Is that all there is?
1:00pm Thursday, 22nd March 2007
Sir Michael Lyons has spent the last three years reviewing the future of local government. The results were published yesterday. To be honest, they were pretty cautious and a little disappointing. And the government rejected most of them anyway. Honestly - what's the point?
To be fair to Lyons, he had to deal with a pretty difficult political situation. For all the government's claims to want to devolve to the local level, progress has been painfully slow and shows no signs of being accelerated. Council finance is one of the stickiest subjects in British politics and the media tends to portray both the status quo and any possible change as being deeply unfair.
It's also true that the dynamics of the local government debate are changing. It used to be that the future of the country's councils lay squarely in Whitehall. But as the Lyons review shows, the key to progress in the future lies in local government itself being more assertive and claiming a new role as a 'place shaper' - leading whole areas.
So there's some good news amid the gloom, but the Lyons review still doesn't seem likely to really change very much. The local government finance system is a mess - hardly anyone really understands how it works. At the local level, councils can only raise around 25% of their budget through their own taxation. That means that if they want to increase their budget by 1% to meet the government's rising demands, they need to increase their own bills by 4%.
Lyons' recommendations on that score were really sensible. Extra bands would have made council tax more progressive - someone living in a £1m house currently pays just three times the amount of someone living in a £20,000 council flat. This is a tax that was created in a rush to replace the community charge (otherwise known as the poll tax) - and it shows.
If ministers aren't prepared to localise more taxes, they should at least have an independent body to make it clear whether Whitehall is providing enough money to meet the demands it places upon councils. The public deserves clarity, rather than the kind of finger pointing that ministers usually indulge in - remember Charles Clarke blaming councils for education cuts and councils pointing the finger right back?
So Lyons has produced a cautious report that has met with a cowardly response. It's the story of local government reform in this country all over. A brave attempt Sir Michael, but we might have to wait a lot longer for a genuine shift to better, more realistic and more human governance and finance arrangements in the UK.
To be fair to Lyons, he had to deal with a pretty difficult political situation. For all the government's claims to want to devolve to the local level, progress has been painfully slow and shows no signs of being accelerated. Council finance is one of the stickiest subjects in British politics and the media tends to portray both the status quo and any possible change as being deeply unfair.
It's also true that the dynamics of the local government debate are changing. It used to be that the future of the country's councils lay squarely in Whitehall. But as the Lyons review shows, the key to progress in the future lies in local government itself being more assertive and claiming a new role as a 'place shaper' - leading whole areas.
So there's some good news amid the gloom, but the Lyons review still doesn't seem likely to really change very much. The local government finance system is a mess - hardly anyone really understands how it works. At the local level, councils can only raise around 25% of their budget through their own taxation. That means that if they want to increase their budget by 1% to meet the government's rising demands, they need to increase their own bills by 4%.
Lyons' recommendations on that score were really sensible. Extra bands would have made council tax more progressive - someone living in a £1m house currently pays just three times the amount of someone living in a £20,000 council flat. This is a tax that was created in a rush to replace the community charge (otherwise known as the poll tax) - and it shows.
If ministers aren't prepared to localise more taxes, they should at least have an independent body to make it clear whether Whitehall is providing enough money to meet the demands it places upon councils. The public deserves clarity, rather than the kind of finger pointing that ministers usually indulge in - remember Charles Clarke blaming councils for education cuts and councils pointing the finger right back?
So Lyons has produced a cautious report that has met with a cowardly response. It's the story of local government reform in this country all over. A brave attempt Sir Michael, but we might have to wait a lot longer for a genuine shift to better, more realistic and more human governance and finance arrangements in the UK.
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It’s a bit unfair to blame Michael Lyons, or ministers, when we’ve had – for all the elite debate – so little expression of public preferences over the distribution of power between central and local government.Lyons
Let’s look at the evidence. 1. We know there is deep antipathy to what in other jurisdictions is the principal fiscal carrier of local government autonomy, a property tax. People here just don’t want their property to be taxed.
2. We know too from all the work done by Ipsos Mori and others that people’s appreciation of their local authorities is far from positive. That’s to say they may rate certain local services but hold elected members and often council officials in low esteem. I don’t buy the argument that suddenly if councillors were more powerful people would recognise them (in the way they tend to recognise their MPs). Their lack of appreciation of councillors stems from an endemic under-valuation of local government.
3. People think of local government in terms of pavement services. When it comes to health, schooling, social services and “welfare” in the generic sense they don’t seem to care much for local service delivery and especially for non standardised service delivery. It’s noteworthy thatLyons Lyons
All this is to raise the question: do the people ofEngland
It won't surprise you to learn that I'm a little sceptical about some of your argument. Some points in no particular order:
1. I'm not sure what's so radical about what Lyons is proposing. Many of his proposals on the council tax are pretty technical fixes designed to make a regressive charge a little bit fairer. If we are going to have a local property tax, then it seems sensible that it should be regularly revalued and that the wealthy should pay a good deal more than they currently do. Personally, I prefer a local income tax, and I suspect most people in the country would as well.
2. The notion of place shaping is not that radical either - there is no real implication of devolving power, more of helping councils take a strategic overview of their local area. Part of the point of the place shaping idea is precisely to privilege the role of politicians as representatives and governors for localities, not just as the people who organise the bins - for me, service delivery has never been enough of a selling point for local democracy (do you really need councillors to get the streets clean?). What can possibly be wrong with that? It all seems pretty sensible and incremental to me.
3. You suggest that derogating significantly from our current, highly centralist, model is radical. But the centralist state is actually a very recent development, existing in its current form only since the early 1980s. I would suggest that localism should instead be seen as a rather moderate corrective to the genuinely radical innovation of massive centralisation, particularly the degree of regulation that has sprung up since 97.
4. It's very easy to dismiss elite debate, but there's a reason that localism has taken such a hegemonic grip on political discourse (rhetorically, at least). And the reason is that it is hard to imagine a successful public service reform programme going forward that does not involve some degree of devolution. Centralised reform has been tested to destruction and even the hardest nosed of civil servants accept that there needs to be more space for local innovation and variation if service improvements are to be sustained.
5. I find your view of political leadership a little limited. You seem to be implying that politicians should wait for the spontaneous emergence of popular localist sentiment before acting. Yet governments frequently force more profound social changes on society without broad popular support - where was the public demand for legalising homosexuality? It seems to me that there is a more subtle interplay between elite debate and popular opinion that you allow. Of course politicians should not force radical localism (whatever that might mean) on an unwilling public. But they can lead a debate and they can take steps to improve the legitimacy of local institutions.
All of which is to say that we need to start somewhere, rather than sit dumbstruck before public indifference. At the very least, the government needs to do something about council finance, which is plainly unsustainable. I'm not one of those people who thinks that localism is all about funding - I'm much keener on freedom to operate than freedom to tax - but the current funding system needs fixing one way or the other.