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John Denham’s Making Local the Answer lecture at the RSA on 21 October was a bold attempt to tie together the various strands of government policy relating to local government into a single thread.
For my money, the Secretary of State did a fine job of wrapping a coherent narrative around a series of current initiatives. Whether there is a bit of post-rationalisation at play here, I’ll let you decide.
The main focus was on the potential Total Place offers, in terms of both cash savings and better commissioning and delivery, not least the likelihood of increased investment in upstream work (eg interventions with those at risk of involvement in drugs or crime), to reduce demand downstream.
This was linked to the extension of local authority scrutiny over all local services. Mr Denham is surely right to describe scrutiny as “the lion that has not yet roared”; the scrutiny function was introduced with little, err, scrutiny as a counterweight to increased executive powers, when cabinet-style local government was introduced, so no wonder many authorities struggle to use it effectively.
However, I am less convinced by the way that Mr Denham described the role of members in this brave, new joined-up world: “why not elect councillors who report back to citizens on all local services?” (I paraphrase, as I don’t have the full text). Why not indeed – but isn’t this really about local leadership and place-shaping, rather than being a conduit for voters’ views and questions?
The Secretary of State’s narrative also encompassed moves to develop commissioning for innovation, developing more enterprising roles for authorities (including in relation to carbon and climate) and freeing data. This does, indeed, add up to a lot of movement in the right direction.
However, by also devoting time to attacking the Opposition, the Secretary of State invites scrutiny of his positioning of the Government’s approach as Localist. And I’m afraid it falls short in some respects.
In his response to the lecture, Sir Michael Bichard emphasised the level of support that would be needed in Cabinet to really follow through on all of this, as Whitehall departments inevitably fight to defend their budgets and their silos.
This is a moot point. Certainly, (new) localist positioning in the past has not translated into a willingness by ministers to let go of the strings – to be prepared to not answer a question about local services on the Today programme or at the despatch box. This will need a great deal of personal commitment from this or any other government, and my instinct is that an extremely strong narrative will be needed to generate that commitment.
Is the narrative from this lecture strong enough? I doubt it; it comes from a managerial viewpoint in a tidy world where progress is made by services responding to ‘local circumstances and needs’ but where there is no ‘postcode lottery’.
It doesn’t make clear that real devolution requires reputational risk in the short-term, the inevitability of some failure in some areas, and a refocusing of accountability, not in terms of performance indicators, but in terms of real responsibility for shaping the future of our communities.
My reading of the tea leaves tells me that we are about to hit a period of renegotiating the relationship between public services and local people. This new contract will be about how we behave as citizens with less generously funded local services in a low-carbon world, to create communities which are sustainable and resilient. New questions are posed by this renegotiation.
Recently developed habits and expectations will be challenged, and all local authorities will become expert in eliciting behaviour change.
We don’t yet know all the answers (which will, perhaps, be partly in the form of the “enforceable entitlements” to which Mr Denham referred), but the likes of Barnet are making a stab at it, and their efforts should not be dismissed.
When we examine these questions in detail, I am sure that, in Mr Denham’s words, local will indeed be the answer.
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From Local leadership and the bigger picture
Warren Hatter casts a watchful eye on climate change, innovation and local leadership.
Readers' comments (1)
Duncan Kerr | 3-Nov-2009 2:20 pm
I believe that the Secretary of State is genuine in his commitment to decentralisation and two years ago I would have been quite positive. However I wonder how the policy will perform when tested against the new realities of public service austerity. In this climate “enforceable entitlements” will inevitably become rigid ceilings rather than floors, an approach which takes us back to the late 1980s and would leave us longing for the “flexibility” of targets.
Warren is absolutely right in identifying the transition to the low carbon economy as the key medium-term issue locally, nationally and globally. It is unfortunate that neither the Climate Change Act nor the UK Transition Plan provided any clarity about who would lead the task of transition in our diverse communities or how they will do it.
Of course Local Government can seize the initiative and step-up to the plate. However to do so we have to be honest about our environmental track record (such as rejecting over 50% of wind farm applications and not providing any country-wide data on emissions from our own estates until required to do so). We also have to be mindful of the comments in the LGC last month by David Curry who spoke of local councillors being so deeply rooted in their place, that not even local residents could rouse them.
It seems to me its game-on and, for once, the ball is in our court – but what is the collective response?
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