A note on this morning’s appearance with Sonia Poulton

I am grateful to lovely Sonia Poulton for the opportunity to speak this morning. For those of you who have been following this work from the beginning, you will know how difficult it is to compress years of documented evidence into fifteen minutes, and into general summary of the issue.

But that is exactly why I am sharing the clip here. For many people the small print being read loud in Parliament right now is still completely unknown. The regulations, the secondary legislation, the FOI responses, the ministerial letters confirming one thing while councils do another , none of it makes the headlines. And yet it is precisely in that small print that decisions affecting every part of our lives are being made, reshaped and pushed through.

If this little conversation reached even a few people who had never really come across devolution and the current LGR programme before, then that in itself could help create the clarity needed for real change.

One final note. Published today .. the same day the Bill returns to Parliament, the Local Government Chronicle’s confidence survey finds that only 16% of senior council figures believe local government is being listened to by Westminster. Not 16% of residents. 16% of the councils supposedly leading this programme. Only 35% expect power to actually be devolved , down from 59% when the programme started. Only 24% trust the government - halved since 2024.

The “locally led” Bill that strips out real local consent is not even trusted by the people it claims to be led by

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Thank you Sonia. The work you do in keeping a space open for conversations that don’t make the mainstream, or some of the big “alternative” outlets either - matters more than I can say.

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