England needs devolution not a new system of local government

That map sets out the boundaries for English local government proposed by the Redcliffe-Maud Commission in the late 1960s. At the time there was a huge outcry and chunks of historic counties would be ripped from their heritage and lumped into new utilitarian councils. What we got in the end, the 1972 Local Government Act, represented a classic English fudge, one that didn't satisfy those opposed to moving lumps of Yorkshire into Lancashire or pretending that Peterborough is part of Cambridgeshire but which calmed most places down.

The current government, in its quest for 'levelling up' will be setting out its plan in a "Devolution White Paper". We're not yet clear as to the contents of this White Paper except that the government seems committed to the model of devolution developed under the Coalition government where, in response to "asks" from city-regions, the government in Westminster would 'devolve' powers and cash to those city-regions - so long as they had an elected mayor. This is the model developed under the direction of George Osborne and wrapped up in a report prepared for him by Lord Heseltine. I've been clear that, from a degree of experience, the approach Heseltine (and government) prefer is not the way to go about regenerating the North or a sensible basis for devolution.

At the heart of this approach is the idea that, because current economic activity is skewed towards cities (sort of ), future investment should be driven by city-regions as "economic hubs". The essential argument is that growth happens in the densely populated hearts of big connurbations so therefore we should use these connurbations as the basis for political geography:





This slide, produced by Andrew Carter from the Centre for Cities, returns us to the world of Redcliffe-Maud where a utilitarian presumption is used to design English local government, one without reference to anything other than a narrow (and open to question) economic assumption that cities are the principle driver of economic development. Carter doesn't provide us with the map but does set out a sort of options appraisal for getting to a map central to which is that there is no opt out - devolution will be imposed (the irony of which shouldn't be lost on us). We also see from the slide above that "economic" services (what these are is unclear - economic development, planning, transport, regeneration, skills, training) would be lifted out of existing local councils and subsumed into the new mayoral authorities.

Leaving aside political judgements, the assumption that cities drive economic growth must be challenged if we are to get a genuine levelling up across England. Carter acknowledges that English cities underperform against a basket of economic measures (GVA, start ups, employment rate, skills). So why base the economic development strategy on these places rather than on places that are not underperforming? Why spend billions on new transport systems linking together underperforming urban centres? This approach simply denies the reality of how economies are changing and the manner in which technology is changing how we live and work.

By focusing on a sort of central place theory of economic development, we fail to recognise that most people don't work in those urban centres, their employment is dispersed across a multitude of, largely suburban, locations that people access by car. The choice of a central place theory as the model isn't just a mistake but is the opposite of how economies are developing. Worse still, by taking economic functions away from local communities, we ossify this centre-focused planning approach and sideline the very communities we want to help.

There really isn't much need for wholesale local government reorganisation and absolutely no need at all for the creation of these huge, unwieldy city-regions especially since even the Centre for Cities recognises that large, economically-significant parts of England fall outside the 'functional geographies' of those city-regions. If we want devolution, there is no reason at all why we have to change England's political geography - you want to give local government powers then give them to existing metropolitan and county councils rather than invent a whole new (and probably unpopular) system of local government.
.....

Writing on Con Home - why we don't need fewer councillors

Something of a rant but with the serious point that elected people, especially councillors, are the way we hold the unelected people to account:

But far from us needing fewer politicians, we need more. Rather than taking the decision-making further away from ordinary residents with unitary councils, regional mayors, and combined authorities, we should, as Conservatives, be wanting to get more decisions made right down in the communities where those ordinary residents live, by people they know and can speak with. Right now, our system of local democracy doesn’t function well, and the lack of real accountability is a big reason for this.

Whole piece on the always excellent Conservative Home.

....

Big government is a substitute for trust not the means to achieve it.

People don't trust government. That government is pretty bad at nearly everything it does. Politicians and officials are at best venal and at worst corrupt. Yet government goes on getting bigger. Go figure?

Nick Gillespie reports on how there has been an almost complete collapse in people's trust of the US government:

In 1964, according to Pew Research Center, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that they "can trust the government in Washington always or most of the time." By 2015, that figure stood at just 19 percent.

Gillespie sets out how scandal played its part:

But the most powerful reasons for collapsing trust in government are surely the actions of government. Consider even a smattering of revelations and developments going back to the late '60s. The U.S. failure in Vietnam was bad enough on its own, but the Pentagon Papers, a secret report commissioned by the Defense Department that concluded our involvement was doomed from the start, revealed a government that was incompetent at best and duplicitous at worst. The Watergate scandal and revelations of widespread corruption in the Nixon White House led to the unprecedented resignation of a president who had won re-election by the largest Electoral College margin up to that point in history. (What suckers we were, giving a crook 61 percent of the vote!) High-profile government commissions issued reports showing that intelligence agencies and the military had engaged in illegal surveillance of American citizens and tested would-be mind-control drugs on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians.

Political corruption sits alongside government institutions having an almost complete disdain for the public to the point where they considers it entirely justified to simply lie to the public. Gillespie skims through the most egregious US examples and wonders why, despite government's abject failure it has continued to grow ever larger and to stick its grubby fingers into ever more aspects of folks' lives. And, with almost sublime irony, the loss of trust is the reason why people turn to government for protection even though they know it is "...at best incompetent and at worst corrupt".

Things are a little better here in the UK but, like the USA, we have lost trust in the fundamental institutions of society. We mistrust parliament, consider government essentially incompetent and are cynical about central social institutions like marriage, church and business. Yet no politician is asking how we might restore trust and confidence - in each other and in society as a whole. This is a moral mission rather than something resolvable through a policy platform and, as such, it sits uneasily with the now dominant utilitarian approach - moral leadership isn't about "evidence-based policy" but about helping people to recognise why trust is so important.

All our current approach to government and politics does is to provide new sets of rules - often in the form of bans and taxes - intended to manipulate public behaviour and to prevent the negative affects of mistrust from being realised. So the lack of trust becomes embedded - government doesn't trust people (and is entirely comfortable with not telling the whole truth) and creates an environment where mistrust is seen as normal. Yet lack of trust makes doing business harder, acts as a drag on economic growth, and rewards those who would hobble choice and opportunity while casting out those who would liberate people from such tyranny.

Gillespie concludes that we need "...policies that increase local control and individual autonomy..." - what we in the UK would call devolution and I think this to be the right place to start. Our obsession with sameness, with avoiding the postcode lottery, has pretty much destroyed the autonomy of local communities and the most approachable and accountable politicians - local councillors - have been reduced to powerless caseworkers through centralisation, local government reform and intervention-based inspection systems.

There's a tendency to see libertarian ideas as a sort of crash capitalism but perhaps we should look to voluntarism as a way through the sickening darkness of a trust-free society:

That means more work is needed putting together serious, detailed policy plans that give more autonomy to individuals and communities; highlighting examples of markets and voluntary organizations succeeding in building trust, self-regulation, and common purpose; and appealing to a broad, positive vision of a strictly limited government whose goals revolve around ensuring basic fairness, equality of opportunity, continued economic growth, and rising living standards.

