Sadly, "...it's means hanging baskets..." comes across as the standout, throwaway line in a largely sensible article by Rachel Wolf about the matter of levelling up. What she reports on is a sense of troubled civic pride that anyone with ears in the North will have heard - not just in recent times but for decades. Certainly it was a feature of my 24 years as a local councillor in Bradford:
People are deeply proud of where they live, and it is the primary source of their identity. They feel embarrassed and angry about what is happening to their towns. Shops are closed, the cenotaph has graffiti on it, people often feel unsafe. The pandemic has accelerated an existing decline. When the town opens up again, what will there be to do? In a lot of places, there’s an event — a local fireworks display; an event in the park; a well-known market — that has disappeared. No one knows why. People can’t park in the center and the buses are an expensive, irregular joke.
But this isn't about some sort of Potempkin village strategy for Boris Johnson to adopt, rather we should ask why - why is it that this sense of pride is so damaged, why is there graffiti all over the place, why do people spit in the street, why don't we have park keepers any more, why is the kiddies' playground vandalised? A thousand questions about the immediate environment in which people live - the potholes, the unmended walls, the dog poo, the litter, and the impression that anyone using a car to go shopping is either a convenient source of cash or else the spawn of satan.
I have an old film, made in 1964 when Penge Urban District Council was abolished with the creation of the new London Borough of Bromley. I keep the film because it features my maternal grandfather (that's him and my Grandma behind him in the picture) who was the last Chairman of that Council. Somewhere I also have the proceedings from the final council and accompanying dinner - this sent out a message at once sad and hopeful. Sad at the passing of a genuinely local council looking after the interests of SE20 residents but hopeful that the new arrangements brought new opportunities and a shared future with the District's neighbours in Beckenham, Bromley and Orpington.
In the film, produced by the local Rotary Club, that sense of civic pride described by Rachel Wolf comes across strongly. Every part of the town is celebrated - Crystal Palace Park, the High Street, the market, the council housing, the pubs and, of course, more famous things like Peggy Spencer's dance school. Plus my grandpa, sporting his chain of office, at a visit to an old folks' home. That civic pride oozes from every second of the film.
So what changed? How did we get from that world of the 1960s when a working class suburb in South London took such pride in itself, to a time when ordinary people despair at the state of their town? We're a lot richer but that ought to have made things better not worse. We're certainly healthier - my grandpa died a slow death in his '70s from work-related lung disease something that's far less prevalent these days. And mostly we're happier.
The answer lies, in part at least, in the decision to reform London's government in 1964. Where there'd previously been a patchwork of little district councils all fussing and bothering over things like litter and hanging baskets, we got instead large unitary councils with grand strategies and big schemes. And today this process of shutting down little district councils continues with developing proposals for unitary councils in, for example, North Yorkshire. Councils with a fighting chance of developing that civic pride get replaced by huge councils that wade through the clamerous, competing calls from dozens of towns and villages. Meanwhile the cost pressures from social services climb and climb, taking up an ever growing portion of the council's budget - at least two thirds and nearing 80% in a few cases.
It has been the shift in local government resourses from visible to social services (or "place" to "people" as the modern jargon puts it) that created many of the problems identified by Rachel Wolf. Statutory obligations to provide care outweigh the desire to make places look great - so the litter budget gets cut, the parks department is shrunk and the library service is stripped to its legal bones. Meanwhile the elimination of local accountability for the police, removing control of business rates from local councils and a bewildering collection of inspectorates all signal to the councillor and the resident that local government doesn't matter. Yet every single problem identified by Rachel Wolf was once, and now isn't, something done by local government. We had little district councils with councillors who knew their neighbours to do things like pick up litter, collect bins, put swings in the park, provide car parks and clean up graffiti. Bigger city councils also ran buses and the police force.
If we want to "sweat the small stuff", then we need a new life for local councils rather than the grandiose devolution schems and proposals for distant, 'strategic' unitary councils. And we need to either fund councils properly to provide social services or remove those services to a national agency or agencies. My issue with the 'levelling up' debate is the view, clear in Rachel Wolf's article, that it is central government 'funds' - the 'vast plethora of funds' - that matter. If, and I think the people surveyed by Wolf are right here, civic pride matters, then the best way to do this is to rediscover the sort of local government large towns and cities lost in the 1960s and 1970s and which current policy is destroying in more rural and small town England.
....
No comments:
Post a Comment