This is the first in a short series of posts OurKingdom will be running in April looking at various aspects of local government.
Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Four months ago, on December 12 2007, a major constitutional bargain was struck which attracted no attention then and has largely been ignored since. I refer to the concordat on central-local government that the government signed with the Local Government Association (LGA) and that was trailed in the Governance of Britain green paper. But government departments and ministers have not lost their enthusiasm for interfering in local government affairs and, so far as I know, the LGA and local authorities scarcely ever raise its presence in their defence.
The state of local government is vital to the health of our democracy, yet in all the talk of constitutional affairs and reform, the need to revitalise and free local authorities from their chains doesn’t get a look in. There seems to be a mental Berlin Wall between concerns about executive dominance of Parliament, the unreformed House of Lords reform and the obsolete parliamentary election system, etc., etc., and local government that is neither “local” nor “government.” Here is executive dominance if you like: central government rules local authorities with rods of iron that determine the bulk of their policies, their spending, their targets and their process. The local authorities themselves are the most remote from local people in western Europe.
Ministers and commentators talk blithely about the “new localism.” But this is a sham. What we have in effect is centrally-driven local governance within which local authorities have lost powers and funding to a plethora of quangos and other bodies and are required only to be efficient administrators on diminishing budgets. In England and Wales, first-past-the-post elections distort local representation with even less justification than is advanced for Westminster. Yet who, other than the brave and indefatigable Simon Jenkins, cares?
Needless to say, the concordat hardly addresses the major structural and policy issues that are suffocating local democracy. Does it begin by recognising that local government requires constitutional independence from central government? You have got to be kidding. Does it reassert the prime duty of local authorities to respond to local people’s needs and desires and shape policies for local well-being accordingly? Not really – the focus is upon local service delivery. Electoral reform? Nah.
Meanwhile, high above local level the government is busy erecting a new troika of regional governance, made up of regional development agencies, a new super-quango and its own regional offices, that will take all the major decisions that shape regional and local affairs across England, running partnerships with the very largest local authorities, NHS, police and other authorities. Nothing is being done to reduce the scale of local government structures that have grown far too remote from local people.
Within local government, the concordat is accepted as the first stage of a new approach to local affairs. It recognises that much is wrong, even if it does little more. It gives the LGA a foot in the door. But local authorities will have to give that door a bloody hard push if it is to lead to anything worthwhile. And all of us who find local government boring and complex will have to take an interest.