Everywhere we look we find examples of voluntary action - whether for profit or for reasons of charity or community spirit - that provide this common purpose. Those ideas of mutuality, commonweal and co-operation that created so much good in the 19th century need refinding and reimagining. Whether it's free schools or new mutual financial institutions, these sorts of bodies provide approachable, accountable services to a defined community or a specific neighbourhood. And, at the heart of such organisations' mission is always the idea that most of the time you really can trust your neighbour.

....

Only the electorate or the courts should be able to sack councillors, anything else is just a bullies charter

The Committee on Standards in Public Life has bunged out a sore losers report into "Local Government Ethical Standards" in which it tries to rebuild the old Standards Board model for enforcing such standards:

Council standards boards should have the power to ban councillors for up to six months without allowances, the Committee on Standards in Public Life has recommended.

The report blathers on about bullying and harassment while at no point recognising the essential flaw in the old standards regime - it was used, again and again, as a means to bully councillors and as a political tool. My experience of this system showed that these boards are essentially kangaroo courts - in my case, while I blithely assumed I'd be dealing with the investigating officer, the Standards Board shipped up, at the cost of thousands in public money, a barrister to cross examine me. I was found guilty of having shouted at a fellow councillor but the board decided it wasn't bad enough to sack me. The whole process was a complete waste of time and money but really suited my political opponents (and not just the ones in the Labour Party).

Let's be clear. If a councillor has broken the law then the matter should be reported to the police who will investigate and, if there's a case, ask the CPS to consider prosecution. Serious stuff like taking backhanders for planning deals or smashing another councillor round the cakehole are covered well by law and don't require a standards committee. Non-criminal infractions - saying something stupid,  alleged bullying and harassment all fall into this category - are better dealt with through the political parties since they have far more sanctions. Bear in mind that, as a Conservative Group Leader, I could suspend the Party whip from any member and I could ask the wider Party to take further action should it be merited.

The idea that there should be a sanctions system built into local government standards processes undermines the relationship of the councillor with his or her electorate - these are the people we serve and, ultimately, the people who decide whether or not we get to stay as a councillor. Moreover the sanctions system deals with vague ideas of ethics drawn from a code of conduct that lacks detail, definition or specifics. It is a bullies charter.

I appreciate that the Committee on Standards in Public Life, as a bureaucratic entity, seeks to sustain and extend its role but its proposals return us to the days when councillors and campaigners used reporting people to the Standards Board as a political tactic. This acts to stifle debate, steers councillors away from commenting on sensitive or contentious issues, and reinforces the view that our role as elected representatives holds no privilege, we are no different from paid officials or appointed board members.

If you want a better proposal, just scrap council standards committees altogether. We're not snowflakes, we can cope.

....

Places aren't made by government, they're shaped by enterprising, creative people

The places we love (and indeed the places we don't love but which are loved by others) are shaped by hundreds of influences. Most important, of course, it is shaped by what Kipling called "mere uncounted folk, of whose life and death is none report or lamentation". These are the men who built the houses, the carts and horses guided along tracks and by-ways that became our roads, the farmers, cattlemen and shepherds who set the fields and styled our landscapes. And amidst all these are the people who wanted it to look good, who did little things of beauty, planted gardens, erected memorials and raised churches. In our towns those people built little walls and fences, tended allotments, carved their love into features of homes and built the pavements, roads, sewers and bridges.

Our world is shaped by what we do not made by the actions of planners. Yet such people - planners, directors, councillors - persist in believing that places are, in some way, made by their actions: by the instructions of the benign state without which all would be untidy, unsafe, chaotic, crazed. Here, in a modern mash-up of this hubris is Local Government Association along with assorted plan fans:

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), Local Government Association (LGA) and Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) have launched Future Place: a joint, two-phase initiative which will unlock place-making potential at local level through quality in design, future thinking, and knowledge sharing.

The programme has been designed to promote best practice and the potential of innovative delivery, design and funding models, cross-sector collaborations capacity building, and knowledge sharing at a local level.

At the heart of this 'two-phase initiative' is the idea that places are made bu architects, planners, housing officers and town clerks - here is this delusion encapsulated:

...we invite local authorities to put in writing their overarching vision (emerging or finalised) for an area and how they are currently working across their programmes to deliver the wider ambitions of the local authority by creating great places

Here these grand organisations are asking for local councils to peer into the future's mists and craft a magical vision that "Future Place-Makers" can then deliver. We are reminded that planners, architects and government prefer the directed and ordered not the organic and creative. For all that such folk talk about Jane Jacobs or Saul Alinsky, planners and urban designers real love is Baron Haussman who destroyed thousands of homes to allow a straight road into Paris for the government's cannons and horsemen. For sure these days there's a nod to liberty and organic development through the canard of community consultation but governments with their planners and officials still believe they know best.

The problem is that places made by government - council estates, America's 'projects, the worst of France's banlieue and that hideous East European 'Stalinist baroque' - are failures because those planners, architects (like the dreadful Le Corbusier who wanted to knock down France's old towns and replace them with tower blocks) and government officials think they know better then real people what real people want. These are people who don't understand that things are where they are because that's where they are and that moving them somewhere else destroys them however lovingly you craft exciting designs.

The task of planners isn't to lead on place but rather to support the real shapers of places - entrepreneurs, artists, flaneurs, seekers for the new and different. Instead of drawing up visions filled with coloured arrows, creative quarters and anchor institutions, these future place makers should be more modest - present a space for the real creatives, the actual place shapers, to weave the magic once again. Government's job is not to make places but to help people who love where they live to shape those places.

...

Was the Brexit vote a call for more accountable, less distant - even local - government?

Sociologist Geert Hofstede, as part of his work looking at the different dimensions of culture, created the idea of 'power distance' - “the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Because people feel - physically or psychologically - a long way from where the decisions about their lives are made they become less engaged and involved. This may well explain why, in most developed world democracies, voter turnout rises as social class rises - and this difference has been growing:

In the 1987 general election, for example, the turnout rate for the poorest income group was 4% lower than for the wealthiest. By 2010 the gap had grown to a staggering 23 points.

While 'I can't be bothered' or 'I don't understand politics' might be the sort of explanation we get when we canvass non-voters from lower social classes, it is likely that people in these classes no longer feel that their voting makes much difference to what the government does once it's ensconced in nice warm offices down in London. More importantly, other than that periodic opportunity to vote, people feel unable to influence government in its process of decision-making on things that affect them.

If we look at the levels of government, from the parish council up to the EU and other international bodies, it seems more likely that people (and in particular people from lower social classes) are able to influence the decisions of their parish council far more than they are the decisions of the European Union's Commission and Parliament. Those people can and do organise to go to the parish council, a body filled with people much more like them than higher tier levels of government, and argue for a particular course of action. And, more importantly, see that course of action enacted.

The problem in England is that fewer and fewer decisions affecting people (and especially working class people) are made in places close enough to those people for their voice to be worth expressing. So people don't bother. Worse still, since the national decision is necessarily broad brush, the minutiae of how that decision is implemented in a given place are discussed by bureaucrats without reference to the voters these minutiae impact.

Since democracy is as much about how accountable decision-makers feel as it is about how many people vote, the systems we have at national and supra-national levels act to exclude people. Decisions are made about what's taught in schools, about how money for health care is distributed, about where houses should be built - a myriad of things that affect us directly - without the public having the means to contribute or, more importantly, for the decision-makers to feel in any way accountable to that public.

