|
> Home
> News cuttings >
Starter
Local Government
Chronicle - 13 November 2007
Here’s a starter for 10. Who said: “I think it is time with local government to tear up rules and all the ring fencing and the auditing and actually say to our local councils, it’s your money, spend it as you choose and get judged in the ballot box by people that you serve.?”
And this: “We want to put governing back into local government. Local councils should not merely administer services, they should shape the future, build a foundation for aspiration and ambition and not wait for Whitehall to tell them what to do next.”
Finally: “This Government also want to see an unprecedented transfer of power and influence direct to local people; elected representatives who are not afraid of the views of local people but enriched and strengthened by them?”
The first is David Cameron during that speech in Blackpool. The second and third come from Hazel Blears in the debate on the Queen’s Speech.
To which the instinctive response is: err, up to a point Lord Copper. I live for the day when Government tells councils: “it’s your money, spend it how you like!” As for Hazel Blears the combination of high-falutin’ sonorities and serious gross bodily harm inflicted on the English language (ring-fenced grants are now being “mainstreamed”) is straight out of the New Labour phrasebook.
Politicians would be more convincing if they admitted two political realities. One is that no government can turn its back on the volumes of public expenditure which pass through local government nor on the broad allocations of those sums in pursuit of policy goals. The other is that the national interest is not simply a sum of local interests and that local interests may get in the way of national goals. In these cases Government garners responsibility to itself.
So the Queen’s Speech which occasioned Hazel Blears’ effusions about community empowerment and the pruning of local authority performance indicators contained measures to add more muscle to the central apparatus to deliver the Government’s objective to built 3m houses by 2020 and a bill designed to drive through planning permission for large projects (good guess: nuclear power stations and runways). Against that the ability to add a conservatory to the lounge without planning permission provided the neighbour is happy or perhaps even put a bedroom over the garage is pretty easy empowerment.
But the Government is right. Many communities will dislike having more houses imposed upon them (and would probably dislike it just as much if the commensurate infrastructure development were guaranteed though it makes a wonderful weapon with which to beat the government) – and they have every right to defend what they see as the quality of their environment. But there is a national need for more housing and it is predominantly in the most economically vibrant parts of the country. The last Conservative Government was excoriated locally for imposing new-build targets on councils.
Equally the planning system is laborious and can too easily discourage development. The Government solution is to “empower” a quango to take planning decisions on large projects in the light of national guidance. Those under the proposed flight-path or within a short drive of the power plant will be apprehensive at best and outraged at worst, though they will be far outnumbered by the thousands poring over conservatory catalogues.
The modish rhetoric of devolution can be treacherous. It is entirely couched in terms of central government graciously conceding a little parcel of competence to the citizen - a sort of constitutional alms-giving. The implicit assumption, almost genetic in government, is that the state enables the citizen rather than that the citizen licenses the state.
Labour is locked into its top-down agenda. The Tories have time to think. Rather than chew away at the toxic issue of Scottish votes in Westminster they would do well to explore the idea of a contract between the government and the citizen which defines the job to be done and where and by whom it is best done.
We might even call it empowerment!
© Local Government Chronicle
|
previous page