There is a school of thought that argues that in a period of austerity and expenditure reductions, local government should be ‘managed’ rather than ‘governed’.
Proponents argue that executives and professional managers should devise technical solutions and take managerial actions to reduce expenditure and balance budgets. In extremis, they even claim that politics and politicians prevent rational decisions and block common sense.
In my experience there are a few (thankfully, a small minority) senior local government officers and chief executives who may, on occasion, share this view. There are also some civil servants and perhaps even Westminster politicians who would subscribe to this technocratic idea.
There may even be some local authority councillors and leaders who may, in their more desperate moments, wish that they could leave the hard choices and decisions to their officers. Such thoughts and arguments are very misplaced, especially in this period of austerity and budget cuts.
Local government is a form of government, just as much as is central government.
It is about elected politicians taking decisions on behalf of communities.It should be about councillors and council leaders or elected mayors championing their places, communities and the people who live and work in them. It should be about responding to local needs and local aspirations.
It should be about leadership of place and influencing others to shape the place, its economy, social conditions and environment. Local authorities should ‘govern’ and not simply act as the local administration, local agents of central government or units of local management.
While not every policy, statute and action by the current Conservative-Liberal coalition Government has promoted or supported genuine localism,it is the case that overall, its policies have enabled local authorities to become more in control of their destiny than has been the case for some years.
At the same time, however, it has effectively begun a process of starving local authorities of the money to sustain services. Cynics could and do argue that local government has been handed a ‘poisoned chalice’ to make hard and unpopular decisions in terms of cuts to services and handling welfare changes. I have much sympathy with such a view.
Still, I fervently believe that elected local politicians have to ‘seize the moment’ and do their best for their local communities, the people who live in those communities and for the local businesses that provide employment.
In short, they must ‘invest’ in these same communities. Inevitably, this means taking some hard and, at times very painful decisions – choosing between two or more cherished programmes; choosing between two or more groups in society; and choosing between different communities in the local authority area.
Whether national or local, the allocation of resources, setting taxation levels, determining eligibility criteria for services and deciding which services are to be available locally are ‘political’ decisions. They cannot and should not be left to managers or executives. And the people taking them have to:
- Have a very clear vision for their place
- Be accountable,principally to the electorate but also to other stakeholders, too
- Be accessible to be ‘lobbied’ in a legitimate manner
- Listen to service users, local residents, staff and others and be open to persuasion.
- Be responsive to evidence
- Take the professional advice of the council’s officers, who are employed to provide such advice.
Ultimately, political decisions are always best taken when those taking them have a clear political, values-driven compass underpinned by their vision.
This will be to some extent ideologically driven but should also be responsive to local circumstances. There will be manifesto policy commitments but much of contemporary decisions having to be taken by councils will not have been addressed with precision (if at all) in council manifestos. So what might the vision based political, values-driven compass offer?
It should offer criteria and over-arching objectives by which options and decisions are evaluated.
For many councillors, these might include: ensuring protection and opportunity for the most vulnerable members of society; or the pursuit of employment and economic growth; or the protection of specific services; or even to reduce the level of council tax; or some or all of these. In practice, of course, the criteria will be a mixture of several values and policy-driven objectives – and inevitably, unless carefully developed, some contradictions!
Only elected and accountable politicians, having consulted local people and other stakeholders, can determine such criteria. Of course, they will expect officers and professional advisors to provide much of the necessary information by which to reach their decisions using such criteria.
They should also listen to citizens, service users, staff, local voluntary and community organisations, businesses and external experts.
Councillors and especially council leaders and elected mayors should be ensuring that they are debating and agreeing the local compass with themselves and with the wider community.
In the 1980s, when I was a councillor and leader, there was perhaps more anger and some greater sense of defiance by local authorities to the cuts being then imposed by the Thatcher Government than is the case today.
Today’s challenges are much greater than those of the 1980s but I am not arguing for mindless, gesture and infantile politics which all too often misfires with unintended results. I am, however, arguing for councillors and in particular council leaders to act more ‘politically’ than many seem to be doing. This requires:
- Confidence, clear views and objectives and excellent communication skills
- A willingness to take hard decisions for the greater good
- Being prepared to explain to the local community where responsibility for the welfare changes cuts and job losses lies, particularly if it is felt to be with central Government
- Being ready to share power and resources and indeed cede these to others
- It demands leaders being willing and able to take on vested interests and chop down sacred totem poles; and explaining why
- It means standing up to the Government but not continually playing the ‘hard done by victim’ (remember that the real victim is the person made homeless, or the child and parent deprived of their Sure Start Centre, or the employee made redundant)
- It requires leaders to lead, and to actually be leaders.
Even in the current financial gloom, which may not lift for many years, there can be new opportunities. For example: local government taking over public health; arguing for a greater role in wider strategic health commissioning;making the case for taking on responsibility for the failing national Work Programme; adopting a new strategic role to work with schools as champion of the learner and community; and so much more.
All of the negative and positive opportunities require clear values and strategic goals. And they require confident leadership across local government at a local and national level.
At the local level, this will include effective complementary and mutually respectful and supportive relations between politicians and officers – with the former setting the agenda base on their political values-driven compasses.
The lesson of history is that the great local government leaders of the last 150 years including Jo Chamberlain, Herbert Morrison and many others of all political parties knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and were single minded about this – in the main, that’s why they achieved.