The Coalition Government has avoided the temptation to reorganise Whitehall departments. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has been renamed the Department for Education but there has not been the wholesale reshaping we saw under Blair – which led to the creation of such historical oddities as the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) and a vast amount of anomalies, cost and muddle.

ODPM, of course, could not by definition outlive the retirement of John Prescott. So it morphed into the Department for Communities and Local Government. The D then suddenly disappeared and now we have ‘CLG’.

This, as I have said before, told councillors that they should start representing residents to the town hall and not the other way round. It also produced pages of legislation, brought into force in the dying days of the last government, telling councils how to handle petitions. This prescribed many things which councils did already and which were anyway best left to local determination.

For opposition groups, there is admittedly the rather useful provision that a petition has to be debated in full council if it passes a certain signature threshold. Councils are essentially allowed to set the threshold themselves and I have recently had some fun in Hertfordshire when the Tories insisted that it be 10,000 signatures. For a typical local issue this means that every elector will have to sign a petition before it can be debated; most settlements in Hertfordshire will be absolutely excluded. (Feel free to sign our ‘10k’ petition on Facebook).

CLG also introduced the right of petitioners to call not only the council but also individual officers to account. This is shockingly wrong in principle: councillors are there to be held to account, not their staff.

Is this just a tiresome bureaucratic matter or should we worry? 

The CLG’s Strategy for Seaside Success published in March said:

Seaside towns like Scarborough, St Ives, Weymouth and Torbay are some of the most thriving and vibrant towns in the whole country, with strong local leadership, dynamic businesses, and distinct attributes – whether food, entertainment, sport, the arts or the natural environment. They are no longer dependent on the unreliable weather, but attract visitors all year round.

As the Chief Leisure Officers’ Association commented, this appears at odds with reality:

The English Riviera (Torbay) faces a challenging future. For the past two decades the destination has experienced a gradual but persistent decline in the value and volume of tourism. From 2005 to 2007 staying domestic visitor numbers reduced a further 22% and average durations reduced to 4 nights. The only areas of growth relate to the numbers of day visitors.

Yes: we should worry.

CLG believes that there are no real economic problems in our coastal towns. If this permeates into Coalition policy at a time of cuts there could be a disaster.

CLG is not being abolished just yet.

But it is at least time it was made to learn something about communities…and local government.