Move civil servants out of London: fine. But that won’t curb Whitehall’s grip on Britain | Simon Jenkins

The government has announced an army of civil servants, thousands strong, is to head into the darkest provinces. White papers in future will have the tang of JB Priestley and farm subsidies the fizz of Jilly Cooper. Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby will be a Master of Foxhounds. Like all Sir Keir Starmer’s actions just now, it should be worth a few votes.

First, there is nothing new in the plan. Every government makes these token gestures of bureaucratic dispersal. Starmer is merely scaling back Rishi Sunak’s plan as chancellor in 2020, when he proposed moving 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030. He even proposed that 400 of his own Treasury staff would move to Darlington, where a “hub” would be built to console them. They were parodied as exiles to some distant corner of empire, wondering what they had done wrong.

There was no rhyme or reason to Darlington. It was hardly a hotbed of public finance innovation. The town just happened to be adjacent to the chancellor’s Yorkshire constituency. The new “Treasury hub” has just been given planning permission in the town and Darlington’s central market is being tipped as a good place for the exiles to lunch.

The Blair and Cameron governments also moved thousands of civil servants out of London, chiefly to outposts in Manchester and Birmingham. Big cities at least have some suitable academic and professional infrastructure. But gesture locations seldom work. The 1980s siting of the HMRC’s office in the new town of Cumbernauld, its biggest anywhere, ended in 2022 with its closure and move to Glasgow. When the Blair government in 2006 moved the Office for National Statistics to Gwent, where schoolchildren have to learn Welsh, 90% of the staff refused to relocate.

The reality is that 80% of British civil servants are already based outside London – which seems not unreasonable – while the numbers in the capital continue to grow. The biggest peacetime boost to bureaucracy was Brexit. Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit has reportedly needed almost as many extra regulators – 30,000 – as are needed to administer the entire EU in Brussels.

Where they work does not really matter. Moving civil servants around the country will do nothing to address the centralisation of democracy that is being entrenched by Labour’s plans. The fact is that capital cities are centres of power and power breeds bureaucracy. No one can guess how many officials will be needed to run Angela Rayner’s employment laws and rental housing regulations. It must be thousands.

Then last December, Rayner published a white paper on devolution that offered a clue. It saw its early manifestation in this month’s so-called metro mayoral elections. Introducing the new mayors, Rayner implied she was devolving power from the centre. She was not. Local councils may be close to fiscal destitution if not bankruptcy. Rayner was not addressing any of that. She was introducing what is clearly an extension of the Treasury’s favourite form of local government. It is called central government.

Metro mayors were invented by the Cameron government as regional governors to “coordinate” the ambitions of local cities and counties, chiefly concerned with transport and business development. They run no local services and answer to no elected assembly, but merely chair meetings of subordinate council leaders. Their election reflects no local affection or loyalty, as mayors should do. They are identified, George Orwell style, by compass points, such as West England, East Midlands, the North East. When such regional government was offered to the north-east by Blair’s John Prescott in 2000, it was overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum.

Rayner wisely did not care for a referendum this time. She did not even have the nerve to call the mayors governors – the normal name for the ruler of a region. The metro mayors seem likely to go the way of elections to NHS foundation trusts and police commissioners, relics of Westminster’s pretend local democracy.

Starmer and Rayner regard elected local councils as in effect agencies of Whitehall. This applies in everything from taxation powers to school curriculums to pothole repairs. The final centralisation is the proposed removal of planning control over rural development, housing supply and high street protection. Such powers have long been crucial in giving local people a degree of control over the future of their communities. This must be a central right of local democracy.

The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan and the mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, pose for a selfie with regional mayors in Leeds. Photograph: Phil Noble/PA

Rayner’s new regions are clear agencies of this centralisation. They will have no taxation powers but will depend on her and function as her local arm. They may be able to overrule or “call in” subordinate council decisions. Most significantly, they are to be staffed through a “secondment scheme” with central government. They will be allocated central civil servants “in strategic authority officer roles including senior positions”. Rayner says the mayors are to be “hardwired into the way government works”. The link to Starmer decentralising Whitehall could hardly be more blatant. He is “recentralising” local government.

It really does not matter where civil servants work. It matters who they are working for and to whom they are accountable. The United Kingdom is widely regarded as having the most centralised government of any western democracy, a fact not conducive to efficient administration. It is hardly a secret that the present Whitehall is dysfunctional.

Starmer disagrees. He is curbing any lingering relics of British local democracy in a flurry of cliches about growth, enterprise and nimbyism. He has set up a new framework of Whitehall control to secure the precise opposite of devolution. Goodness only knows how many more civil servants that will that require.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist