The Local Government Conference met in conference in Birmingham last week.
I am slightly (only very slightly) embarrassed to confess that I have attended every conference since the LGA was created in 1997. In that first year the conference (in Manchester) ran from Tuesday until Friday. There was a gala night on the set of Coronation Street (this is apparently a television soap opera for those of you too busy each evening with your politics).
John Prescott and Gordon Brown turned up to praise the new body’s birth and the role of local government (delicious irony in hindsight), John Bird and John Fortune did a live skit on its bureaucratic structures and we all networked long into the night.
We were cheerful: the powers and roles lost under Thatcher and Major looked as though they might now be restored.
In every way this year’s conference was a much more sober affair: it was all over by Thursday night and the optimism we all felt in 1997 was not even a distant memory.
Indeed there was a spectre. Local government is threatened as almost never before.
While the Localism Act threw local government a few bones, Govism has started gnawing away at its heart by denying local authorities a role in schools.
Meanwhile, the Government decision to devolve council tax benefit might well have looked delightfully localist until you spot the 10% cut that comes with it – a cut that cannot, the Government says, be passed onto families or the elderly. The effect is either to ensure that the cut is passed on in its entirety to the minority who are unprotected (in some cases eliminating their benefits altogether) or absorbed by councils already reeling from the accelerated cuts delivered by Pickles.
The change is clearly rushed. Ministers have not been fully briefed on the consequences on the ground, nor have they been warned that councils will anyway struggle to introduce the new computer systems that will be needed to take on this new role.
But if this is Banquo’s Ghost, the future of social care is Macduff. Quite simply, the very future of local government as a provider of care is now in doubt.
Demographic changes (we live healthier lives, smoke too little and have better medicine) mean that there are every year more and more elderly people.
Couple this with long term restrictions in funding and a crisis emerges – a crisis which could engulf the largest discretionary function remaining with local government.
Some now seriously say that local government may have to hand over social care to the government if there is not a fundamental reassessment of funding.
So by the time we get to the 2015 LGA conference – just 5 years since the last General Election – it is perfectly possible that the two most important local government services – education and social care – may have been taken over by central government.
1997 now looks like a golden age of local government.
* Chris White is a former Leader of the Liberal Democrats on St Albans Council, Councillor for Hertfordshire County Council and Regional Chair: East of England
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5 Comments
Q: What is keeping councils awake at night?
A: Tories
the ruling class has never really liked local government. If you go right back to the Norman invasion, parish councils are kinda the remnants of the anglo saxon governance, while central government is of course the Norman barony & feudal system. It’s a potential source of opposition to elective dictatorship. It seems that in any case local goverment elections pay more attention to national than local issues anyway.
The key to it all is finance. If councils which were about average raised all the money they spent, federal or national government would have much less scope for interference. There would have to be some equalisation – with precepts from the filthy rich councils to help the struggling – , but many, perhaps most, councils could get on with their business as their electors thought fit.
There is a role for federal, national or, perhaps even better, regional government in helping councils with Special Needs – such as too many poor or need for large-scale investment. There is also some proper role in providing research and some inspection services, but intervention ought to be only targetted on the local councils that really need it. Second guessing every lower tier of government is wasteful.
Perhaps more of these very talented politicians and civil servants in Westminster and Whitehall should be exercising their skills in local Town Halls and Area Committees.
Good points from Jenny and Ian.
Jenny’s Leveller analysis (OK, I read History at Cambridge and did a special subject on the Civil War and Commonwealth period; she’s talking about what the Levellers called “the Norman yoke”) is a tad unfair in that Britain was a relatively decentralised country by European standards until the 19th century. Liberal governments should bear a share of the responsibility for missing opportunities to give grassroots local government (including parish councils) more powers when the new systems were set up and the old undemocratic but community-based systems of local government were replaced, though Liberals were at the forefront on late 19th century “municipal socialism”, addressing urban problems of health, education and leisure deprivation through local council action. Also worth remembering that the Saxon/Norman distinction doesn’t work in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales, though Wales of course experienced a big and oppressive Norman impact.
Ian is spot on. A few years ago a couple of right-wing Tory clevers wrote a series of articles on housing and planning policy, with some mad or downright evil ideas (abolish protection for the natural environment and let the market decide whether the fans of a nature reserve can outspend the businesses that want to build there) but also some percipient analysis of different countries. In particular their article on Germany showed that a system that was not particularly market-oriented as opposed to mixed economy democratic achieved balanced decisions on house-building and industrial or commercial development proposals because both the negative impacts and the positive impacts (including new revenue) were felt locally in a system where local government raised far more of its resources locally than in the U.K.
Of course, in a country as geographically unequal as the U.K., this would have to be put alongside an equalisation mechanism, but the central government contribution should be restricted to that and to small schemes central goivernment is keen to push. In my view one of the biggest charges against Labour in power is that David Milliband (hero of many whose achievements in power were imperceptible) weakly allowed the Lyons Report on local government finance to be watered down and then largely buried in mush.
I’m not sure it is all finance. The battle to nationalise schools stems from an innate distrust of local solutions. While it is true that some local education authorities have not helped the argument, the solution was to bring them up to standard rather than sideline them and invent a new unelected intermediate tier – which is where the Gove proposals are going.
The other problem is that central government just doesn’t get local government. The civil service stream is rarely tainted with local government officers – thus allowing Whitehall to look down on Town Hall.