George Osborne’s local devolution revolution

George Osborne is the man of the moment, the future Tory leadership contender who is riding high right now. So it was rather clever that instead of offering a showy speech to the Tory conference, the Chancellor announced a rather technical but big reform as his speech ‘rabbit’.

His refrain throughout the address to conference was that ‘we are the builders’, and to underline that, he announced his National Infrastructure Commission which was trailed overnight. But he also announced reform to local government funding. This will see the abolition of the local government grant (it will be phased out), and in return councils will be able to keep all the rates they collect, with local authorities getting 100 per cent of their rates by 2020. They will also have freedom over the rates in their area, as Osborne announced he was abolishing the uniform business rates. Once the reforms are in place, city mayors will be able to raise business rates by up to 2p in the pound with the approval of a majority of businesses represented on the local enterprise partnership in order to fund infrastructure projects.