The answer is, of course, making politics more local, not just in homage to Tip O'Neill's maxim that 'all politics is local', but because local decision-making is more accessible and therefore more accountable. This probably makes it better decision-making and it certainly means the politicians can't hide behind layers of Kafka-esque bureaucracy when confronted with their dafter decisions. As Tim Worstall put it (in explaining one reason why Denmark works so well as a culture):

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

So, if you're looking for ways to improve English government perhaps, instead of moving decisions ever further up the tiers of government, we should do the opposite and move decisions down to the most local level possible. The EU called this 'subsidiarity', spoke at great length about it, then proceeded to ignore it in favour of ever more 'harmonisation' (bureaucrat speak for what the Daily Mail calls the "postcode lottery"). If you're looking for reasons why those disengaged lower social class voters turned out to vote in the Brexit referendum, the fact they felt - perhaps for the first time - that they were actually involved in making an important decision might be a big reason. And, although the stated reasons for voting to leave are many and varied, the fact that the EU is distant, complicated and (in the terms we've discussed) essentially unaccountable sits at the heart of people's choice. "Taking back control" isn't about sovereignty or the UK parliament, it should be a call for us to get decisions about peoples' lives right back down to where those people have a fighting chance of influencing what's decided.


….

Why the Taxpayers Alliance needs to shut up or learn something about local government

I can't speak for others in local government but the Taxpayers Alliance really gets my goat. And I say this as someone who wants low taxes and small government. The TPA seem to specialise in a particular low rent form of attack - sending freedom of information requests to every council usually to obtain information already publicly available. This information is then totted up and badged as waste. Thousands of hours - all funded by the taxpayer naturally - spent providing trite information about councillor expenses, officer pay, trade union facilities time or numbers of press officers. The TPA then bungs out a press release screaming about waste, how hard-working officers are 'overpaid' or councillors travelling the land on junkets.

The problem is that none of this febrile investigative work gets anywhere near the heart of the TPA's alleged mission of lower taxes and smaller government. It gets them a headline - "Ten Borsetshire top bosses earn over £100,000" or "Big Borough Chief Executive earns more than the Prime Minister" - but the effect of this isn't to get us better, smaller government but rather to undermine public confidence in their local government. The TPA will then get some information about potholes and claim that, if we didn't pay chief executives so much money or employ press officers then we'd have all the cash needed to fix those potholes - despite this being utter tripe.

Don't get me wrong, this is good politics - at least if you're looking for a stick to beat incumbent council leaderships - but it completely and totally misses the point. If you want smaller, cheaper local government then the only way to do it is for one or both of two things to happen - councils stop doing things they do right now and/or councils start charging people for the services we give them (see green waste collections, for example). At the moment - not that the TPA ever mention this, of course - top tier local councils spend between 50% and 80% of their budgets providing social services and social care - in Bradford's case about £180,000,000. Paying the chief executive £120,000 instead of £160,000 isn't going to make one jot of difference to this problem bar making it more difficult to recruit a good enough person to run the organisation.

I was talking recently about the difficulties councils have recruiting and retaining planning officers (typical pay £30,000-50,000). As soon as we get an experienced officer with his or her boots under the table, up pops a far better paid opportunity in private consultancy and off zooms the experienced planning officer. The same applies for property and planning lawyers, good accountants, leisure centre managers, and human resources officers. Maybe the nice folk working for the TPA are doing so for love and a bowl of rice every second day but in the real world there's a competitive market for the skills needed to run large and complex organisations and the professional expertise to deliver the services those organisations provide.

If the Taxpayers Alliance wants to meet its mission of lower taxes it needs to start saying what it is that government should stop providing so as to do this - not just infrastructure projects like HS2 but actual revenue services like defence, benefits, health, education or pensions. It would be more interesting to see a picture painted of the small state, low tax future implied by the TPA's mission but all we get is attacks on petty waste (and often not even waste but legitimate spending) and the wages of senior offers - wages that aren't competitive and which often result in poor management in those local councils.

It's time we started to push back at the TPA - for sure they provide good copy - over local government pay, service delivery and funding. Because the TPA is wrong, damages the reputation of local government and prefers a cheap headline over a thoughtful contribution to the debate about how English local government is run and funded.

....

What devolution isn't...

First let me tell you what devolution is:

Of course, certain responsibilities, such as enforcing and interpreting the Constitution, conducting foreign relations, providing national security, monetary and fiscal policy, and regulating inter-state commerce must remain at the assigned federal level. States also retain critical responsibilities under their own constitutions and must deal with some issues on a multi-community basis. But, Constitutional Localism argues for a system which prefers that decision making be as close to the citizens as possible. That is where consensus and effective solutions are most likely to emerge.

I know, I know, it's America and they've a federal system and it's different over there. But the principle is absolutely clear - as many decisions as is possible should be made as close as you can get to the people affected, at a level where those people not only know who the decision makers are but, as Tim Worstall once put it, know where they go for a beer on a Friday night (Tim called it Bjorn's Beer Effect).

Devolution is not about directing some national government funding through some sort of regional or city-regional polity overseen by a grand and self-important mayor (whose eye is as likely to be on national power as it is on the interests of the millions his mayoralty serves).

Devolution is not about a grand committee of council leaders administering, with a nod to unelected business representatives, some sort of national government provided fund intended to promote local growth (even local growth badged as "inclusive").

Devolution is not about allowing local councils to keep local taxes but not to set the level of those taxes or having that level capped. Or for that matter not letting them set rents for their houses, charges for their services or fees for their functions.

Devolution is not having a system of local government where a National Government Minister can, almost on a whim, intervene or impose on the local council simply because of some negative press coverage.

Devolution is not having local government as, essentially, a mere agent of national government policy (and a convenient scapegoat for when that national policy turns out not to work very well).

Devolution is not a system where the policies of services local councils are providing get determined by unelected national inspectorates and QUANGOs.

And devolution isn't scrapping small, locally-focused councils and creating huge, less accountable, less transparent and less accessible authorities.


Instead of arguing for actual devolution back to local councils, what we have is an unseemly scramble to get one of those there mayors (a painful and, as yet inconclusive, process here in Yorkshire). Not because having a mayor is a good idea, improves democracy, extends accountability, and increases public participation. Nope, we want a mayor because, without one, we might miss out on some crumbs of investment from national government - cash for shiny new trains, subsidies for our pet (and valueless) 'green economy' schemes and money for us to carry on pretending that there's any relationship between universities and business innovation. This is not devolution, it's just a pretty pathetic game of 'chase the money'.

We could do so much better.

....

Postcode lotteries (or why England is the most centralised large country in the world)

I don't know about you, but the term 'postcode lottery' makes my blood boil. We hear it all the time with its implication that everything should be the same everywhere or else things aren't fair. I get emails lobbying me to propose changes (usually expensive changes) because "it's a postcode lottery".

Here's a typical example:

'Our extensive new report highlights the bizarre situation where charity shops from the same chain, delivering exactly the same services and performing in exactly the same way, can get a completely different package of support in terms of rate relief and waste disposal charges simply because they are located on different sides of an authority boundary,’ said Robin Osterley, the chief executive of the Charity Retail Association.

