Margaret Hicks-Clarke – Chair, Yorkshire and Humberside Association of Civic Societies
As we arrive in Hull for our YHACS Spring Meeting you may detect a touch of election fever in the air. Devolution has arrived in Hull and East Riding, where mayoral elections will be taking place for the first time on Thursday 1st May.
The move has caused a division among our member societies. While Hull, Beverley, Goole, Howden and Hornsea are now part of the new Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority, our friends over the Humber Bridge in Grimsby and Cleethorpes come under the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority. They will of course remain valuable members of the YHACS family.
There are many questions being asked as to what will change, what benefits the new devolved powers will bring to the region or whether the Combined Authorities are just another layer of expensive bureaucracy. Time will tell.
Hull and East Yorkshire is the last outpost in Yorkshire to get an elected Mayor. South Yorkshire was first in 2018 with West Yorkshire following in 2021 and York and North Yorkshire in 2024. Each of the areas will have their own experiences of the devolution journey.
In North Yorkshire, where I live, we’re one year in and still grappling with how to engage with the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority. Our friends at Ripon Civic Society, facing similar issues, organised a talk by James Farrar, Chief Executive of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority. They issued an open invitation to other North Yorkshire societies and I went along.
The key takeaway is that the Combined Authority is a partnership between existing local authorities covering a functional cross-boundary geographical area. Its role is to use money and powers devolved to it by central government and work with local leaders and communities to grow the economy, make communities safer and deliver strategies and projects to attract funding and investment to the region. It does not take over the responsibilities of the existing partner authorities, which continue to function as normal, but works to enable “locally-owned change.”
From a planning perspective, the Combined Authority is responsible for ensuring that each local area has its own up-to-date Local Plan to meet the Government’s statutory housing targets. It has powers to make strategic decisions on major developments such as new towns, key infrastructure projects and issues that span local authority boundaries. It also has devolved funding for brownfield housing and affordable homes, and a Strategic Place Partnership with Homes England.
Local planning authorities will draw up the Local Plan and handle the majority of planning applications, although it is envisaged more of these will be devolved to officers rather than going through planning committees in an effort to speed up the planning process.
Thank you to our new YHACS committee member Richard Taylor and David Winpenny, who are joint chairs at Ripon, for inviting me to the talk. I’ll be watching developments in Hull and East Riding and would be interested to hear how other societies are interacting with their more established Combined Authorities.