Richard Reeves
When Margaret Thatcher sat down with her first cabinet in No 10, one of the agenda items was a plan to free local authorities from Whitehall control. It didn’t quite work out. Thatcher herself recalled that she was soon “forced down the path of still tougher, financial controls, as the inability or refusal of local councils to run services efficiently became increasingly apparent.” Tony Travers at the LSE characterises her reign as an “11-year-long war against local government.”
Today a truce has been declared. David Cameron describes himself as a “confirmed localist.” Thoughtful Tories, like Oliver Letwin, look back to an older, Burkean tradition concerned with the “little platoons” of local communities. Last month the Conservatives launched a green paper on the issue, which Cameron advisers think contains some of the most radical ideas they will bring into government. They may find more allies in future, given that many of the expected new Tory MPs will have earned their stripes in town halls. Some of his opponents, too, will warm to these ideas. In 2006, David Miliband argued that Labour politics needed what he called a “double devolution,” by which he meant giving power to local authorities, who would in turn give it to individuals. “Devolution is a deal,” he declared.
Amen to that, say the new Tories. But they want to go farther. The Conservatives say that they will allow more elected mayors, but only if a majority vote for them in referendums. Local taxpayers, they say, will be able to veto large council tax rises, again by referendum. But the most important Conservative proposal—one largely overlooked—is to grant councils a “general power of competence.” In future they will not need a specific mandate to act, but can undertake any lawful activity without a permission slip from Whitehall. On paper, it indicates a profound change in the relationship between central and local government.
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David Walker
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
As David has just said, it’s been a lively year for tanks, but the judges also registered a large gap: little or no work that anticipated the financial crash and its consequences for fiscal policy let alone the real economy. Have tanks been bold enough, we wondered?
The judges were David Goodhart, myself—until recently the editor of the Guardian’s Public magazine—Rohan Silva, adviser to the Conservative Party leadership, Sir Lawrence Freedman, deputy principal of Kings College London, Kishwa Falkner, a Liberal Democrat peer and David Halpern, former strategy adviser to Tony Blair now at the Institute for Government.
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Jessica Prendergrast
Does England need more mayors? Yes, say Michael Kenny and the IPPR’s Guy Lodge, writing in Prospect, pointing to the success of mayors in reinvigorating and improving the performance of local democracy in the small number of local authorities in which they have been adopted. And the politicians, it seems, are listening. Communities secretary Hazel Blears recently extolled the virtues of mayors, and various press reports suggest that Labour may include support for more mayors in its next election manifesto.
Believe the hype and the case for more mayors seems pretty clear-cut. Delve a little deeper, however, and the case is not so clear. Generalising from the current crop is a risky business. There is a severe lack of evidence for the benefits of mayors in English local government; not least because there are only 12 of them (not including the special case of the mayor of London). A sample size of 12 makes drawing firm conclusions nigh-on impossible.
This is further complicated by two important factors. First, the mayoral authorities that do exist have tended to emerge from local political turmoil—Hackney being the most obvious example. Second, councils with mayoral models tend to represent areas that are not typical of the population as a whole—in particular, there is a strong urban bias.
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Michael Kenny
The London mayoral election has got a lot of people in the capital talking about politics again. It is partly, of course, the fact that the battle for Britain’s most important directly elected political position is being contested by two celebrity candidates—Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson—in a very tight race.
But there is more at stake here than political drama. This election matters for the people of London. True, the Greater London Authority Act of 1999 handed few direct powers to the mayor. The city leader is able to exercise strategic and co-ordinating powers over only transport, policing and economic development. Nonetheless, Livingstone has proved adept at using these powers and his ability to “speak for London” to develop some innovative policies, notably the congestion charge. He has, moreover, seen his powers in the field of housing and planning strengthened.
Beyond London, it is clear that there is something about elected mayors which generates political energy and a sense of connection. As a result of their direct election, mayors are much better known than council leaders, and are in a position to promote greater political accountability.
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Jonathan Myerson
Turnout at local elections hovers at around 35 per cent, dropping to 25 per cent in London: a shockingly low figure. Whitehall, think tanks and commissions are full of ideas about how to reinvigorate local democracy. But after four years as a councillor in Lambeth, it is clear to me that the protagonists in this debate remain frighteningly ignorant about the reality of local politics, and about what people want from their “local governors.”
All the parties and think tanks want to hand power back to citizens. Labour believes “local communities are just better at dealing with their own problems. They have the networks.” The Tories “advocate devolving power directly to the citizen,” and the Lib Dems want “local communities… to have more influence and say over the issues affecting them.” But my time as a councillor has told me one thing: citizens don’t want more power; they want someone to do it for them.