Yes folks, these charities aren't getting the same deal from every local council because different councils exercise their discretion differently on business rates and waste collections. And therefore something should be done (by implication to make everywhere the same, to remove Council discretion).

There's a reason for much of this - national media and politics. I remember Anne Widdecombe explaining how, regardless of devolution, the national media expected a minister to appear on TV to explain why something or other was a postcode lottery (or failing, or underfunded, or inefficient). So long as this is the case, national government will tell local government what it has to do and how to do it while probably not providing 100% of the necessary resources.

I guess this explains comedian Geoff Norcott's observation (following his appearance on Question Time) that the politicians on the panel end up answering incredibly minor concerns ('dog poo in the paddling pool') that would be better addressed to the Parish Council.

My modest proposal - for when, by acclaim, you make me God Emperor for a week - is that we should ban the term 'postcode lottery' because it is helping destroy flexibility, creativity and innovation by local councils. Not that councils are all that good at this stuff (although we are massively better at it that national government) but, if councils have more discretion, people would be a lot closer to the people - elected people - making decisions about their lives.

And while we're about this business (and I'm still God Emperor) I would stop MPs having huge well-funded constituency offices full of people that go around doing things that really should be done by local councillors - and, yes, I'd devolve the benefits system, immigration administration and much else too. Frankly, we elect MPs to go down to London because we've got better things to do with our lives and, anyway, can't all fit into that fancy faux-gothic pile they've got to work in. And when those MPs have all got there, maybe they can stop fussing about postcode lotteries and let local councils get on with their job of running local services.

.....

Stupid regulation and dumb government - why Detroit isn't regenerating

This piece from Scott Beyer sums up the problem with local government's default approach to business regulation - banning stuff:

The city has begun reinforcing regulations that, because of bureaucratic disorganization, have long been ignored. Central to this is the Operation Compliance Initiative, which was passed in 2012 by then-Mayor Dave Bing to regulate Detroit’s 1,500 illegal unlicensed businesses. Most operate on extremely low profits and, like the Browns’ project, are often run out of homes. Part of a complex underground economy, they are usually in poor areas. They offer everything from auto parts and electrical equipment, to basic retail and in-house dining—but they all have failed to meet the permitting and licensing requirements mandated by the city and the state of Michigan.

My city of Bradford isn't a broken as Detroit but we're just as dumb - banning A-Boards, charging upwards from £500 to put some chairs on the pavement, stopping taxi firms collaborating to compete with ride-share apps, imposing onerous planning restrictions on security, enforcing use classes to prevent innovation, banning takeaway food anywhere near schools. I guess we're probably no more unfriendly to business innovators than most other cities but, frankly, many of those can get away with it. Bradford, like Detroit, is damaged by these overzealous regulators and dumb rules.

.....

Should Council's be doing this?

I understand the financial imperative for local authorities to seek investments that will provide (possibly) assured future income. But there is a point at which you have to ask whether using the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) to invest in commercial property is either fair or the proper use of such borrowing:

Through this innovative partnership, local authorities borrow money from central Government via the Public Works Loan board at a fixed low interest rate and regenerate surplus land that they own by building a Travelodge hotel as either a stand-alone project or as part of a mixed-use development. Not only does this create jobs and boost the local economy but it also provides a substantial return of profit for the council.

It looks great, doesn't it? After all the commercial interest (Travelodge in this case but it could be other businesses) gets access to cheaper finance than would be the case had they borrowed from normal commercial sources. And the Council gets that much vaunted 'regeneration' and an income from owning the freehold. It all seems like a brilliant idea but it does raise questions especially where the deal is less of a partnership that the one described here.

The first question is how local authorities with preferential borrowing rates and a benign tax environment are affecting the property market, especially for the sorts of investment - shopping malls, car parks, supermarket sites and so forth - that are favoured because of their (hopefully) reliable income. It may well be the case that the value of these assets is inflated by the capacity of local councils to invest larger sums given low interest rates on their borrowing.

The second question is whether the PWLB exists for the purpose of commercial property investment - especially the sort of investment Bradford Council has undertaken by simply buying an existing car park for several million quid. Surely the operation of the PWLB shouldn't be merely 'prudential' (does the ground rent exceed the cost of borrowing) but should contain some recognisable social value.

Finally, do local councils have the expertise to engage in this sort of property investment - what looks like low risk may turn out to be more problematic. Imagine buying up a freehold only to find that the income from ground rent dries up or becomes difficult to collect? Local councils are looking for long term income here without necessarily appreciating how market and social change will affect that long run - what happens to car parks in a world of self-drive cars? Do AirBnB type models undermine the budget hotel? And how will the medium term play out in the world of retail letting?

Councils will, of course, turn round and say, 'but we've no choice as we've no money'. This merely returns to the original driver of such investments - falling council revenue budgets - while the risks associated with such strategies are unclear and the impact on property markets elsewhere store up further problems. And this is all before we consider how many billions councils will add to public borrowing.

Should councils be doing this?

....

Hows about we try some of that there local democracy? It used to work quite well.

A while ago I wrote about the move to ban local councils from charging for Park Runs following the decision of a town council to do just that:

And, of course, you all think it absolutely right that politicians in London ban Councils from deciding on things like what they can and cannot charge people or organisations for doing. Don't get me wrong here, I don't particularly think Councils should charge for park runs (although please note that crown green bowlers, cricketers and football players are charged to use facilities in public parks) but I do think that if we are to go to the trouble of electing local councillors to make decisions we should actually let them make those decisions. And, yes, that might include charging for a park run. If you don't like the decision you get the chance to vote out the people who made that decision. This is how the representative democracy lark works.

This process - whereby decisions made by local authorities are over-turned because national politicians see some votes to grab or are badgered by national media and other national politicians into stopping the local council from doing what its democratically elected councillors have decided they will do.

This isn't just a British problem (although we are, among larger countries, one of the very worst offenders) - here's Joel Kotkin in New Geography about the USA:

This follows a historical trend over the past century. Ever since the Great Depression, and even before, governmental power has been shifting inexorably from the local governments to regional, state and, of course, federal jurisdictions. In 1910, the federal level accounted for 30.8 percent of all government spending, with state governments comprising 7.7 percent and the local level more than 61 percent. More than 100 years later, not only had the federal share exploded to nearly 60 percent, but, far less recognized, the state share had nearly doubled, while that of local governments has fallen to barely 25 percent, a nearly 60 percent drop. Much of what is done at the local level today is at the behest, and often with funding derived from, the statehouse or Washington.

Anyone taking a reasonably long view of English local government will recognise this trend with local councils increasingly mere agents of central government enacting programmes and projects deriving from the legislative and fiscal decisions of national government. The drive to standardisation through inspection regimes and the tendency to go on about 'postcode lotteries' provides the justification for this change. Very little that Bradford Council does is not directed, regulated and funded by central government meaning that, when that central government changes its spending priorities or reduces spending the thick end of the impact is felt by the council.

I believe this is, for all of standardisation's superficial appeal, bad government. Not only does is assume that circumstances are the same everywhere but it kills administrative innovation by constraining the freedom of action for local councils. It may be true that we'd all like everybody everywhere to receive the same incredibly high quality of service but the reality of modern government is that quite the reverse is true - the lack of flexibility and independence at the local level results in sclerotic, unresponsive public services that become inward-looking and producer-oriented. Faced with radical alternative approaches the producer-dominated local government (and agencies with related vested interests) appeal to national government and national bureaucracy to prevent any threat to the current system.

This problem has got mixed up with the arguments about regional devolution (an excellent idea being very badly delivered because of national government's control of investment finance and insistence on city-regions rather than existing political geography). The thrust of localism is that government is better when politicians focus on making what they see out their front door better rather than on designing grand schemes and systems to run everything, everywhere according to rules laid down by clever folk in a London office.

And let's remember that the check on this system - we call it democracy where I come from - is that folk get a regular chance to replace the politicians if they mess up. I happen to think this a rather better approach to government than the current system where those local councillors can simply blame central government for everything that has gone wrong.

....

Grenfell Tower: some writings

These are a set of sensibly written and essentially non-partisan pieces on the Grenfell disaster. I feel it's necessary to do this so we get away from wanting everybody's head on a stick before we've got to grips with what actually happened. This matters to me because I'm on the board of a housing association with 30 or so high rise blocks.

Airlines show safety and profit go hand in hand. Let's not learn the wrong lessons from Grenfell.

"The aviation industry may be highly competitive but it is also tightly regulated and permeated by a culture that views safety as paramount. Such is the sector’s success that a report last year found that the number of annual fatalities almost halved over two decades while the number of global flight hours more than doubled"

Grenfell Tower fire: Should this cladding be allowed?

From the technical editor of Building Magazine - so may be better informed than some commentary.

The terrible and sudden spread of the fire at the west London tower this week has raised questions about whether ACM cladding should be permitted on high-rise residential towers

Is Grenfell Tower a monument to the death of the ethos of public service?

Tessa Shepperson at Landlord Law Blog knows here stuff - this is a little polemical but raises some interesting points such as one that is a warning for Tenant Management Organisations:

There seems to be a general tenancy nowadays, in all fields, for people to disrespect knowledge and experience and assume that people with no knowledge and no experience can – with advice – do as good a job as the experts.

Tenants are just tenants, they aren't buildings management experts.

To blame “Evil Tories” is to miss the point spectacularly…

In which we learn that regulation of privately rented properties is quite a bit stricter than that of state housing:

A programme of inspections takes place to tackle high-risk HMOs to ensure that means of escape and adequate fire safety measures are in place and to identify unlicensed HMOs.

There is an overlapping fire safety responsibility between the Council and the London Fire Brigade (LFB). Owners are required to carry out a fire risk assessment and make an emergency plan. The fire risk assessment is a systematic examination of the premises to identify the hazards from fire which must be recorded.

The Grenfell High-Rise Fire: A Litany of Failures?

From Wendell Cox in New Geography - so a US perspective:

Worse, in a larger sense, the Grenfell fire may turn out to be one of the world's great planning disasters.

And from blogger Tim Newman:

I have no idea what the philosophy was in the Grenfell Tower, but it should have been to get everyone out ASAP in the event of a fire: you hear the alarm, everyone evacuates, the firemen turn up to see what’s what. From what I’m hearing, people believed they should stay in their apartments because the flats were designed to contain fires, or something like that. Even if they were designed to contain fires, you should still evacuate. Yes, it’s a pain in the arse standing in the carpark in your pyjamas at 1am, but it’s better than burning to death.

Suggests there's a need to review fire safety advice (staying put is pretty standard advice)

Or another well-informed blogger, Raedwald:

Around 6am, 5am UK time, last Wednesday morning I started watching Grenfell Tower burning. It was clear from the footage that the fire progressed on the outside of the building. "Cladding" I said to my plumber. A bit of digging about found the portfolio pics on the website of Studio E architects, of Tooley Street; they confirmed that an aluminium sandwich panel was specified.

There's still a way to go on this disaster. One thing that needs some urgent attention is the lack of preparedness from the Council. This echoes for us in Bradford since the Council completely failed in its response to serious flooding on Boxing Day 2015 - less serious for sure but a failure nonetheless. Is this pretty standard for Councils? Are we not ready for disaster - whether its a big fire, a flood, an outbreak of disease or a hurricane?

....

If we can't charge for park runs, what is the point of a local council?

Yesterday lots of people were running around smiling because of an announcement from the Government:

Councils in England will be banned from charging people to take part in weekend fun runs under rules being proposed by the government.

Free events, organised by the Parkrun group to encourage fitness, attract thousands of runners on 5km courses (3 miles) in parks across the country.

A parish council near Bristol last year proposed charging entrants £1 each, citing the cost of upkeep of paths.

And, of course, you all think it absolutely right that politicians in London ban Councils from deciding on things like what they can and cannot charge people or organisations for doing. Don't get me wrong here, I don't particularly think Councils should charge for park runs (although please note that crown green bowlers, cricketers and football players are charged to use facilities in public parks) but I do think that if we are to go to the trouble of electing local councillors to make decisions we should actually let them make those decisions. And, yes, that might include charging for a park run. If you don't like the decision you get the chance to vote out the people who made that decision. This is how the representative democracy lark works.

Except it doesn't really. I thought through the things we do as a local council - care for the elderly, look after the disabled, protect children, fix the roads, collect your rubbish, pick up the litter you drop, provide parks and hundreds of other services large and small. In every case the degree of genuine local control gets less and less each passing year. Our care services are determined by central government means tests, our children's services by national legislation and the threat of intervention, highways maintenance by centrally determined capital programmes, waste management by onerous EU regulations and, now it seems, Government wants to decide through legislation what we can and cannot do with the parks we manage.

Councils do a pretty good job - amidst a load of criticism - in administering the services we're asked to administer. And local councillors mostly do a great job (especially the Conservative ones) of helping people negotiate the nonsense of bureaucracy. We also provide a reality check on the innate daftness of government administrators. But these days our decision making is more and more limited to how we administer services within central government rules and trying to keep going the small number of non-statutory services such as allowing people to organise running round the park on a Sunday morning.

The park run case is about a council making a tricky decision about its budget. And then seeing a national organisation lobby central government to take away that council's right to make that tricky decision. So tell me, what is the point of a local council?

.....

Things are seldom as simple as they seem...

I'm discussing Council budgets and we get to the matter of shared services and specifically sharing back office functions (things like receipts and payments, payroll, tax collection and so forth). Now these are things that every local council does with the same intention and the same outcome. So, on the face of it, sharing such things ought to be a doddle.

The problem is (and it's not insurmountable since quite a few councils have merged back office with other councils) that, for all the apparent obviousness, things aren't that simple. Even if I allow for a certain amount of bureaucratic sucking of teeth - "ooh, Councillor, I don't think that's possible" - there remains the matter of systems. And unless you merge the systems you really don't realise, other than a bit of saving in senior management, much benefit from sharing.

The problem is that merging large and complicated systems is not straightforward. By way of illustration, our former Spanish bank (Banesto) was taken over by another bank (Santander) but the actual back office systems for the two banks remain - or did in October 2015 - separate to the extent that Santander operators were unable to sort out problems, these had to be done by the former Banesto people who "understood the systems".

