One leaflet being stuffed into letterboxes by Liberal Democrats in Hull, a city of almost 270,000 people in East Yorkshire, argues that Labour politicians spent too much money on some car-park gates. Another boasts that trees have been pruned near a supermarket and that a new grit bin has been installed. All politics is local, goes the old saying. Increasingly, all English local politics is trivial.

On May 2nd local elections will be held in much of England and Wales. If the Tories lose many seats, internal grousing about the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will intensify—though Hull cannot add greatly to his misery, since it has no Tory councillors. The grumbling will grow louder if the party loses two metropolitan mayors in Tees Valley and the West Midlands. Local elections have become referendums on national governments and not much more.

Hull once had a powerful city council. Well before the second world war, it demanded money from the central government to pay for thousands of air-raid shelters—then, when Westminster demurred, built them anyway. After the bombs fell, it commissioned Patrick Abercrombie, a leading planner, and Edwin Lutyens, a star architect, to redesign the city.

“The council ran gas, water, telephones, everything,” says Daren Hale, leader of the Labour Party group in the city. In much of Britain telephone boxes are red. In Hull they are cream, a consequence of the council’s determination to maintain its own network. In the mid-20th century many people lived in council houses, travelled to work on municipal buses and sent their children to council-run schools.

Gradually, under successive national governments, powers have been stolen away from councils in Hull and elsewhere. English local government is now feeble. In Britain just 5% of taxes are raised locally, according to the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries—less than in any country of similar size. Britain scores poorly on a local “self-rule index” created for the European Commission (though better than Russia).

Austerity has slashed the value of grants from central to local government. Yet the cost of the few services that councils are still obliged to provide has risen. The County Councils Network, which represents 37 authorities, estimates that children’s services and adult social care swallow 69% of its members’ budgets, up from 63% a decade ago. Like many local authorities, Hull is putting up council tax (levied on property) by 4.99% this year, the most that is normally allowed without a referendum. Councils in severe difficulties, like Birmingham, can jack them up further.

Britons seem to have noticed the discrepancy between rising bills and worse services. Polling for the Local Government Association shows that councils have never been ranked so poorly for “running things” and providing value for money since the survey began in 2012. Apathy is another response. Turnout in English local elections has fallen over the past few years (see chart). It has held up better in Scotland and Wales, perhaps because devolution there has made all non-Westminster politics seem more compelling.

In Bransholme, a poor part of north Hull, a group of mostly retired women who are chatting in the Alf Marshall Community Centre complain about the decline of local services. “I think it’s got run down, to be honest,” says one. “There were all sorts of family centres, day-care centres, and it’s been cut and cut and cut,” adds another. Still, when they need help with local problems, such as motorbikes riding across the green, they turn to local councillors.

One effect of local government’s poverty is that it is easy to push around. Westminster is encouraging councils to band together in “combined authorities” with an elected leader like those in Tees Valley and the West Midlands. Any council that agrees will receive a smidgen more power and money. East Riding, the suburban and rural local-authority area that wraps around the city, and Hull have agreed to do this in return for joint control of an investment fund worth £13.3m ($16.4m) per year. For context, in 1940 Hull’s air-raid shelters were expected to cost more than three times that, adjusting for inflation.

Nobody seems that enthused. “We don’t like the idea of all power being centred in one person,” says Mike Ross, the Liberal Democrat leader of Hull City Council. He signed the deal because he believes that places without combined authorities and high-profile leaders are muscled aside in the competition for public and private investment by those with them. Besides, he says, “the government writes the rules, and they like the mayoral model.”

East Riding and Hull have not always got along wonderfully, partly because the rural authority is more conservative. “It’s Cavaliers and Roundheads,” says Alan Johnson, a former local mp who is now chancellor of the University of Hull (though he notes that they did co-operate to entice Siemens, an engineering firm, to the area). But every other local government in the region has joined another grouping, leaving them stuck together like the last two people in a singles bar.

Hopefully the combined authority will succeed. But the troubles with local government will persist. It will still be badly short of money. It will still have to tax people more to pay for services that few of them use, while squeezing spending on the things they do use. People will vote on May 2nd out of a sense of duty, if at all.■

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