Local Matters V: How public partnerships are wrecking local democracy

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OurKingdom is running a short series of posts looking at various aspects of local government - you can read the series in full here.

George Jones (London, LSE): Public Partnerships are the Government's fashionable mechanism for delivering local public services. They come in various shapes and sizes: between local authorities and other public bodies, with the private sector and with the voluntary or independent sector. And they have proliferated. Researchers in 2002 found at least 5,500 local partnerships, spending £4.3 billion a year, with 75,000 partnership board members. There must be far more today.

But this explosion of partnerships raises fundamental issues about the health of local democracy. Since partnerships exercise public powers, use public resources and provide public services, they need to be accountable to those on whose behalf they act. But the accountability arrangements for Local Strategic Partnerships [LSPs] and Local Area Agreements [LAAs] - the two most significant manifestations of partnerships - leave much to be desired.

It is difficult to see how LSPs are accountable to the local community. There are no processes for ensuring this accountability, nor are most partners (especially the private and voluntary sectors) directly accountable to local people in their day-to-day operations. And the LSP is a body completely invisible to most citizens, who are simply unaware of its existence.

The accountability mechanism for LAAs, meanwhile, conspires to move local authorities further away from their populations. Counties and single-tier authorities have been given, by the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, the duty of preparing and submitting LAAs in consultation with partners involved in them. These agreements contain up to thirty-five targets that are negotiated with central government through its regional offices - and central government can impose changes to them at will.

The government emphasises the local authority's accountability for the achievement of these targets, and the Audit Commission, as the body responsible for ensuring public money is spent effectively, will assess it on that basis. But, as many of the targets are set centrally, the local authority is forced to focus more on the requirements of central government and the Audit Commission inspectorates than the local community it is supposed to represent. Accountability here runs only upwards, not downwards.

There is a further problem. Only on the local authority are duties imposed - but it has no direct powers to ensure the effective working of the LSP or that targets set within the LAA are met, when those targets do not lie within its direct responsibilities. It has no leverage on other public bodies beyond the uncertainties of their duty to co-operate, and to take account of and have regard to LAA targets. It cannot be accountable for matters over which it has no control. And if accountability is shared in arrangements of joint-accountability, then any partner can shuffle off its responsibility to others, so that no one can ever be held to account. Shared accountability becomes in practice joint irresponsibility, where no one is accountable.

If the present confusions of accountability remain, then the LSPs and LAAs will only be instruments through which central government seeks to achieve its objectives, hiding behind the accountability of local authorities to legitimise the LSPs and LAAs. The answer to these problems of accountability is to ensure that the elected local authority in its community leadership role is in the driving seat of the LSPs and LAAs, and that the partners are obliged to follow its lead.

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