Integrating two complicated back office systems - say those of Leeds and Bradford Councils - is only possible given time, money and a plan. To make such a merger worthwhile, we need also to know that the net savings exceed, in a reasonable time frame, the money invested in the merger. It is, while not impossible, pretty challenging to make this calculation with a high degree of confidence. Such a lack of confidence isn't really a problem if the costs are low and the savings are high. But this really doesn't seem to be the case for such back office mergers (or so I'm told).

This problem with complex systems, how they stay in place because changing them is uncertain and expensive, is repeated time and time again. Here's Jon Worth on European railways (quite literally):

After having been stuck again this morning due to lack of collaboration between EU rail firms, I started to wonder: can liberalisation of EU rail actually ever work? And, were it to ever work, what are the prerequisites to making it work?

Jon goes on to set out seven factors about the system (information, accountability, ownership, cohesion, customer rights, maintenance and ticketing) that need resolution through system design if a liberalised railway is to be delivered. Jon concludes, unsurprisingly, that:

So then, that’s the little list of issues to solve. Will the EU, and its Member States, be ready to go that far to make a liberalised railway work? And to foot the costs of doing so? I rather doubt it…

The problem for us is that, given the significance of our legacy systems (in government, transport and finance especially) and the rate of innovation in these areas, we run the risk of economic sclerosis unless we begin to grapple with the challenge of replacing those systems with new ones. There are technical solutions to all of Jon's questions but the current infrastructure (physical and social) is largely unable to carry those technical solutions. The result of this is that people find 'get-arounds' - those railways, instead of sleek transport systems of the future become anachronistic and inefficient systems superceded by driverless vehicles, drones and communications technology.

Too often this is an argument against doing anything or for merely doing things that don't impact the established order - an interactive screen here, an app there rather than having some idea how the system will look when everything is done. For all my liberal instincts, I can't help but think things are seldom as simple as we like to think they are whatever William of Ockham might have said!

....

The strange death of local government - a comment on setting budgets (and what we do)

‘No new money from central government is being provided to councils in 2017/18. In fact, more than two thirds of councils will actually be worse off next year than they were expecting.'

You will have heard this sort of observation many times over many years. This version is from the current chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), Lord Porter. The problem is that, while I think Lord Porter is right, over the years the repeated cries of pain from local government have destroyed much of our credibility on this matter - there may now be a wolf but nobody believes us.

That Night a Fire did break out--
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street--
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence) -- but all in vain!
For every time she shouted 'Fire!'
They only answered 'Little Liar!'
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Or in less poetic terms:

"Surrey County Council should hang their heads in shame.

"Surrey residents will have seen their council tax go up by around 85 per cent in the last two decades and have every right to feel that their local representatives have let them down once again."

So says the Taxpayers Alliance as it argues how paying councillors, high salaries for top officials and trips to conferences show there's no need for tax increases. After all, local government always says this:

"After years of striving to keep council tax as low as possible or frozen, many town halls have found themselves having to ask residents to pay more council tax ..."

That's Cllr Claire Kober, leader of Camden and chair of the LGA's resources board.

So is there any truth in all this? Are local councils being stripped bare as the easiest target for national government demanded austerity or is there still largess, waste and unnecessary expense out there in local government land?

I can't really comment on Surrey or indeed any local council other than my own, Bradford. Here's the state of our budget:



For the sake of precision, this is the 2016/17 revenue budget, third quarter report (taken from the papers for a Corporate Overview and Scrutiny meeting on 2 February 2017). What it shows is that Bradford Council's net expenditure for 2016/17 is £378m and gross expenditure is £1,230m (net expenditure being that gross figure less income). This is, for us mere mortals, a lot of money and most of it - including most of the income - is public money.

You will appreciate how, given the scale of the money we spend, saving a hundred thousand or so on paying councillors, senior officials or trade union reps isn't likely to fix the problem (assuming - see above - we accept there is a problem). And nor is this where we're spending the money. I'm going to focus on the unfunded part of the table above - the 'net budget' figure of £378m. This is funded from two sources - local taxes (council tax and, at some point, business rates) and Revenue Support Grant (RSG). When you hear about cuts to local budgets what is being talked about is reduction in RSG. It is the stated intention of the government to reduce this grant to zero - it is currently around £138m in Bradford. Some local authorities in England already have no RSG - the government cannot cut the budget of, for example, Sevenoaks District in Kent because they no longer give it any grant.

But enough of where the money comes from what about how its spent. Were I to ask an average Bingley Rural resident to tell me how much is spent on highways and how much on social care, I'd probably get similar numbers. The reality here is that we spend around ten times as much on social care as we do on highways. Look at that table above and you'll see that the net budget for adults' and children's care amounts to £207.8m out of that £378m net budget - that's 55% of the total net budget and over 70% of the money we spend on delivering services. Yet these are, in the main, hidden services that only the individual recipients know about.

In the budget planning papers for 2017/18 Bradford's finance director reports that, in terms of delivering care, we plan to spend £158m in the forthcoming year (note this is a different definition and calculation from the table above). And this will support 6,200 vulnerable people at a cost in excess of £25,000 per person. Oh, before you call this a scandalous waste recognise that this represents £480 per week in a world where average weekly cost in a care home (not a nursing home) is, according to Which, £600. And this hides significant cross-subsidy:

According to the healthcare market intelligence provider LaingBuisson, residential care homes in England currently need to charge fees of between £590 and £648 per week.

However, the average fee paid by English councils for residential care of older people was just £486 per week in 2016/17.

LaingBuisson estimates this means residents who pay from their own finances are filling a funding gap of £1.3bn a year.

What we're seeing in top tier local government is its gradual decline from being a maker of place into being the funder of care for vulnerable people. For county councils this is even clearer as they don't provide services such as refuse collection, leisure services, housing and economic development that metropolitan districts like Bradford provide. I'm guessing that the proportion of county budgets spent on providing care is touching 70%.

Linked to this shift in local government priority is a secondary truth - we really have very little control over these budgets. With adult care the entitlement to care is set out in law and local authorities have a duty to provide (or enable provision of) that care. If an older or disabled person - and there are growing populations in both areas - qualifies, the council has to provide and has to pay. For children we have a little more flexibility but most councils rightly seek to avoid increasing the risks and government retains (and exercises) the power to intervene and direct decisions in children's services.

This strange death of local government belies the scale of our spending and the importance (or even self-importance) of councillors. The sad reality for many councillors is that their local parish or town council has more flexibility in decision-making than does the grand top tier council with its fine offices, highly paid officials and more-or-less full time councillors. None of this is a criticism of local councils or councillors but rather a recognition - something even the TPA recognises in its more measured moments - that most of the financial challenges facing local councils point back to national government where, despite all the rhetoric, local councillors are largely seen by officials as bumbling fools that get in the way.

I remember a grumpy old Labour councillor in Bradford called Syd Collard who, on the minibus to some planning committee site visit, went on at length about how being a councillor was a waste of time these days and he wouldn't recommend it to anyone any more. My Dad - a councillor for 35 years - says much the same. Wherever we look and regardless of national government cant about localism our ability to make local decisions about local services to local people are constrained by the interference of government regulations and the prejudices of the 'Man in Whitehall'.

