England was built to be run from one place - and still is

The Prime Minister wants to fix the way England is governed. His answer is to send officials out from Downing Street to sit in the offices of regional mayors and get things moving. It sounds like power being handed down. In truth it's the centre reaching further in.

Here is the thing almost nobody says out loud. England is the most centralised big country in the Western world, and it has been that way since before it spoke English. That isn't the fault of the last few governments. It's the design.

When the Normans took England, they built something no other medieval kingdom managed: a country owned and counted from a single point. The survey they completed in 1086, the Domesday Book, recorded the value of every piece of landed property in the kingdom, down to the ploughs and the livestock, so the centre knew exactly what it held and what it could take. England was mapped, valued and taxed from the top before much of Europe had a capital worth the name.

The continent grew differently. Its cities, its guilds and its provinces held power of their own - the right to tax, to judge, to refuse. England's towns held power only when the Crown chose to lend it, and only for as long as the Crown allowed. That habit never broke. What we call local government has mostly been the centre deciding how much rope to let out, then pulling it back the moment it feels a tug.

So when a Prime Minister - a man who ran Greater Manchester before he ran the country - promises to fix the regions by dispatching his own officials to them, he isn't reversing the pattern. He is performing it. An official sent from Downing Street still answers to Downing Street. A town that can't raise its own money, keep it, and spend it as it sees fit has a manager in London, not a government of its own.

The government says seasoned officials will get roads and homes built that Whitehall has blocked for years, and it may well be right about the roads. But getting the centre's work done faster is a different thing from letting a place decide its own work.

Real devolution has one test, and it's money. Not a grant handed down with strings attached, not a civil servant on loan, but the power to raise a tax, keep it, and answer to the people who paid it. Almost every other rich country trusts its towns and regions with some of that. England, the country that wrote down the value of every field a thousand years ago, still can't bring itself to trust its own with the till.

Power is the one thing the centre has never shared. Sending civil servants north doesn't change whose it's.

An opinion of the house.