Only half a revolution so far
Town & Country Planning, November 2010
Imagine you wrote a monthly column about some revolutionary new idea (localism, for example), and – month after month – you complained about the way things were. Then, all of a sudden, you woke up and found there was about to be a Localism Bill.
What would you feel then? Elated? Worried that nobody would be interested in your column any more? Angry because they haven’t got it right – or, worse, because you didn’t write the new act of parliament yourself?
Well, I am in that situation now, and I feel all those things and more. By the time you are reading this column, you probably know more about what is actually in the Localism Bill than I do now.
But what I do know about it, and what I know about the Comprehensive Spending Review, have within them the seeds of insanity for people like me. Because what is being proposed, I believe, is something of historic importance – and yet it isn’t quite enough.
Anyone with any sympathy for the coalition (and that includes me) has must have been transported on an emotional roller-coaster by the CSR. There must have been people, like me, who was prepared for a major upheaval because it seemed to be the only way of loosening the debilitating grip of the centre on public services.
There must also have been those, also like me, who was prepared for cuts because they believed it was the only way to tackle what the great radical William Cobbett called ‘The Thing’
Cobbett meant that combination of placemen and speculators who live off the rest of us, and – let’s face it – the Thing still exists.
We remain the abject dependents of a huge upper middle class machinery for self-aggrandizement. It covers the pension managers who cream sums from our pensions, through to the quangocrats and directors of those vast instruments of New Labour control. Not to mention those high-paid pinnacles of the arts establishment pedalling a miserably out-of-date post-modern arts bubble.
They are not the landed aristocrats that Cobbett condemned, but they might as well be. We pay for them all, plus the £800,000 salary to the BBC director-general, the handouts to Tesco and their kind of ‘regeneration’, the huge subsidised industry of tick-box business training or public sector standards. I could go on.
The trouble with wishing for something, as Emerson said, is that “it will surely happen”. Sure enough, the CSR is so overwhelming that it looks likely to do away with a number of things that, arguably, civilisation depends on – while still leaving much of The Thing intact. Hence the emotional roller-coaster.
What is unprecedented about it, it seems to me – at least in recent decades – is the potential compact that seems to being offered to local government: much less money for must more freedom.
This is hugely important. It means that local government will begin to look just a little more like it did in the great days of Joseph Chamberlain, who used to urge his fellow council leaders to “be more expensive” (by which, I believe, he meant more ambitious).
Local authorities will be allowed to generate energy and sell it, to raise money in against future income, to spend capital receipts, to decide their own planning destinies, to slough off most of the targets and standards, and probably – we await the published Localism Bill – to do whatever is necessary to achieve local objectives.
This is a settlement as significant as devolution, in its way, and possibly more so. But it is still only half a revolution.
The glitch is that it could lead to huge disparities between different areas. The imaginative and effective local authorities will usher in a new age of entrepreneurial local government, rather as the Americans managed in the 1990s. The unimaginative ones – and there are many of those, let’s face it – will struggle destructively under the weight of losing a quarter of their budget.
These are the kind of worries that threaten any kind of localism. Any self-government can potentially lead to disparities. The point is to build in some kind of flexibility and safeguards so that local people can take a hand where necessary, and turn round their failing city.
So here are three absolutely vital shifts to make this revolution work:
1. Local people must be able to vote out local leaders. Local voting must be by proportional representation to undermine the remaining one-party fiefdoms.
2. Local government depends on the success of local enterprise, and that in turns means local banks. So far there has been no sign that the coalition is going to be as bold with banking as it is with public spending.
3. Local people must be able to make decisions to spend more money if they want. The cap on council tax has simply has to go
Without these reforms, and especially the last one, none of the rhetoric about localism really stacks up. Unless local government is properly democratic, how can they make a difference?