I'm sure Syd and my Dad would agree that local government is important. But right now local councils - the top tier ones at least - are in danger of becoming merely the agents of care delivery for a combination of the NHS and national government departments. Without belittling care as a service, this isn't what we need and reminds me daily how the stupidity of the poll tax and the arrogance of ministers since resulted in the emasculation of local councillors - a gentling enacted in law by Blair's 2000 Local Government Act that left most of us sitting on the backbench being 'community leaders' rather than doing what people think they elected us to do.

.....

Putting on the postman's uniform - a return to local leadership

In David Brin's book, The Postman, he describes how a man in a post-disaster USA dons the uniform and, as if by magic, is transformed into that same reliable and trustworthy working-class public servant. In exploring the importance of connections between places, Brin (in common with many other writers exploring a post-disaster world) touches on different forms of organisation. We wander from self-reliant little homes with tough but loving families through suspicious and fearful villages or towns to the most dystopic world of the Big Man and the warlord.

In all the book's places we see what many would see as a crisis of leadership. In some places there is no leadership beyond the family, an entirely independent pseudo-pioneer world - a sort of Farnham's Freehold without the casual racism. In others we see safety and security achieved at the cost of compliance with oppression - Zamyatin's We with tatty leather jackets. Elsewhere we glimpse the entirely lawless where, in a world of scarcity, the utility function drives human decisions to their logical conclusion. Here's Deirdre McCloskey in "The Bourgeois Virtues":

"The economist and historian Alexander Field has based a similar argument on biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert with bread and water that you want, you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheer self-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation, and the game's afoot. Once you and he have chatted for a while and built up trust, naturally, you will refrain."

Or perhaps not if the utilitarians are right? In their world the task of the leader, or so it seems, is to decide - by whatever means - what is the greatest good for the greatest number and implement that good. Such, for all the deal-making, fancy words, thought leadership and opinionating, is the core purpose of those gatherings of great and good - Davos, Bilderburg, summits, conferences and think tanks. Such things are the manifestation, the logical conclusion of a philosophical tradition running from Plato through Mill and Bentham to A C Grayling: leadership from the wise.

The problem today isn't that we are entering some sort of dystopia but rather that the most essential part of leadership - that someone has to follow - has been lost in our desire to perfect the manner in which leaders lead and the things that they lead on. Here from the Millennium Project:




I haven't got the Davos agenda but, while the words may vary, this 'conscious leaders' agenda' pretty much covers what they'll talk about (other than how to get themselves more power and money of course - that's not on the official leaders' agenda). What we have here is the agenda but the problems for those leaders in Davos is that, especially for the political ones - plus those pompously titled thought leaders - it's the lack of followers that is the agitation. This is the 'populism' that is troubling so many of the great and good - for them it is, indeed, better characterised as 'unpopularism'.

The problem here is that these leaders, for all that they seem secure in their power, are uncertain how long this will remain the case. We were all pretty certain that Donald Trump wouldn't win the US presidential election - and we were wrong. We were less certain but assured by our leaders that the UK wouldn't vote to leave the Euorpean Union - and we were wrong. Elsewhere we've seen the President of France become so unpopular that he withdrew from any prospect of seeking re-election. In Spain and Greece social democratic parties are being replaced by radical parties of the left and the big losers to left and right in Holland, Sweden and Germany aren't conservatives but rather Europe's once dominant centre-left.

And the image above of the world and its problems? That is an image constructed by the centre-left - a reflection of big state, big government models for the future. It's not that the content is wrong but rather that the model assumes that the wise - Philosopher Kings - will provide the leadership and this leadership will be global. These are the people who Harm de Blij says live in a flat world, flitting effortlessly from place to place across the world and inhabiting a community where they genuinely feel like Tom Paine's citizens of the world. The problem is that 99% of the worlds population aren't in this flat world - they're, in de Blij's words, either locals living in the global periphery or mobals trying to get from that periphery to the core where they can have a better life.

"From the vantage point of a high-floor room in the Shanghai Hyatt, the Mumbai Oberoi, or the Dubai Hilton, or from the business-class window seat on Singapore Airlines, the world seems flat indeed. Millions of world-flatteners move every day from hotel lobby to airport limo to first-class lounge, laptop in hand, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring as they travel, adjusting the air conditioning as they go"

Such 'flat earth dwellers' understand the locals and mobals. After all they've listened to a thought leader speak, they've read a precis of the current academic research and they reviewed documents from a UN agency or two plus, for balance, Oxfam or some other NGO. The right noises about poverty, economic development, humanitarianism and growth drop from their lips. But they do not know these locals and mobals. Those people, the ones they see from the limo window, serving them tea in the hotel and marching angrily about how their livelihoods are threatened - they've stopped following these Philosopher Kings. Our 'flat earth dwellers' are no longer leaders but rather a bunch of folk who can see a lot of locals and mobals pushing against the glass of their bubble. And they are scared.

None of this is to say that enlightenment liberalism is wrong or a problem. After all, despite the best efforts of some to suggest otherwise, capitalism has made us richer and is doing the same for those locals and mobals de Blij worries about. Rather it's to suggest that we need to rethink the model of leadership that is revealed at Davos and to recognise that this approach - consultative, knowledge-focused but still globally focused and top down - no longer fits what's needed.

At a board away day recently (from where I pinched that image of the world's agenda) a couple of almost throwaway comments struck me as important. The first of these was that we're moving to a self-service world, quite literally through the power of the smartphone in our pocket. Want to know where something is? Phone. Need a picture? Phone. Want to buy some car insurance? Phone. I forget where I read it but if your business idea doesn't work on a phone, don't bother.

Many of the presumptions about public services, transport, retailing and decision-making no longer apply. It's not that we don't still need leadership but that that leadership needs to be more dispersed, connected and local than what we see today. The economics writer, Tim Worstall taked about Bjorn's Beer Effect:

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

In a self-service world we need to look more at local considerations than at the systems needed to deliver services - the phone in your pocket can deliver those services and you can work it out for yourself. But you still want advice, help - dare I say it, leadership - but this should be at your scale: local, responsive and focused. Most of the world's problems - pretty much all of them with the exception of that huge asteroid - don't require a global response but require us, at most, to change our personal behaviour. This needs dispersed local leadership rather than grand gatherings in nice cities.

The second throwaway from my meeting was about how people work - specifically Generation Y and Z but I suspect this applies much more broadly - in a world where access to knowledge (and fake knowledge) approaches being universal. We heard a description of a noisy, confused room of young people discussing the task at hand, phones being consulted, everybody talking, groups forming and unforming - there's leadership here but not in the traditional, dominant, top-down manner that our Philosopher Kings would want. And the leader on one task is different from the leader on another task - all a bit like The Apprentice!

This again reflects the manner in which connectivity - something that mobile technology is bringing to de Blij's locals - now forms the core function in leadership. The leader is no longer in that high castle and, tomorrow, may step aside because a different person has stepped up to lead. All this suggests that the established power structures of representative democracy and bureaucracy serve less of a purpose - if we self-serve we don't need that big bureaucracy and, therefore, its great leader. And if we're connected, involved and engaged we have less need to choose someone else to do the connection, involvement and engaging.

