'Local' government must seize the chance

Author: The Guardian - Sep 30, 2009

The term "local government", as applied to Britain, must be one of the most misused in our language. Many of us are not governed locally. At best, we depend on a local administration to sweep streets, collect rubbish, provide social care, libraries, schools – although education, arguably, is barely a local service any longer – and maybe housing.

If you are lucky, your local council will be innovative, creating partnerships with the private and third sectors to provide jobs and training. It may use powers to create new ventures. It may also be joining up services – health and social care, for instance, with a single chief executive running both the local council and the NHS primary care trust. But it will be the exception.

Precious few councils will see the post-election challenge in public spending as an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and reinvent themselves. But they will need to examine their services and ask whether providing services in-house is the most efficient form of delivery. That need not mean a return to mindless outsourcing, but it does mean the council commissioning and regulating a range of services provided by others. Street cleaning, and some environmental functions, could be devolved to communities, parishes, the third sector and new neighbourhood enterprises, where appropriate.

The local government, planning and housing bill planned by the Tories for their first year of office would take councils into new areas and recreate truly local government. Town halls will have to bid to become super-commissioning bodies for public services currently undertaken by government departments – such as joint control of primary care trusts, as well as wider scrutiny of the NHS locally, with strong influence over welfare-to-work programmes, economic development, and so on.

This will mean a cull in some Whitehall departments and the abolition of at least one, such as Communities and Local Government, which carries little clout. Its functions could go to a new constitutional department, overseeing devolution to English local government and, broadly, funding to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Finally, a future government has to let councils become smarter in using their assets as collateral to borrow against. Town halls have the highest credit ratings, and they don't go bust. Using assets in land, buildings and housing, plus the combined multibillion-pound local authority pension fund, why not set up a mutual organisation in England to fill the gap left by deep cuts in central government funding?

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