Devolution has been too cautious, and England has less say about community affairs than almost any other democracy

• Tony Travers is a visiting professor in the LSE department of government and a director of LSE London

All the bigger British political parties are in favour of devolution, yet it proves oddly difficult to deliver. England is a remarkably centralised country, with the UK government responsible for setting every tax, including the annual cap on council tax. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also, despite their devolved status, heavily centralised within their own national systems of government.

It is exactly 50 years since the major reform of local government structure in England and Wales. Prior to the 1974 changes , there were 1,245 councils in England; after the reforms were implemented, the number of councils was slashed to just 412. Today there are 317 councils, and the number continues to fall as the result of a near-continual reorganisation, which has turned two-tier counties – where there were county councils plus districts within them – into one or more unitary councils, where a single council provides all municipal services. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, after more recent reforms, now have a single tier of large municipalities.

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Ronnie Hinds has a proposal for managing local authorities, John Clark says large city-based unitaries do not work for rural areas, and John Bullock believes that anyone standing for parliament should have a decade of local experience

Your editorial on local government ( Editorial, 14 April ) concludes by pointing up the tension between the economic benefits of scale claimed by proponents of large councils and the community benefits of small councils closer to those they represent and serve. After a lifetime career as an officer in local government, and having chaired two commissions overseeing council finances and electoral boundaries, I have come to wonder if the answer is to separate the council (ie those elected to represent their constituents) from the organisation that is responsible for delivering local services to people and communities (ie the council employees).

The present system treats these as one and the same, but their functions are different. I believe it would be possible to create a different relationship, whereby the elected, political body effectively commissioned services from the delivery organisation, run entirely on managerial lines. This would sever the current one-to-one relationship between them and allow a number of elected councils to be served by one delivery agency, holding out the prospect of achieving the economic benefits of larger operational scale and the political benefits of closeness between electors and elected.

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Campaign draws on performers and artists to encourage 300,000 more young people to register ahead of this week’s deadline

A last-minute drive to alert young British people to therisk of losing their say in how the country is run launches this weekend, spearheaded by many famous faces, including some not normally associated with politics or campaigning.

YouTubers such as Amelia Dimoldenberg, host of Chicken Shop Date, are lining up alongside singers and comedians, to join established names, such as Michael Sheen, Sir Stephen Frears, Es Devlin, Meera Syal, Billy Bragg, Paapa Essiedu, Emily Berrington and Ralf Little.

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London mayor expected to criticise Susan Hall in speech launching panels on school roofs

Sadiq Khan will accuse his Conservative rival in the race to be London’s next mayor of being “Trumpian” over the climate crisis, as he announces plans for solar panels on schools.

Khan is expected to acknowledge resistance to his expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) in a speech on Friday but insist that he still intends to “go further”.

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People will blame Brexit, Boris and austerity, but this country’s demise goes back decades – and shows no signs of stopping

In 1951, the county of Durham condemned 114 villages to a slow death . The older, smaller coalmines were approaching exhaustion, which meant, officials said, “many of the rows of houses which grew up around the pitheads have outlived their usefulness”. These “rows of houses” were homes to 100,000 adults and children. Now they were designated Category D.

D for de-industrial. D for demolish. D for decline.

Families living there would receive no more investment: neither electric lights nor doctors’ surgeries. Before their homes were torn down, they were expected to move out or die out.

Many refused to do either. This weekend, I visited some hamlets just outside the town of Shildon, in south-west Durham. About seven decades after the order for their execution, rows of small houses were still standing. Some were boarded up; others had cars parked neatly outside. On this afternoon of bright sun and biting wind, men stood like sentinels outside their front doors and kids growled by on dirt bikes. Eldon, Coundon Grange, Coronation: these former pit communities were half-populated, half alive. It was eerie and melancholy, but it was not death.

If Durham’s category-D villages are remembered today, it is as historical curiosities, summoned up by black and white footage and oral testimony. Yet these settlements without a future offered a foretaste of perhaps the central political issue of our time: how do people live when money has discarded them?

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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Party hopes to take mayoralty from Tories but incumbent Ben Houchen is still popular with voters, defying national mood

• UK politics – latest updates

Politicians have been known to warn each other against parking tanks on their lawns . For the Labour candidate in one of the most keenly anticipated May mayoral elections, the phrase has added bite: Chris McEwan has hundreds of them.

He shows photos of a room at his house in Darlington with an astonishing collection of small model tanks, all neatly laid out. His grandchildren think it’s a toyshop. “It’s a throwback to when I was a child, really,” he said. “I believe in peace.”

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Labour’s West Midlands candidate says it’s time for a fresh start as he vows to create 150,000 new jobs

When Richard Parker recounts his career history, he casually mentions he was asked by the Japanese government to advise them after the 2011 earthquakes, and helped reform housing in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Troubles.

These projects were normal for someone who brushed shoulders with senior leaders across the world during his time as a public finance accountant and partner at PwC.

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As he seeks re-election, Andy Street is promoting ‘Brand Andy’ in a contest that could affect whether Rishi Sunak survives as PM

The Tory mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, has said he wants voters to focus on him and his record, not the performance of the Conservative party nationally, when deciding whether he should be given a third term in charge of England’s second- largest region.

In an interview with the Observer , Street said he was busy promoting what he calls “Brand Andy, the individual” rather than operating under his party’s colours, in a contest which could affect whether Rishi Sunak survives as prime minister and leads the Tories into the next general election.

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Polls are the last chance for voters to make their choices before the general election

• UK politics – latest updates

Voters in England will go to the polls on 2 May to elect more than 2,600 councillors and 10 metro mayors, in the last set of local elections before the general one.

Labour and the Conservatives are defending just under 1,000 seats each, the Liberal Democrats about 400 and the Greens just over 100. Police and crime commissioners in England and Wales are also up for election.

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