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?

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The Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill or how to raise food prices without helping suppliers

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The Queen’s Speech setting out the government’s proposed legislative programme is, as these things always are, something of a curate’s egg. There’s some pretty sensible stuff – pension reforms, some regulatory reform, scrapping (I thought we already had though) the Audit Commission and some reform to the electoral register that will make cheating a little harder.

But there are some bad bits – the blogs will be crammed with comment, even rage, about the surveillance bill so I’ll leave commenting on that to others. However there is another dreadful proposal - an unholy stitch up between metropolitan foodies and the National Farmers Union. It has the quite innocuous title of the “Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill”. It is a bill to put up food prices.

It’s not portrayed in that way of course but rather as a benign measure aimed at stopping the big grocers – let’s be blunt here, the big supermarket chains plus the Co-op – from wielding their market power with suppliers. But no-one asks about what wielding that market power actually means to the British public.

So let me explain. When supermarkets screw suppliers – large and small – down to the floor they do so in their own interests. And in the interests of consumers. That’s right, you and I benefit from the evil supermarkets buying stuff as cheaply as possible and on the most flexible of terms. Not only that but the consumers who gain the most from the evil business practices of the supermarkets are the consumers who need that gain most – the poor. Whatever I may think of supermarkets – and I’m no particular fan – there is no doubt that delivering on their promise of cheap food has been the single biggest contribution to alleviating poverty in the last fifty years.

However much the supply chain likes the proposed Bill and however much the competition (the Association of Convenience Stores are big fans) want it to happen, nothing should cover up the fact that the proposals will result in higher food prices. Maybe not by much but rest assured prices of staple foods – eggs, butter, flour, cheese, bread and so forth – will be higher. Which is why the ACS likes the Bill – it removes, at a stroke of the pen, some of the supermarkets’ competitive advantage thereby making a direct contribution to those stores’ bottom line.

The saddest thing is that – faced with higher prices from UK suppliers – the big supermarkets will look overseas. Rather than having some clipboard wielding jobsworth determining prices, the buyers will head to Poland, to Serbia and to Bulgaria where they’ll by milk, meat and flour to sell in their shops. Far from protecting the livelihoods of hill farmers, these proposals are just as likely to accelerate that vocation’s decline.

The Grocery Code Adjudicator Bill will raise food prices. And there’s no evidence at all that it will make life any better for suppliers.

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