We'll still need the public servant but that person won't be a president, chief executive or civil service mandarin. Rather that servant will be Bjorn having a drink on a Friday with his friends and neighbours or Claire playing Lego with the kids in the local pre-school. Someone who, to return to where we started, has put on the postman's uniform.

....

Private bin collections, vulnerable people and the funding of local councils

I'm going to be very careful here because I don't want you all to think I've an issue with the concept of 'vulnerable' people or indeed our obligation to support them. But we need to look at how two factors are throwing a spanner into the works of local government (and the local delivery of services):

1. We're getting better at keeping people alive, which is great, but we're also getting better at giving those people a real life

2. We've realised that year on year real terms increases in the cost of government are unsustainable in an era of (relatively) low growth rates

The consequence of these two - somewhat contradictory  - factors can be seen in stories like this:

Some householders in Greater Manchester are paying a private firm to empty their bins.

Many are angry because some councils have reduced rubbish collections in an attempt to cut costs, and to motivate people to recycle more.

A local businessman who bought himself a truck eighteen months ago is now emptying up to 800 bins a week.

Collecting the rubbish is, as far as most people are concerned, the main - they'll say "only" - service they get from their local council. Yet nearly every local council has now moved from weekly to fortnightly collections (all wrapped up in nice weasel words about recycling) and some are now creeping from every other week to every third week - even once-a-month.

Many of you will have noticed how local roads are getting worse too. There's a simple reason for this - to maintain roads in Bradford over a 25 year cycle, we currently need between £10 million and £11 million spending on them every year. We're actually spending £7 million to £8 million. Even with efficiencies and new technology, those roads will deteriorate.

It's easy to blame austerity - "the cuts" - for this parlous state of affairs. After all that's the second of the two points above. But what you should appreciate is that, even without 'austerity' (which I'll define as spending by local councils remaining at 2010 levels) there would be huge pressures on those general services as a result of 'vulnerable people'.

To illustrate this, I'll talk about the police. Recently I met with a couple of senior coppers to discuss policing challenges in Bradford. For the police (even with, now, a relatively protected budget) there's real pressure on basic frontline service - 'bobbies on the beat' as we most often call it. This is because, quite understandably, the police have been told to give more attention to child sexual abuse, missing people (especially children) and getting better at dealing with people they encounter who have serious mental health problems. These new priorities - usually just added onto the old priorities - are very resource intensive. One missing girl takes up a great deal more police time than one house burglary meaning that more and more resource is redirected to this work with 'vulnerable people'.

For local councils (and here I'm talking about unitary authorities like Bradford) approaching 50% the spending we control is now directed to dealing with these 'vulnerable people'. And there aren't very many of such folk. Looking at the numbers in Bradford, between adult social care, children's social services and programmes in public health (drug and alcohol rehabilitation and so forth) we work with about 15,000 people out of Bradford's half-a-million population - that's 3% of the District's population taking up nearly 50% of the money spent by the Council. And the looking after is expensive - one out-of-district placement for a child with special support needs can cost up to £200,000 a year.

As a result of this, small changes in predicted numbers have a huge impact on budgets - 900 looked after children rather than the 850 we expected and there's a multi-million pound overspend. And other support extends too - we seldom used to get situations where learning disabled adults ended up as carers for their physically disabled parents but this is now happening because we've helped those learning disabled adults have a better, longer and happier life. I could go on - more old people living longer in their homes, disabled children who used to die in their teens are now living into their twenties and thirties and we've rightly decided that children in care shouldn't just be dumped in kindly but crowded children's homes.

The result of all this is that, in one way or another, we're going to end up paying more for things we once considered free. And, while taxation is one way of doing this, I'm not sure I want the council tax of a young family struggling to pay the rent or mortgage to go up and up so we can provide care for an older person living in a house worth £250,000 or more. Unfortunately the debate about funding local services is trapped in a model of property taxes plus grant that precludes alternatives - even in places trying radical approaches like Swindon the solution is based on taxes rather than charges.

Regardless of national funding settlements, local council spending will continue to shift onto personal support services and away from the universal visible services we tend to think of as what our council does. This rather brings into question both the purpose of the local council and also the means by which we fund local government. Property taxes make sense when the services are primarily directed to place rather than people (emptying bins, sweeping streets, fixing potholes, running parks and so forth) but make much less sense when those taxes are overwhelmingly directed to personal support.

I don't know the answer to all this but I am sure that our national debate needs to pay attention to these trends. As a conservative, I'm in favour of personal responsibility with a safety net - where people are able to pay they should pay - but I recognise that we've somehow got the "I've paid into the system, I'm entitled to free stuff" mindset to deal with if this is going to change. In the meantime, Councils will continue to scrimp with the result that you probably won't get your bin emptied so often, the roads will be poor and the park will be tatty.

...

In case you wondered what we do at Council meetings in Bradford

This is cross-posted from the Bradford Council Conservative Group's Facebook page. It's an illustration of the nonsense we get up to at our Council meetings. Most of the time we spend hours debating motions before resolving to write a letter to a minister. We spend very little time discussing things that we actually control like empltying bins, fixing the roads, looking after children and caring for the elderly. And when we do propose that the Council actually does something, the leadership arrange for it to be voted down.

"FULL COUNCIL MEETING – FIVE-AND-A-HALF HOURS TO ACHIEVE WHAT?

Yesterday Bradford Council met. All ninety of us gathered to, in theory, make decisions about the things that matter to the residents or Bradford. So what did we do?

The first part of the meeting was fine. We received five petitions asking for the Council to act on various matters and these were referred to committees for further consideration. We asked questions of the leader and received financial and corporate planning documents. From a four pm start we’d concluded this process by about ten to six.

The meeting however finished over three hours later during which time we:

1.       Agreed to write letters to the Home Secretary, the Education Secretary, and the Boundary Commission. In the last case the letter concerns issues not within the remit of the commission as it simply criticises the criteria given to that Commission by Parliament and Government.

2.       Rejected proposals to recognise and support e-cigarettes as an effective smoking cessation method that is used by 20-30,000 Bradfordians

3.       Turned down taking positive action against dangerous and anti-social driving

4.       Had an hour long debate about education that resolved nothing at all (except that a majority of Councillors don’t agree with grammar schools)

5.       Voted down the opportunity for the Executive to lead on Bradford Council’s response to the flooding in December 2015. Instead Council decided it was fine for an update to go to a scrutiny committee in six months time

6.       Agreed the salary packages of two senior officers 

We spent a whole evening failing to act on things that actually matter to the Bradford public like dangerous driving, smoking deaths and flooding. Instead the Controlling Labour group preferred to spend time debating a 1984 mass picket in South Yorkshire, moaning about national education policy, and moralising about refugees.

It is difficult to justify keeping Councillors in the meeting for hours when all we do is pass motions instructing the Chief Executive to write letters to people. Yet this is all the current Labour leadership seem to want to do. This year we’ve written letters to a host of government ministers all of which are carefully crafted by officers and all of which receive carefully word answers that change nothing.

But when it comes to taking real action – doing things as a Council – the Labour leadership consistently vote down proposals. As a result, the Council is clear that it isn’t interested in reducing the harm from smoking, developing a more active road safety strategy and treating the risk of flood as a priority."

....