Happy Christmas, Councillor! Your role may be abolished!

This is Blog no 88

Of course, this won’t apply to everyone. But under the Government’s plans for devolution in England, there will be fewer Councillors. Indeed, that is clear intention:

“Fewer politicians, with the right powers, will streamline local government to focus on delivering for residents.”  

This is an enormous package and, at over 35,000 words, weighs in as a substantial contribution to anyone’s Christmas reading list. Even a cursory look tells you one thing at once – we have a rival to Sir David Nicholson’s famous comment about Andrew Lansley’s ill-considered reorganisation of the NHS in 2011. He said it was “so big you can see it from space”. This will be the same.

There are strong arguments for revisiting Local Government structures in England. Currently it is a mess, so the intellectual case for the status quo is weak. Whether it is wise to embark upon such an ambitious programme of change right now is more questionable. Reorganisations create enormous instability, as key positions remain vacant pending new appointments, and the inevitable haemorrhage of corporate memory and local knowledge take their toll. This is unavoidable; it always costs more and takes longer.

One might tolerate this were it not for what else the government is seeking to do at the same time.

An example is the enormous target to build 1.5 million houses, and for which it is urgently necessary to approve new Local Plans. Currently there are 226 District Councils which are Planning Authorities, and many will face tough choices designating sites for housebuilding, and convincing local people to approve them. What then happens when these Councils disappear, and the plans are subsumed to new strategic authorities for whom local communities have less allegiance? It could be a recipe for widespread opposition. Encouragement for the very ‘naysayers’ that the Prime Minister rightly wishes to persuade to back his plans.

Supporters of the reforms will argue that people can rapidly adapt to changes in local government. They point out that previous reorganisations have featured ritual huffing and puffing, but residents have still continued to put their bins out for collection, and still registered their births, marriages and deaths with few discernible objections. So, will they notice if there are fewer Councillors? After all, doesn’t everyone hate politicians anyway? 

Maybe. But I believe the relationship between local communities and their Councils is a bit more complex. Subtle, even. Good elected members, are walking, breathing consultors, continually soaking up the views of their constituents, engaging with local civil society, businesses and the media. They absorb the mood of their constituents and take this into account when they represent them in the Council chamber. Moves to centralise power at local as well as national levels – whether through the Cabinet system or all-powerful elected Mayors carry risks of weakening this transmission mechanism. In short, we need good local Councillors. Otherwise, we just have top-down policy-making, and insufficient bottom-up thinking.

In the coming months, there will surely be ample debate on these proposals. Parliamentary scrutiny, even with Labour’s thumping majority, will provide opportunities to influence the programme of change. But only at the margin. The direction of travel is set and was foreshadowed in Labour’s Manifesto.

Local government expert, Professor Colin Copus estimates that at least 2,000 – 3,000 Council seats will disappear, but it could be more. He and others are also anxious that communities’ sense of identity will be weakened if decisions are taken further and further away.

So, in an attempt to provide constructive ways forward and to contribute to the debate, here are three suggestions the Government might consider.

1. Strengthen the lower tier of local government. We have 10,000+ Town and Parish Councils and about

    100,000 elected or co-opted members. But not everywhere. If we are going towards bigger and bigger top-  

     Councils, we should re-inforce the lower level. There is just a hint of this in the Policy paper: “We know

     people value the role of governance at the community scale and that can be a concern when local

     government is reorganised. We will therefore want to see stronger community arrangements when

     reorganisation happens in the way councils engage at a neighbourhood or area level.

     For some of us, it should not be an afterthought but a ‘sine qua non’

2. Leverage the Citizens Assembly movement. More and more politicians are belatedly recognising the

    value of randomly selected citizen voices used for deliberative review of important issues, and there is

    growing evidence of their effectiveness. Why not legislate that all the new Strategic Mayoral authorities and

    their equivalents must establish and maintain such a mechanism? Go further and use similar methods (eg

    Citizens’ Juries) as providers of scrutiny and accountability.

3. Clarify the obligations to consult. If there is to be a weakening of the link between local people and  

    municipal decision-makers, we should create a more structured framework for effective public consultation.  

    It is currently confused with a myriad requirements to consult dating from legislation passed in different

    decades, mostly long pre-dating social media and other new technology forms of gathering stakeholder

    views. Overhauling local consultation and setting enforceable standards would encourage more and higher-

    quality public involvement. It might also reduce the embarrassing number of judicial reviews.

Angela Rayner’s proposals are bold. We will need to become accustomed to a new vocabulary of Strategic Authorities, Spatial Development Strategies, Local Growth  Plans, Local Power Plans, Local Skills Improvement Plans and many more. The paper has a ‘top-down’ flavour to it, but this is possibly unintentional. Readers of Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram’s influential book, Head North will recognise many of the themes in Labour’s plans and realise that the intention is to create an environment for locally generated ideas and priorities to flourish.

What is needed is a way to secure public consent and to do this, we need an improvement in service delivery.

That’s a real challenge in the midst of a reorganisation.

Time to be very careful.

Rhion H Jones

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