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Glimmer
Local Government
Chronicle - 1 November 2006
So what would the Tories do about local government? They have said that they will abolish regional assemblies, return the powers exercised by regional quangos to local councils, and get rid of or redesign regional development agencies according to local circumstances. The advice to Tory councillors concerning local government re-organisation is a clear No, No, No! The party promises to set up its own review of finance once Lyons has reported.
We are now getting the skeleton of a more complex policy. David Cameron and Caroline Spelman have written a pamphlet called The Permissive State launched, for once, entirely without fanfare.
Cameron explains that if the state is to promote “general well being” (the social equivalent of GDP) it needs to harness social responsibility. Indeed, the entire project is predicated on the belief that there is “a growing sense among people of all backgrounds and from all corners of the country that it is time to reclaim control of their own communities.”
Cameron promises four major changes to the relationship between central government, local government and local communities. These are the dismantling of regional government; the empowerment of people to take action themselves; and the subordination of local police forces to an elected sheriff, directly elected police authority or directly elected mayor where mayoral and police boundaries are the same (a prize for where this is relevant outside London!).
The key new policy is to give councils more power over the spending of money. Central Government would be required to spell out how much it spent on local services in each area. The council and communities would have the right to redirect this spending according to their own priorities and Whitehall would have to deliver an “action plan” (aarrrhhhggg!) to achieve them. Money delivering national priorities like acute health care would not form part of the kitty.
This project is given legislative form in a draft Sustainable Communities Bill drafted in partnership with a body called Local Works (I assume that is a noun and a verb rather than an adjective and a noun). Anyone wanting to get to the guts of the proposal should turn to the Schedule at the end of the bill which sets out considerations for the action plan. They include the obvious, like the local economy and employment and community health and environmental protection; the virtuous like participation in civil and political activity; the aspirational like the availability of local shops, post offices and pubs; and the plain dotty like “consumption of locally-produced or organic food.”
The pamphlet accepts that this would lead to huge differentiation in services across the country. There is no problem with that: the belief in standard services has spawned the huge apparatus of monitoring and control which has done so much to sterilise local government. But there are bound to be questions about the administrative cost and complexity of the policy which could, ironically, end up giving a vastly enhanced role in practice to the Government’s regional offices (which I assume are to stay since the pamphlet ignores their existence.)
We need a real feel for just how much money would be available for discretionary direction once competences already exercised by councils and national priorities are excluded. The pamphlet speaks of local priorities for affordable housing and the infrastructure to sustain development, urban regeneration and tramway and even motorway construction as being frustrated under the present structure. But are these really starters for local redirection of funding. And how much of the NHS, providing perhaps the most sensitive local issues of all and where there is currently no shred of real local accountability, is off limits?
A handful of detailed budget break-downs would really enable us to judge whether the bill, in Cameron’s words, would “significantly alter the balance of power in favour of local councils and local communities.” A commitment to trial it in a handful of areas would be a wise precaution.
This pamphlet does not question the structure of the centralised state despite its lavish praise for the Swiss federal model. Instead it requires the state to deliver a conflated devolution-cum-local agenda. A huge amount of explanation is still to come.
© Local Government Chronicle
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