandable that UK ministers are not prepared to see the same happen under post-Brexit circumstances. Yet dealing direct with local authorities is not a sufficient answer either because it does not address structural priorities that transcend council boundaries. The real danger is that a lot of this money will end up wasted, without levelling anything up.

I suspect that is exactly what will also happen with the £700 million windfall which the Scottish government will receive in April from the ScotWind licensing round – cash on the nail.

It could be ring-fenced for relevant infrastructure that would maximise prospects for ongoing industrial benefits from offshore renewables, to reverse the abject failures of the past.

Instead, we are told, it is to be used “in part, to support our net-zero ambitions; and we will then consider how to utilise it across the rest of the Scottish block grant”.

In other words, it will disappear into the big St Andrew’s House trough, to be dripped out from their innumerable funds without making any lasting difference to anything – least of all the prospects for Scottish industry.

The same thing would happen with Levelling Up funds if the Scottish government got its way but there is another option.

Before it is too late, Scottish and UK governments should agree to all this money being de-politicised from both directions and allocated through regional partnerships that bring together the three levels of government to determine structural priorities.

What could be simpler, more useful or more transparent? Which is why it is probably never going to happen.

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