One of my polling districts comprised 99 per cent local authority housing, meaning its voters were heavy users of council services. These are the people who should be most eager to use the ballot box. But turnout here struggled to reach double figures. Yet the “new localism” continues to find ears in Whitehall. New tiers of committees and “urban parish councils” will, say ministers, reinvigorate local involvement. Much of the thinking in the department for communities and local government’s recent white paper, “Strong and Prosperous Communities,” is informed by such ideas.
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Harvey Cole
Michael Lyons’s report on local government finance, delivered on 21st March, was reminiscent of Horace’s quip, “The mountains were in labour and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse.” The expected roar of the Lyons turned out to be an impotent squeak.
The report had twice been postponed, in order to extend its scope to consider aspects of the role and function of local authorities as well as their financing. But the main thrust of its 400 pages turned out to be a series of tweakings of council tax rather than bold moves to replace, restructure or supplement it.
Along with the introduction of three new council tax bands, one at the bottom and two at the top, Lyons suggested a revaluation of house property—the current bands are based on 1991 prices—a move which the government promptly rejected. Scratching around for ways of widening the council tax net to scrape up additional revenue, Lyons also proposed removing the current exemptions of farms and farm buildings (to raise £450m); of property occupied by charities, including their shops (another £724m); and to end the relief for empty and derelict property (£1.3bn). All that would have increased the total yield of council tax by about 10 per cent. The government grabbed at the last of these—and it was largely included in Gordon Brown’s swan song budget. But the other suggestions will be the subject of—probably lengthy and indecisive—consultation.
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Harvey Cole
The May local elections will be seen, in the main, as an opinion poll on how long Tony Blair should remain as prime minister; with sub-themes being the progress of David Cameron and the challenge of the BNP in some parts of the country. This “nationalisation” of local elections is an old story. But meanwhile some rather big things are happening in local government, largely unremarked on by the national media, and “localism” has moved closer to the top of the policy agenda of all three main parties.
The first notable change is that one of the main complaints about local government—that it raises only a small proportion of the money it spends and is thus always subject to central control—is becoming much less true, at least for larger authorities.
As a result of reorganisations over the past 40 years, local authorities no longer produce or distribute gas and electricity, nor do they control higher education, and oversight of police and fire services has been transferred to independent bodies. In spite of this reduction in activities, in 2005 local authorities in England were still responsible for about 15 per cent of all state expenditure—£70bn. However, less than a third of that was raised from councils’ own resources: council tax amounted to £21bn, and a bit extra was earned from charges and fees.
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Harvey Cole
At the local elections on 4th May, about half of the total electorate had a vote. The Tories ended up with a net gain of around 320 seats, and so it is tempting to assume that had there been polls for every local authority, the party would have picked up over 600.
But the picture is more complicated than that. The elections were only held in England—and in just over half of all authority areas there. Most important, those areas where voting took place make up a very skewed sample. Almost 1,800 contests took place in the 32 London boroughs, where every seat was up for grabs. Virtually all the metropolitan boroughs and other unitary bodies held elections and the 56 of these accounted for just over 1,100 seats. But in these places, only one third of seats were up for election. This was also the case with the 88 district councils where polling took place, but these made up only just under 40 per cent of all districts: the rest vote in other years.
The Tories made just about half their net gains in London. But London was heavily over-represented on the battleground. It accounted for 18 per cent of authorities which were up for election (against 10 per cent nationally) and had three times as many seats up for contention as compared with other places: an “oversampling” of 5.4 times.
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Anthony Bevins
The recent public fright over genetically-modified (GM) food should have taught New Labour a lesson: we still have some way to go before achieving joined-up government. A related lesson is that we do not have a proper system for overseeing the unending stream of expert advice which governments now receive.
Robert May, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said in a paper to MPs that the recent experience with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) explained why the British were more concerned about GM food than the Americans. But he added reassuringly: “Lessons have been learnt. We need to have much better lines of traceability from food production to the table. We should allow consumers maximum information and choice about what they buy through clear labelling.” So far, so good. “And we must test,” he said. “No one was looking out for untoward effects in cattle. In the case of GM food, we are testing for unexpected and unwanted effects.”
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Madsen Pirie
I fell for the idea straight away. Douglas Mason, a Scottish councillor, came up with a poll tax as a way to avert the rating crisis which hit Scotland in the early 1980s, and which threatened to do the same in England.
It is often difficult to track an idea back to its source, and there may well have been other people who thought this one. It would be surprising if there were not, because local government finance was reaching a critical stage, and people were examining how other countries managed. Capitation taxes, local income taxes, sales taxes and land taxes were among the ideas which came under scrutiny.
It is quite possible that civil servants, political researchers, academic analysts, even government ministers might have independently come up with the poll tax idea; but I heard it first from Douglas Mason.
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