Harmony broken by unitary battle

19 February, 2009 | By Dan Drillsma-Milgrom

Last September George Garlick, the newly appointed chief executive of the soon-to-be-created Durham County Council, told LGC 'unitary councils seem absolutely screamingly obvious'.

“Trying to bring together an area’s priorities and service improvement in a holistic manner in a two-tier area is like trying to push water uphill,” he said.

He thought “the game was worth the candle” when it came to local government restructuring.

His views were clearly shared by David Miliband when, as local government minister, he formally kicked off the current round of restructuring in an article in LGC back in 2005 - although he issued a word of warning when seeking to start a debate about the powers and leadership structure new unitary councils would need.

“A knee-jerk reaction to these questions would be for counties and districts to retreat into entrenched positions, with central government negotiating fruitlessly in the middle ground. No one wants this and I believe the issues are too important to be dealt with in that way.”

Well, the knee jerked.

In the seven county areas already approved for restructuring, there were plenty of protests and petitions; MPs and lobbyists battled in public and in private against the changes.

Last week, the government implemented a further delay to the process in the three areas whose futures remain in doubt - Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk. By instructing the Boundary Committee for England to delay giving its advice on the final structures until July, communities secretary Hazel Blears has most likely ensured that those structures will not be implemented until 2011 - almost six years after Mr Miliband’s article.

The delay has at the very least has raised serious questions about the feasibility of the restructuring process in the three remaining county areas. Throw in the serious problems occurring with the implementation of the new unitary council in Northumberland, and it all adds up to an unpleasant ending to what will probably be the last round of restructuring for a very long time.

Talk to politicians in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk and conspiracy theories abound. In each of the three counties there is scant Labour presence outside the main cities of Exeter, Norwich and Ipswich. So it is conceivable that the creation of one or two unitary councils would see Labour wiped off the electoral map in these three areas.

Some form of delay was necessary as a result of the various judicial reviews and subsequent appeals that could leave an early recommendation from the Boundary Committee open to challenge. But was a five-month delay necessary?

According to one county leader, the lengthy extension can be seen as the latest act in a battle between the Boundary Committee and the Department for Communities & Local Government .

The department is keen to ensure Ms Blears is not presented with a politically unacceptable recommendation by the committee - that is, county unitaries - the theory goes.

Hence it is setting deadlines that will push the required legislation back until the very end of this government’s last legislative session of the term, otherwise known as ‘the long grass’.

The Boundary Committee, meanwhile, is trying to manoeuvre itself into a position whereby the department has no choice but to accept its recommendation.

In the case of Norfolk County Council , the council is keen to stress that just because the Boundary Committee has been set the July deadline it doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t make its recommendations beforehand.

Should the judges overseeing this week’s appeal come back with a verdict by early or mid-March, which does not require the Boundary Committee to conduct another consultation, the secretary of state could feasibly receive the recommendations, consult on them and make her final decision just before pre-election purdah kicks in.

Meanwhile, to add to the sense of a reorganisation process being conducted by the seats of civil servants’ pants, local government minister John Healey last week wrote to district council leaders in Northumberland blaming them the new county unitary’s predicted deficit of around£10m.

“It is hard to understand how a shortfall to this extent - 20% of the district budgets - could have arisen if, over recent years, every district council had adopted prudent and responsible budgets,” he wrote, adding that some “appear to be impeding the creation of the new council”.

Let us assume that, one way or the other, the situations in Devon, Norfolk, Suffolk and Northumberland are resolved within the current term. What then of the rest of the country? As LGC reported last year, the appetite for unitary structures is widespread among county chief executives (LGC - 21/08/08) . Their hopes would appear to be slim.

Ms Blears’ former opposite number Eric Pickles is fond of saying that, if ever appointed communities secretary, he would keep a pearl-handled revolver in his drawer to shoot the first civil servant mentioning local government reorganisation.

As Norfolk County Council leader Daniel Cox (Con) explained, Mr Pickles’ comments present an incentive to get things done quickly. Furthermore, this week’s localism green paper contained an explicit promise to halt the reorganisation processes in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk.

“With that quote goes any thought of any reorganisation happening, certainly in the first term of a new Conservative government,” he said. But Cllr Cox insisted reorganisation would go ahead as long as legislation had made its way through Parliament before the election.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Tories aren’t attracted to the potential cost savings from getting councils to cluster together and potentially share chief executives as well as services.

So what are the alternatives to all-out reorganisation? Four areas - Dorset, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire - are operating as two-tier ‘pathfinders’ in a bid to secure greater efficiencies and better integrated services.

The work of the Local Government Association and the Improvement & Development Agency has been focused on preparing two-tier areas for ‘upper-tier-centric’ initiatives like local area agreements, the comprehensive area assessment and local strategic partnerships.

With the former, the hope is that districts can be engaged by setting targets at a local level that can build up to help the county meet its centrally agreed target. In areas like tackling worklessness, districts could identify pockets where the problems are concentrated in order to hit county-level targets.

Meanwhile, the County Councils Network and the District Council Leaders’ Sounding Board have set up a joint district/county task group to develop best practice. Three ‘quick win’ areas have been identified, around waste management, safer communities and shared services/back office functions.

It is the latter option that the Tories will be most keen to push forward.

But as the recent Icelandic banking crisis showed, district councils’ futures could be far from secure with or without central government help.

A meeting of the Society of District Council Treasurers last September considered their authorities’ future viability. Districts’ financial situations were “much worse” than a decade ago with some “already drinking in the last chance saloon”, they concurred.

Many were not confident that shared services would lead to large-scale cost reductions and there were fears not all had “revealed the true seriousness of their situations”.

With the state of the UK’s public finances looking dire for the next decade, it could be that, whoever forms the next government, they find saving the two-tier system - at least in its present state - as troublesome as dismantling it.