Tories stand firm on localist agenda
Author: Public Finance - Oct 8, 2009
Town halls will need to hold a Conservative government’s ‘feet to the fire’ to ensure it stays true to its localist pledges, the shadow minister for the Cabinet Office has admitted.
At the Tory Party conference in Manchester, Francis Maude was quizzed about the strength of his party’s commitment to localist principles.
‘We do mean it,’ he said at a New Local Government Network fringe meeting on public service reform on October 5.
But he added: ‘All forces in government are centripetal. We failed on this [localist] front in the 1980s. It is really difficult to make it happen but local government needs to hold our feet to the fire on that.’
Maude revealed himself to be a ‘big supporter’ of the Total Place pilot programme, which aims to improve services and cut costs by considering all the public funding streams in an area as a single sum.
‘It’s really good to look at ways of spending money better, but the place to bring it together is not Whitehall, it’s at the local level,’ he said.
Colin Barrow, leader of Westminster City Council, made an impassioned defence of localism, praising local government’s innovation and ability to bring different public sector agencies together to get things done.
‘We have to recognise that different parts of the world require different solutions,’ he said. ‘The idea that you can join up the dots in Whitehall is absurd. Local government is the only place you can get rational solutions.’
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