Warfare or Co-operation
The Relationship of elected councillors and salaried local government officers.
Who are Council officers? Are their interests different from those of councillors’? Do the officers work to the same objectives? Are they motivated by the interests of the electorate as interpreted by the majority party or by rules coming from Whitehall and the law courts? What do they think of elected councillors?
The first thing to note is that officers are not simply local equivalents of the national Civil Service. The Civil Service exists principally to carry out the wishes of the crown, as was, and the elected Government, as is. So historically the civil service administers the Crown’s Government and cares little, at least in theory, for MPs, who from their perspective are merely the electoral body from which the Prime Minister and his colleagues are chosen.
Local government officers, on the other hand, are appointed by their respective Councils, at least in principle, to provide ALL elected members equally with advice. Hence the most junior councillor, even if in a minority of one, and, say, the Leader of the Council have equal rights to get advice, whether on procedural or personal matters, and assistance with constituency issues and casework. In that sense, the junior councillor has access to the highest level of senior officer advice available, in a way that MPs can only dream of from Civil Service Departments. In my experience, new councillors often fail to recognise this opportunity and seldom take advantage of the resources that are there for them.
Local Government officers, however, also serve the elected majority administration of whatever political persuasion. Hence whilst advising councillors as to how they might frame any criticism of the majority party policies, the officers must be careful not to over-step the mark into advising against the administration’s policies.
This is a delicate balance to maintain on a tight-rope and is perhaps why councillors often seem to have more difficulty accepting the political neutrality of their officers than do national politicians of the Civil Service. In my own case, as a councillor on a strongly Tory Council, namely Wandsworth, I have encountered several different but in some ways jaundiced views about the officers.
Some opposition (and here I speak of Tory opposition councillors in the 70s as much as of Labour ones later on) councillors have now, and always have had, an instinctive suspicion that the officers carry out the administration’s policies, not just because that is their job, but because they really are Conservative or Labour supporters.
I could give many examples and no doubt that is why there appears to be more of a tendency to cull senior officers after a change in power at a local rather than a national level.
Other councillors simply think that the officers just happen to be doing their job as best they can. Perhaps because of my background as a local government officer, who wanted to be a “public servant”, I instinctively lean to the view that officers want to perform a public service well. Hence, in the broadest sense, I expect officers to want a healthy and well-funded public service and, therefore, to be inherently more inclined to Labour rather than Tory attitudes, or at least those Tory attitudes that want to limit or even abolish local government services. But clearly this is no more the case than believing that all teachers are Labour voters. Maybe they should be but they most clearly are not – the same is true of local government officers.
But if local government officers are more variegated than elected members often assume, they do have one thing in common and that is their background in local government. Hence they are coloured by the extremely rule-based, legally-encompassed nature of their jobs. Ironically, the attitudes and approaches this training engenders often infuriates councillors, Labour and Tory, who are frustrated by the officers’ very (small c) conservative approach. So that many councillors often end up thinking they have more in common with the “hated” enemy across the Chamber than they do with the officers.
Again, this viewpoint may be dramatically shaped by my experience in Wandsworth where leading lights in both major parties have been very radical in their outlook, whether over their opposition to the Motorway Box, or their pursuit of GLC abolition, or their enthusiasm for an expansionist Council, 1964-90, or a contracting one, 1990-2015. But, whichever the political party, the cries of frustration were often aimed at the cautionary approach of the officers, and not the robust opposition of the opposition councillors, who were merely and quite appropriately doing the job of opposing. Labour and Tory councillors can sometimes behave rather like rival football teams, who are only stopped from having a really good argument by the man with the whistle, the referee or officer, who says, “You can’t do that – we don’t have the powers”.
This state of things results in some misunderstandings, which are reflected in some surprising ways. For officers, whose job it is to carry out the majority party policies and deliver the best possible service within that constraint, the tactics of the opposition can look most confusing. After all, if opposition councillors genuinely believe the services would be better if run by them than by the current majority party, then it becomes relatively easy to justify almost any form of legal wrecking tactics, with the only constraint being what the electorate might think.
From officers, unable to imagine themselves in the opposition’s role, such opposition looks stupid at best and unprincipled at worst. But on the other hand opposition councillors need some room for manoeuvre and may even manufacture opposition rather than run the risk of becoming irrelevant lobby fodder. Any officer, who whilst supporting the administration’s policies, points subtly to the weaknesses in the policies without actually leading the opposition by the hand, deserves the support and praise of both the opposition and, actually, the majority party, which needs a vibrant opposition to keep it on its toes.
Is there any conclusion to draw from this meditation? Well I think there is. Forgetting the time-servers of whom there are enough amongst officers, majority and minority party councillors, I think its best always to recognise a complex mix of motivations is at the heart of any argument.
So we’re not talking about open warfare between councillors and officers, nor complete co-operation either. It’s a complex but endlessly fascinating process of opposition, co-operation and something else between.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 