Hampshire Devolution Back on the Cards
This weekend, Leader of Hampshire County Council Cllr Nick Adams-King shared news that he and the leaders of Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight had agreed on an expression of interest in a fresh devolution deal for the county.
The southern part of the county, which is home to a metropolitan area of around 1.2 million people, is the most populous area without a devolution deal. An agreed package of devolved powers has thus far been highly contentious between the authorities, but otherwise long overdue while its competitors have pressed ahead.
The result is an urban region on the Solent without clear shared leadership or strategy. While opportunities such as the Solent Freeport are available, with the capability to transform economic activity around the Solent’s shipping, innovation and investment, but there is no shared authority to take ownership and drive it forward.
The path to a devolved deal for the region here is littered with those which have failed before, with visions for both Solent and Hampshire and Isle of Wight deals having been unsuccessful.
Previously, proposals for a devolution deal covering all of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight have fallen due to tensions between authorities. Most pronounced is the perceived difference between the highly urbanised south of the county and the rural north, with each seen as having very different needs.
Since then, other areas of the country have pressed on with their devolution agenda without Hampshire. While diverse regions such as West Yorkshire have made these tensions work under a single combined authority, Hampshire has been left as a significant population centre without any arrangement.
Pressure had been building in anticipation of the incoming Labour government, with it becoming increasingly clear that authorities with an eye on devolution deals would need to get their bid to central government promptly after the General Election.
Until the news was shared by Cllr Adams King, local leaders had pushed back against the notion of a mayoral deal, but the urgency of registering an expression of interest appears to have overcome this.
A combined authority and potentially its mayor will not only have to navigate how to knit together the urban south with the rural north, but it will need to find a way to make the urban Solent work. Currently, this part of the county is divided between two cities which are poorly linked and share cultural tension with each other.
The authority will also need to find a way to make the deal work for the Isle of Wight, one of the poorest parts of the south which is separated from the rest of the county geographically and economically by the Solent, several miles of open sea. The Island would therefore be poised to benefit from closer working with its wealthier neighbour, but the authority would need to ensure that economic benefit could cross this stretch of water.
As the County Leader said in his post, this is the first step on a very long journey. The devil will of course be in the detail of a proposed deal, and as his predecessors have found, the political challenges are huge and pitfalls plentiful in this part of the country.
