Talking sense on local government
Today’s Telegraph has an internal memo between David Miliband and John Prescott, which proposes scrapping two-tier district and county councils. The Torygraph, as it would, paints it as an attack on Conservative local councillors.
But, I ask you, if you were creating a system from scratch to govern locally, would you really create one where no-one except local reporters, councillors and council staff, really knew which authority was responsible for what? A system which put collecting waste in the hands of one council (Oxford city) but disposal of it in the hands of another (Oxfordshire county)? A system where collection of council tax is the responsibility of Oxford city, while Oxfordshire county is responsible for the majority of spending? And, on a more political point, a system where control of schools and social services in the city of Oxford, which elects no Tory councillors at all, belongs to Tories elected from the villages and market towns of Oxfordshire?
People from London, Wales and most other cities, where they have just one local council, generally can’t believe me when I tell them how stupid local government in Oxford is. (Yes, as you can tell, I’m a great pub conversationalist!)
The key to the reform would be the creation of all-purpose unitary authorities to replace either the counties or the districts in the 34 English shire counties [...] [David Milliband] is suggesting that instead of new arrangements being imposed from the top, local authorities themselves should propose the sort of unitary structure they want. [...] Mr Miliband indicates that if the Government decides to proceed with the plan, local authorities will have just three months to come up with a solution “in order to minimise argument and disruption”.
Thanks Mr M. We’ll take Oxford City district council boundaries, with a large urban extension south of Grenoble Road and if you must, you can add Botley and Kidlington in too, thank you very much.
PS: feel I have to say that this isn’t a party political point - Oxford city is by no means safe for any one party, let alone Labour, having been NOC with a minority administration for the past eighteen months.
God, is this stuff being rolled out still? I was working for the County Council ten years ago and this debate was happening then.
Funnily enough, people working there had a very different point of view. They felt they administered the areas under the control well and that there was no particular need to put it all under the control of Oxford City Council.
As for the argument about different layers of government, well, how many people apart from the well-informed know whether local or national government has control of, say, education, or of road maintenance? So what’s the difference?
Throw in parish councils and town councils in some areas and it gets even worse.
I can’t see any good or sensible reasons to have two-tier authorities, although I think counties are too large an area and most districts have too small a population. Once you start merging districts to form unitiaries there would be problems with identity, but nothng which can’t be surmounted.
It would not be good for Labour in places like Crawley (a very marginal Labour town surrounded by ultra-Tory countryside and villages) but for practical reasons it has to be a good thing. Our local Tories are currently merging with neighbouring Horsham and we suspect it is to be prepared for possible future unitary boundaries.
Even generally I can’t see it being an attack on Tory county councils. Yes they would go, but be replaced by even more Tory unitary authorities. The whole idea is deeply unpopular with county and district councils of all colours as it represents change. They are still grumbling about the last change: from committee structures to executives.
I wouldn’t get too comfortable with the notion that local government reorganisation will give Oxford unitary status, no matter how many rural bits it attempts to pirate. The whisper from the ODPM is that they’re looking at 400,000 population as the minimum for their new unitaries - rather more likely to be Oxfordshire swallowing Oxford. This is particularly the case given that Milliband’s letter is ostensibly based on research carried out by South East County Councils, including Oxfordshire, making the case to become county unitaries.
This one will run and run; you only have to look at the harm these sorts of proposals did during the north east referendum campaign to know that large well funded local authorities do not go gentle into that dark night.
Richard - it’s by no means a done deal, we know, but I’m glad an opportunity is opening up to lobby for something better for Oxford.
Justin - surely, if functions are transferred from the county to city and former district unitaries, then the staff will be TUPE’d across? Some upheavel, yes, but little actual change in personnel.
I think people need to start waking up to the reality of what is being proposed. Bar Ireland, we already have the biggest areas for local authorities in Europe and the fewest number of elected members on these. Do we really want larger areas with fewer councillors and more distance from the people they are supposed to serve? That isn’t “local government” - not in a reasonable sense of the word anyway!
To top that, most of the local legs of important services are delivered by quangos and not councils, when on the continent services ranging from hospitals and job centres to benefits payments and police are all delivered by local government. Why isn’t that the case in this country? Why do councils in Europe have powers of general competence whilst the UK has the far weaker powers of “well being”? And why all the financial controls over councils, unprecidented elsewhere in Europe?
I thought New Labour was into devolution of power, so why the drive to centralise structures and the reluctance to give back any of the functions taken off local authorities? This is purely a money saving exercise and has nothing to do with reviving local democracy whatsoever!
Jon,
I agree with most of your points, but I’m afraid I don’t see the problem with saving some money when it’s clear that the existing system is neither fit for purpose or efficient.
Antonia,
I’m not sure what you’re basing your assertion that ‘the existing system is neither fit for purpose or efficient’ on.
Evaluation of the last round of local government simplification (the mid-90s abolition of counties like Berkshire and Avon) was pretty mixed as I remember it - places like Bristol dominated the joint arrangements (e.g. fire authorities) put in place to succeed the counties where the new authorities weren’t big enough of themselves, which meant that the cities did relatively well out of reorganisation and quality of provision in rural areas declined.
There were good reasons why Oxford failed to get unitary status in the 90s - and not just Labour’s maladministration of the city. I can’t see a Government that is less sentimental than the Major govt (with its obsession with recreating Rutland etc) pandering to Oxford Labour’s delusion that they could run decent social services or education on such a micro-scale.
Hi Gordon,
I will admit to not being an expert on these issues, but why would you set up an inefficient system with one county and five district councils with different responsibilities for overlapping geographical areas, and five sets of duplication in HR, finance, administration etc? Why would you set up a system not fit for purpose where people don’t know which council provides which service or who to get in touch with for help? By all means, let’s argue about whether there are enough people to justify a unitary authority for Oxford, but surely we can agree that the current system is absurd.
Let’s forget political control for a second and focus on the real issues.
I can’t speak for the other ‘districts’ but I do know that many people in Oxford don’t know which council runs what - if they are even aware that they are covered by two councils.
When it comes to accountability, people often hold the wrong council to account for things they disagree with - how is that democracy in action?
Antonia,
Doesn’t following your argument suggest that a single, centralised bureaucracy would be better than having any local Government at all?
I agree that there are ways in which public services could be streamlined - but it seems to me that there’s always a compromise between local decision-making and economies of scale. Some services appear to work well for relatively small units. Others - like education - don’t.
I also think there is an attraction in having different levels of Government acting as checks and balances on each other. Suppose we had only County level authorities in the mid-80s - vast tracts of the country would have had no Labour or Alliance politicians with any experience of running public services. I doubt that would have been good for the state of democracy.
Finally, I agree that many citizens don’t know the respective responsibilities of county vs district councils - but they probably have little clue of the different roles of central Government, various NHS bodies, or the police service. But don’t we need to take a step back and think about whether this matters, before deciding that the logical consequence must be reorganisation? With the development of services like directgov, can’t we make it simple for citizens to identify the service they want without thinking about the provider?
Gordon,
I don’t think that my argument suggests that single, centralised bureaucracy would be better at all - after all, we know that people are overwhelmingly interested in what happens to their family, their street and their local school or hospital, and no bureaucrat could offer the same level of local engagement as a locally-elected volunteer councillor. I think that ensuring that local government is intelligible in structure reduces barriers to engagement with local democracy and local services, and would be more efficient, no more and no less than that.