Why throw money at the Town Halls to resolve the financial crisis?
In my last blog I suggested that the Government should use local authorities to kick start the economy. There are many advantages to using local authorities rather than very large infrastructure schemes like HS2, Hinckley Point nuclear power station, Trident replacement or even the Olympic Games.
Many of these very large capital projects are politically contentious and sometimes very slow to have an impact. Most get bogged down in expensive public enquiries and a proportion probably won’t come off. What is more much of the early expenditure is spent on highly paid staff, such as lawyers, architects and designers and not construction and support staff. An equivalent £1billion spread amongst Britain’s 500 plus local authorities would, on the other hand, have an almost immediate impact.
£10 or £20 million given to my local authority, Wandsworth, could be used to buy every school pupil a laptop or to implement 10 or 20 small, local environmental improvements. I think we would have little problem in spending most of it within a couple of years, with an immediate small but significant local economic impact. Such a nation-wide scheme might, of course, include some silly, vanity projects and some failures but nothing as disastrous and costly as failed and useless mega-projects. What is more such a scheme could easily be targeted to, say, the local authorities in the poorest parts of the country, with the highest unemployment rates or the worst health statistics.
I see William Keegan in the Observer (7th August 2016) agrees with me about using local authorities to kick start the economy, though I must confess I am more one of his disciples than the other way round!
A similar suggestion comes from one of today’s great iconoclasts, Simon Jenkins. He suggests that the simplest solution would be to throw money directly at people. His suggestion reminds me of Alistair Darling’s scrappage scheme, which gave people £2,000 to car owners to scrap their old car and buy a new one. But Jenkins’ idea is more open-ended, in that people could spend on clothing, food or, and here’s the rub, foreign holidays – I have nothing against foreign countries, of course, but, if one is trying to kick start the UK economy then giving it all to Benidorm seems rather pointless.
The problem with Jenkins’ idea is, it seems to me, that it is not targeted to those most in need and there would, I think, be considerable difficulty in targeting, say, the lower paid or the unemployed. It is an interesting idea and gets round Jenkins’ perennial scepticism about bureaucracy. But the time of local democracy has come (again). Think of Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham in the 1880s or John Burns in Battersea in the 1900s, think of Attlee and McMillan boosting council house building in the 1940s and 1950s.
Boosting the local economy means boosting local democracy and society. Forget quantitative easing, which goes to the banks; forget big vanity projects, over-budget, over-time; think local – NOW.
Great headline in the Guardian today, 30/4/14! “Labour vows to rub out Gove era in education”.
That gave me an unexpectedly great start to the day and what is more the analysis is spot on, with David Blunkett accusing Gove of creating an unmanageable “Kafkaesque” education system. Tristram Hunt goes on to say that atomised schools (by which he means Free Schools, academies, maintained schools) leave a landscape of incoherence, confusion and lack of accountability. Good stuff.
Until, unfortunately, we get to the bit about Labour’s alternative; its recipe for success – independent directors appointed by local authorities on a fixed-term five-year contract from a short-list approved by the education department, by which is obviously meant the Whitehall Education Department and not the local authorities’.
So where is Labour’s case for coherence and clarity and most particularly transparent accountability when we consider local government – gone, caput, nowhere?
A few years ago, it was possible to think that the Labour Party had a coherent strategy towards local government, its powers and its democratic legitimacy. The move in London to make Metropolitan Police Divisions co-terminous with the London Boroughs and then to do likewise with the Health Authority areas opened the opportunity for locally elected councillors, and hence the local electorate, to have more of a say in running these very important civic services.
Combined with the extant structure of local government, it made it possible to think of a local accountable unit with sufficient power and influence to encourage democratic participation in civic governance. OH, how we need to re-vivify local democracy and here was the possibility to do just that.
Of course in this highly centralised state called the UK, there was still a long, long way to go. No true, accountable local authority could flourish without some kind of independence from, or at least accommodation with, the financial control of Whitehall. Unfortunately it always suits the party in power to maintain that control, regardless of the honeyed words about localism – always a tempting illusion under governments of any persuasion – at least until now.
But there were signs that local democracy might be gaining traction – until the take-over of policy-making by instant populists. Tony Blair introduced the Mayoral system and pin-up politics first to London, and then to the rest of the country; and at a lower level David Cameron introduced his elected Police Commissioners. By any stretch of the imagination these reforms added to the atomisation of local authority services, confusion and lack of accountability. They were stimulated by an immediate appeal to the electorate at the price of any coherent view about local as opposed to national democracy.
It will be argued that Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have made some sense out of London’s complex transport systems, but that was largely thanks to the coherent consolidation of power and responsibility across a massive urban area.
They will be better remembered for destroying any coherence, clarity or accountability across London’s planning system. Only this week London’s emerging skyline has been said by GLA planning Director, Colin Wilson, to be “very carefully planned. But we prefer to use a flexible framework” leaving us with what others have called an indiscriminate scattering of tall buildings across London.
The new skyline is far from universally popular, will undoubtedly change the look and feel of the city, will be irreversible, will make millions for some developers and will do almost nothing for London’s housing crisis, and it will be incoherent. As for whose responsibility it will have been – you’d need a degree in British local government practise to be able to answer that one.
The major problem is, of course, that people once trusted our local government service as dated but essentially competent and honest – indeed almost the envy of the western world – Westminster politicians now distrust it and abuse it. My suspicion is that Ed Milliband’s major task in domestic politics has to be to build a sensible local government structure into which directors of school standards and police Inspectors can be built. Such a structure would demand, and get, a genuine local political legitimacy. It would also encourage civically minded citizens to stand for local office.
Most important, it would increase election turn-out. The electorate are not stupid. They don’t vote much in local elections and why should they when local authorities are powerless and more and more an arm of national government. Let’s have a return to local government.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 