Of course Ted established his strategic unit – the Rothschild Central Policy Review Staff . But that was ineffective because it had no formal input into the budgetary process – as has been true for all the subsequent “No 10 Policy Units” up to the “sofa government” of recent times. Thus our ministers and their Whitehall departments increasingly responded to globalisation and similar modern centralising pressures by taking over more and more local service delivery functions, completely unrestrained in the UK by our lack of any formal constitution or guaranteed local powers. So while John is right to want an immediate start for his “Local Place Agreements”, etc., etc., there just cannot be any effective devolution of service delivery until Whitehall departments are themselves limited to an effective strategic role and until individual ministers are firmly locked into that by means of a properly constituted system of parliamentary validation.

Then, and only then, will the way be clear for a sensible level of devolution to elected government at service delivery levels. Of course much else still needs to be done, such as ensuring effective local taxation systems and regular and meaningful revaluations – instead of the present mish-mash – and of course reasonable local charging etc. Then, too, the inevitable disparities of yield means that we shall continue to need our national rate support systems. Moreover at this broad level of central and local relationships we must recognise that there will always be concentrations of problems and/or concentrations of tasks clearly beyond local fiscal resources – and so the funding of such targeted extra or supplementary strategic finance across the regions and across the country must also continue and must also be truly interdepartmental, truly accountable and properly validated both locally and by parliament as a priority line in the CSR.

Only when all this is done will the decks be finally clear for a wholeheated, genuine and thorough devolution of service delivery to the level of locally elected councils. The irony is that all this was proposed over 35 years ago at a time when there was a remarkable degree of informal agreement at policy directing levels across Whitehall departments. But the pressures of globalisation helped to reinforce Ministers’ reluctance to resist centralisation. And while Ministers were then often overwhelmed by their accummulated burdens at central government levels they nevertheless felt unable to sponsor real devolution while, of necessity, retaining some effective strategic control at the centre. So defining the latter remains a key task – and though all of John Tizard’s suggestions are eminently sensible (and there are others that must usefully be considered at the local delivery levels) a “total” approach must mean “total” – and nothing much can succeed without including Whitehall in the plan!