Councils are not all identical when it comes to assessing needs and resources, so even the best-laid plans for self-regulation could lead to splits in local government, suggests David Walker
Imagine you are Sir Richard Leese, the leader of Manchester City Council. Or his counterpart, Doug Taylor, at Enfield LBC.
Life is a daily struggle with cuts. But despite them, you strive to realise a vision of place and people amid turbulent power plays in Whitehall and in the boardrooms of companies your residents depend on for their jobs and livelihoods.
On your doorstep fetches up a ‘peer’. Let’s say he’s Stephen Greenhalgh of Hammersmith and Fulham LBC, or Paul Carter of Kent CC. They say they want to help. But you welcome him – or her – into the town hall or civic centre at your peril. These are Tories who despise you, think you are spending too much, and they may be narks for communities secretary, Eric Pickles. They claim to be super-efficient, but you look at the grant distribution and wonder how come they fared so well, relative to your needy area.
All this doesn’t sound like a harmonious peer review opportunity does it? The Local Government Group (LGG)’s David Parsons, himself no shirk when it comes to partisanship, has just launched Taking the lead: Self-regulation and improvement in local government, a programme of ‘self regulation for the local government sector’.
But here’s the problem. Councils have divergent and possibly-conflicting interests.
Take London. Why should Barking and Dagenham, or Waltham Forest want to take advice from Westminster or Wandsworth when the Government’s housing and benefits policy, which is warmly endorsed by those Tory boroughs, could be so detrimental to the wellbeing of residents of those Labour-controlled outer areas?
Local authorities are not all in the same boat when it comes to local needs or resources. Tory councillors in Surrey or Kensington think Mr Pickles has promised to allow them to retain the proceeds of the business rate – although he hasn’t told the Treasury yet.
Equalisation may be scrapped in its present form. So what does the Local Government Association (LGA) ‘peer’ say about the effect on service delivery or efficiency of the further cuts in local resources that would result from the abolition of national non-domestic rate levies – and don’t let anyone claim efficiency and effectiveness measures can exclude the volume of resources available for local spending. Mr Parsons says the aim is to reduce the burden of central government inspections. But his argument is curiously incomplete. If, in his words, councils are ultimately to be judged on ‘how effectively they deliver services, rather than whether the right boxes have been ticked on a Whitehall bureaucrat’s template form’, why not just get rid of inspections altogether? Why not trust councils to look after the elderly and protect children?
The answer seems to be that the LGG is quiveringly uncertain. You don’t need eagle eyes to note the absence of the word ‘audit’ from the LGG proposals. It is extraordinary that, in the eight months since Mr Pickles’ whimsical announcement of the Audit Commission’s demise, the LGA has had virtually nothing to say about the shape or content of the future audit regime.
It may just be that the LGA Tories are taking their lead from the secretary of state, and he hasn’t got a clue either. Or could it be that they don’t really believe local government is fit enough to do without external invigilation – or that the local public wouldn’t tolerate the end of inspection?
Local government has always done self-regulation on an informal basis. Councils are extensively networked. Leaders compare and contrast through party and other convocations. And officers link up in their professional groupings. What used to be the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) has an impressive track record of bringing people together, and for swapping ideas and innovations.
One of the great ‘what ifs’ of recent times must be what might have happened if that formidable operator, Steve Bundred, had stayed as chief executive of the IDeA in 2003. Given the disarray in which the Audit Commission then found itself, it is just conceivable that the IDeA might have absorbed some of its work.
What became Comprehensive Area Assessment might possibly have been carried out on a voluntary basis through the IDeA.
But the IDeA could never be more than a sort of internal consultancy-cum-information exchange and stimulus for leadership. The LGG document is making big claims, and seemingly wants to formalise self-help and mutual review.
But local government isn’t some kind of national corporation, and a lot of talk about ‘the sector’ is plain wrong. The old groupings of counties, municipal authorities and London boroughs had weight and purpose. Although I favoured the creation of the LGA, I now wonder if it was fated to fail. It works as a club or a loose association. But councils simply don’t have enough in common to underpin a muscular body of the kind which could send ‘inspectors’ – peer reviewers – out.
Since last May, the LGA’s Tory leadership has squarely put party before any idea of common local government interests. Perhaps its members were bound to, but it has killed the trust needed to underpin this version of self-regulation.
David Walker’s evidence to the Commons CLG committee is available at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmcomloc/writev/audit/contents.htm.
Details of LGG’s Taking the Lead: Self-regulation and improvement in local government are available from http://www.local.gov.uk/lgv2/aio/1233499
