For a unitary Oxford council
Some mornings you wish you hadn’t got out of bed, and given how cold and wet it was this morning, today is shaping up to be one of them.
This afternoon this particular councillor will be attending Executive Board and Full Council. There’s one main item of business on the agenda for both meetings: approving the city council’s submission to the government for Oxford to have a unitary local authority. There’s more information about the bid here, under the slightly curious heading “An Oxford council for Oxford people” (does that put anyone else in mind of the League of Gentlemen?), and you can read the draft submission here. I read it for the first time yesterday (you can tell what an interesting life I lead if that was how I spent Sunday afternoon), and I thought it made an excellent case, highlighting the absurdities of the current arrangements, and dispelling the myths about unitary status - for example, that the costs of transition couldn’t be met from within existing resources. The paper reveals that they can, and that it would take just four years rather than five to pay off the costs.
Oxfordshire County Council inevitably focuses on the requirements of the majority of the county. These needs - primarily rural and suburban, and mostly affluent - are very different from those of the city of Oxford.
Here’s hoping DCLG take notice and agree a change for the people of Oxford.
I expect the Greens to be in support of this:
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/Public%20Administration.html#PA300
“PA300 Our preference will be to abolish the County Councils after the transfer of their present functions to District Councils and to confederations of Districts.”
They do support it: the introduction to the paper is jointly signed by John Goddard for the Liberals, Bob Price for Labour and Craig Simmons for the Greens, plus the council’s chief executive
The exeter bid was approved by full council on Monday - 30 for, 8 against. I have heard that in Oxford party politics has got the better of some and what would otherwise be a very sound bid has been marred by the bickering, is that true? I’m glad to see it was approved successfully in Oxford, all the best with it.
Of course the absurdity is that our elected local representatives have to go begging to Whitehall for permission to arrange a local constitution for local people in the first place.
I still think that Oxford City Council, as an organization, is a decade away from being capable of taking on the added functions, assuming it had good leadership for that long. So whilst desirable for all sorts of reasons, I won’t be supporting it just yet and I hope (though it’s not clear from the DCLG website) that there are opportunities to object.
I agree with Jock. Unitary Oxford would be disastrous partly because the organisation is so rubbish, but also because it simply wouldn’t have the critical mass to be a decent authority.
Checks and balances are essential to democracy, and just because the tories run the county at the minute without having representation in the city doesn’t mean that situation will persist for ever.
I don’t subscribe to the “critical mass” bit though. I see no reason why a community of 150,000 people could not successfully run all of what’s required (which might not be all of what’s currently done of course).
Indeed if anything I’d prefer even more devolution to smaller communities and neighbourhoods with partnerships in things like education to enable people to go to schools in neighbouring communities if they need/want to.
Rutland is one fifth the size a unitary Oxford would be and yes, they partner with Leicestershire County Council on things like education, but I don’t hear them held up as a particularly failing example of local government.
For me the crucial objection is the organizational ability. But then I guess many at the city would say the same about the county!
“Rutland is one fifth the size a unitary Oxford would be and yes, they partner with Leicestershire County Council on things like education, but I don’t hear them held up as a particularly failing example of local government”
No, not the most challenging area though, in terms of complex needs, and a Council Tax 15% above the English average, which may be partly related to (for instance) costs of about £8 per home for the Chief Exec’s wages, as against more like 50p for a ‘normal’ sized County or large Metropolitan authority.
A unitary council would be far more democratic. Increased power to the new authority would also increase the amount of scrutiny and number (hence also calibre, without casting aspersions on the ability of our many excellent current councillors) of people who wanted to run.
On the doorstep there is widespread confusion (understandably) about which authority is responsible for which areas, and increasing people’s understanding of the democratic process can only be a good thing in my book.
I’m not sure how RP thinks scrutiny would be enhanced; aren’t the worst examples of failing political scrutiny from unitary authorities (Westminster, Doncaster, Sunderland) rather than areas where a two-tier system operates?
Do we really think councillors in Bristol suddenly got better when Avon was abolished?
I am concerned that there is actually a significant democratic deficit where services are run jointly between authorities - the complexity of such arrangements militates against transparency and accountability. For all we may think about leader+cabinet vs. Committee+Chair models, they do at least provide some figureheads, and some simple member/officer relationships.
There was a good old boy letter the other day about unitary authorities which said it was crazy to set them up because it would mean that ’services that used to be provided by one organisation (the county) are provided by the unitary authorities…for example, instead of one highways department, you have several. The obvious and inevitable result is that council tax keeps rising and there is no improvement in the services delivered’.
This is a kind of odd argument against having one council per area rather than two, but taken to its logical conclusion would have the merit of centralising absolutely everything into one national (or possibly global) service.
Having many small highways departments is obviously a bad thing if it means that your small body needs to employ highway engineers who aren’t working at full capacity, or if it needs to employ proportionately more managers than a larger body would need.
Having one national highway department in charge of every road in Britain is also obviously bad, as you will inevitably generate a large bureaucracy that does not respond appropriately to local needs.
So, for each service that the state provides, there will be a natural size which provides the optimum efficiency and responsiveness. There is no reason to expect that this size is the same for a road system as for a school system, or a parks service, or a police force, or a housing service.
This would lead us to the conclusion that we should have different boundaries for each different service that the state provides, but that creates a different problem. If each service has a different service area, the only way to democratically allocate local funds amongst them is for each service to have an elected management body with tax-setting powers. This is obviously a bad idea - I suspect if you asked Mr. Highways Departments, he would tell you that the only thing worse than too many highways departments was too many politicians!
We are left with the result that we must compromise on the size of the different service areas so as to have a small number of elected bodies with repsonsibility for the services in their areas.
This could be accomplished with unitary authorities, or it could be accomplished with county / district system. I am not familiar enough with the scales of the various functions of local authorities to be able to judge which of the two is superior. That the needs of the city of Oxford and the needs of the people of the rest of Oxfordshire aren’t the same is obvious.
I have two concerns about the proposal.
1. The JSC looks rather like it might be a hotbed of cronyism and stitch-ups, rather like the existing regional assembly quangos. In fact, there would seem to be quite a lot of overlap between the two bodies. I suspect that at least one is unnecessary. (For preference, kill off “regions”, because they don’t exist in any meaningful sense.) If we are to have a democratic system, then any joint planning/strategy body must be the servant of the various elected authorities and not their master.
2. Smaller authorities receiving block grants from the national government make it easier for the government of the day to tinker for political gain. This is a small concern, though, because it’s easy enough for governments to play political games anyway.
“That the needs of the city of Oxford and the needs of the people of the rest of Oxfordshire aren’t the same is obvious.”
Really?
Actually, I think there are more similarities than dissimilarities - yes, Oxford is a more diverse place in many ways (ethnicity, more young people especially students etc), but the same needs apply: waste collection, education, fire service, libraries, roads etc etc etc.
At the end of the day the tension comes from the fact that Oxford hosts things for the rest of the county, and city residents seem to perceive county residents as evil car drivers who want to convert every flat piece of land remaining in the city into a mass car park. Self-aggrandising city councillors who dream of running more services ignore the fact that for every resident in Rose Hill, Blackbird Leys or Barton there are residents in estates across the county who may be in a less urban setting but are no less victims of poverty.
With the situation the way it currently is, its very easy for Oxford city council for blaming the county council for its shortfalls, at least with unitary council they will not have this excuse any longer!
Would the city council boundary be changed in any way if Oxford was to become a unitary council?