Philobiblon

Since I find myself often involved in debates around local government in Britain, I’ve been thinking that I should read something about its operation, what works and what doesn’t, and the thinking about how it’s reached the place it is now. So when I saw a copy of Modern Local Government by Janice Morphet (Sage, 2008), I thought I should pick it up – and I have even now managed to read it, even if I admit to having skimmed bits where the forest of acronyms just became impenetrable.

I’m not, you might be pleased to know, going to give you a complete precis, but a few points I drew from it.

1. The changing nature of the council – in the Local Government Act 2000, the council moved from being seen as the only source of power, which it delegated to officers, to being part of the process of power. Now the power to act lies with the executive, the creation of which was seen as “the cornerstone of establishing direct accountability to the community and electorate … a means of overcoming corruption through openness”.

Proposals announced in 2006 suggested that council leaders should be elected by direct or indirect election and should remain for four years, a result of a view “that stronger local leadership is more accountable to the local community”. (Also a move to all-out elections every four years, rather than “elections by a third”.)

2. The relationship between national and local government
a) “Local authorities have been pressurised to use their funding more effectively through the setting of targets, assessment, peer review and benchmarking.” Some have used this to argue that central controls will always be necessary, others that when performance has improved the argument for control falls away.
b) Looking historically, the UK is one of the few countries in the EU not to have a constitutional position for local government – the implication of the existence of such would be that it would be free to act and also raise revenue such as local income tax, sales tac, tourist tax, or other specific charges. Until 2000, it was not able to act or spend without specific legislated powers, which were in many different pieces of law. The Local Government Act of 2000 created their duty to promote “exonomic, social and environmental well-being”, which is seen as a fundamental and strong in its capacity to support action, although it specifically excluded finance and charging powers (although these were promised subsequently, and were partially provided in the Act of 2003, which provided the power to “trade”, which allowed, for e.g. the congestion charge in London.)

3. Local Public Service boards
Being pioneered in Kent and Swindon – and struck me as very interesting in the light of the hope (usually rather than expectations) of “joined-up government”. They are ” a super public agency board for a locality”, which looks at all public funding for an area – local authority, health, police, benefits support… a structure associated with…

4. “New localism”…
a term that seems to mean anything the speaker wants it to mean. This author says it originated in the US, with the idea that smaller governing units are more efficient, less onerous for their citizens and more responsive to community demands. They can then link with other units for activities for which a larger scale is appropriate. (An argument both for regionalism and the EU.)

As outlined in Britain, it could theoretically at least create a parity between local and central governance. The Public Service Boards above are a potential outcome.

Another associated term in Britain is “place shaping”, from the Lyons report of May 2006, which tried to take a systematic view of the respective roles of central and local government.

5. Conversely there are pressures for a reduction in local power, driven (or excused) by low voter turnout, drive to deliver targets, perceptions of failure and risk of poor performance, major cultural differences between local and central, neatly encapsulated in the term “elite contempt”.