What is remarkable about this week's devolution White Paper is not just its ambitious scope but the fact it has happened at all. New governments usually have a lot on their plates and invariably shrink from stirring up the hornet's nest of English local government reorganisation: not, however, this one.

To understand why it is this Government's priority we must delve back into the 13 years that Labour last ran Whitehall from 1997-2010. As local government minister Jim McMahon recognises in his White Paper foreword: ‘This is ambitious, but it isn't new. This programme of reform continues the work of the ‘97 governments onward.'