Combined authorities are most obviously about acquiring additional powers, but that doesn't mean they're not also on the lookout for outsourcing opportunities.
In my bailiwick the West Midlands combined authority is still but a shadow authority, but it has already produced an outsourcing first: responsibility.
It's a breakthrough, moreover, whose discovery must largely be credited to The MJ.
It stemmed from Dan Peters and Sam Clayden's insightful analysis of the nearly one-third of devolution bids that their authors have decided should ‘remain confidential and unseen by residents on whose behalf powers are being negotiated'.
Some of the non-publishers' explanations were incredible.
Greater Manchester's was perhaps the most disappointing.
Given the devolutionary leadership role the combined authority and its predecessors have rightly earned, it sounded almost a betrayal to hear a Manchester City Council spokesman pronounce that ‘we don't think [the bid] has much business in the public domain while it's still in the development stage'.
It suddenly made one almost sympathetic to George Osborne's insistence on elected mayors as a visible mechanism of public accountability.
Thankfully, others fundamentally disagreed with Greater Manchester's closetry, like Leicestershire CC chief executive John Sinnott, who saw publication as a ‘natural thing to do'.
And Joe Anderson, elected mayor of Liverpool, who said: ‘I don't see why anyone would want to keep it secret.'
Well, Joe, West Midlands combined authority unmistakeably want to – and, moreover, to outsource responsibility for doing so.
Its spokeswoman claimed: ‘We're not allowed to release the documents. The Treasury has told us we cannot publish it.'
Which a Treasury spokeswoman promptly denied: ‘Regions are free to decide whether they want to publish the documents or not. We haven't told anybody not to go public with the bid.'
Tempting though it is to speculate about who's the bigger liar, I'm more concerned – here, anyway – with the recent public complaint by Mark Rogers, Birmingham City Council's chief executive and president of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, that he was ‘fed up of being treated [by central government] like a child, when the organisation I work for and the communities we serve are not children'.
So why, Mr Rogers, are you allowing the West Midlands Combined Authority, a body in which you play a leading role, to keep us in the dark in a way that would be insulting even if we were children?
Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies
