The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

Karabakh of the east Midlands, leaving the map of Derbyshire resembling nothing so much as
a Barbara Hepworth sculpture.
Sheffield region’s bid to absorb Chesterfield
faces legal setback after ruling
Read more
From a financial rather than an identity perspective, Chesterfield’s move makes a certain sort of
sense. Faced with continuing financial pressures to cut, sell off or simply abandon swaths of local
government services that have existed for generations, English local authorities inevitably clutch at
any cash straws they can. The city regions are one of the few straws on offer. They are due to receive
£30m in new funding a year and to acquire new freedoms to shape local transport, planning and
economic policy.
It is hardly surprising that Chesterfield’s defection was hatched and promoted at the council level,
since councillors and council officers are in the frontline of struggling with these austerity-driven
realities every day. While the councils did their deal, Chesterfield and Derbyshire opinion was
barely considered, the high court ruled, so it must now be properly consulted and taken into account
before any decision is taken. An online poll organised by the county council in August, five months
after Chesterfield decided to join Sheffield, found 92% of respondents opposed to the move.
That is almost certainly because, for all its proximity to Sheffield, there has never been any serious
tradition of Chesterfield regarding itself as part of Greater Sheffield, or of Sheffield seeing
Chesterfield as part of South Yorkshire. Chesterfield is today what it has always been, an important
town in north-east Derbyshire, famous for the twisted spire of its St Mary’s church, and for having
had Tony Benn as its MP in the later period of his parliamentary career. Its possible marriage to the
Sheffield city region is overwhelmingly rooted in perceived economic advantage rather than in
history or public sentiment. The high court has therefore pitted economic survival against identity and
democracy.
The Chesterfield-Sheffield question is of far more than local interest. Local identity matters
everywhere. It is tenacious. It runs deeper than the economic or administrative convenience of a
bureaucrat’s pen. County identities are medieval in origin but they lurk on in many modern
consciousnesses. Ministers mess with them at their peril.
The argument about Derbyshire has only arisen because English local government is in such a
desperate state. Austerity in the 2010s is completing the centralisation of local powers begun in the
1980s. Communities like Chesterfield are reduced to scrabbling for a share of the Treasury’s
parachute drop of cash to the city regions. Ministers may talk of a new era of municipal greatness, but
it is a hollow sham as long as local authorities lack effective income-raising powers. Unless and until
English devolution is reconceived as regions made up from existing counties, cities and boroughs,
these arguments will continue, pitting community identity and democracy against economic