The Project, the BBC drama about Labour spinning its way into power that started last Sunday, was a disappointment. For one thing, the young communications staffers shown were too wet, and not just because they were riffling through damp Tory dustbins. It confirmed the stereotype of Labour spin doctors as all callow youths chattering into mobile phones or sending embarrassing emails around Whitehall.

The fact is a good number of ministers' special advisers are long in the tooth and some of them command real expertise.

Take Paul Corrigan, special adviser to Alan Milburn in the Department of Health, or David Blunkett's former adviser Conor Ryan, who has turned himself into a handy commentator on education. One of the casualties of Stephen Byers' ejection from the former DETR was Dan Corry, an able policy analyst. But Corry has now fetched up as director of the New Local Government Network where, since the summer, he has been very energetic in prosecuting the "new localism".

Corry is a keen moderniser of councils, covering elected mayors, arm's-length service provision and all. But the nub of the new localism is less interference in what they do from the centre. This idea has the backing of Number 10. It underpins the idea of "earned autonomy". Once councils have demonstrated that they can deliver, they are given new freedom as to how they operate. Labour seems to accept that Whitehall needs to back off and allow local authorities room to breathe and assert their autonomy.

What the new localism might mean for social housing is not clear. The Treasury is not going to rush into giving local authorities freedom to borrow . The rush to transfer stock has ceased. Meanwhile there's a fight going on over housing revenue account surpluses and where they should be recycled. Giving councils more freedom sounds a great idea, until you stop to think through what that means.

At this point, I hope you won't mind my giving myself a plug. I have just put together a pamphlet for Catalyst, a think tank, arguing that strong central monitoring and distribution mechanisms are essential if we want more, not less, social justice.

Housing policy is a case in point. New localism might imply that we should give Rochdale more freedom, perhaps to deal with its hard-to-let stock, while extending more autonomy to the London borough of Richmond to build homes for key workers. But where do such local authorities get the money?

The fact is that progressive social policies depend on the capacity of the centre to redistribute money from better-off to less-well-off areas and to endow local government from the proceeds of national taxation. The point applies to the "new regionalism", too. Is anyone pretending that the North-east wants devolved power in order to raise more revenue in Newcastle and Morpeth? No, the idea is that a regional assembly would have more bargaining power to extract a fairer share of the cake.

But I wonder if there is a danger here. What if the new localism, with all its talk about a super-heavy, over-regulating centre diminishes the capacity of the centre to collect and redistribute tax money to needy areas. "Needy" implicitly means that we have a scale to determine deprivation on which everyone agrees. But a localist might say Rochdale's problems are not those of Richmond. I believe poor households in Rochdale have a claim on tax money levied from the better-off of Richmond, which is why I think new localism undermines the pursuit of justice in social policy.