Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
COMMUNITIES AND
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
12 JULY 2006
Q20 Lyn Brown: I am glad to hear
you talk about some of the views coming forward, obviously, as
a representative of the Muslim community. There are two things
I want to say. My own constituents talk to me about their concerns
about the representative nature of the groups that were established,
not least because we have a very, very large Muslim community
in West Ham and East Ham, in the borough that I come from; and
there did not appear to be anybody from any of those Muslim communities
from Pakistan, India or African Muslim communities represented
there at all. It was difficult for them to engage, given that
they were such a large community with those working groups because
they did not have somebody there that they could go and talk with.
We have moved on as well from when those groups were established.
We have now had concerns raised with us about the way in which
the anti-terrorist legislation is being implemented and the impact
that it is having on some of our communities. I wondered whether
or not, in your community cohesion work, you will be looking at
that area of work and seeing what we can do to take a different
step or an additional step forward. Will you be involving local
government in that?
Ruth Kelly: They are very important
questions. First, the work we did in the working groups in Preventing
Extremism Together was a major step and the start of an ongoing
conversation that we have not just with the Muslim community but
with other faith groups and people of no faith as well, in how
we create cohesion at local level and prevent extremism. There
may be extremism in the Muslim community, but there is also concern
about the rise of the far right and other forms of extremism which
society also has to grapple with. You are right that the concerns
presented by the working groups are not the only ones of concern
to Muslim communities—and in fact the Muslim community—even
the expression is quite difficult—because they are so diverse
and vary from some of the poorest groups in the country to some
of the wealthiest. We have to be quite careful about how we deal
with these issues. You are right that we need to continue that
dialogue and work with other departments within government, particularly
the Home Office, on some very sensitive issues on policing and
so forth; but local government increasingly has a really important
role to play in this. That is why bringing these different responsibilities
together under this new Department of Communities and Local Government,
is a really important step. I think that a lot of what really
works in terms of community cohesion is determined by what is
delivered by civic leadership at the local level. The new Commission
on Integration and Cohesion led by Darra Singh will be finding
out practically, in a hands-on way, what is working in communities,
where they have best coped with change, and what brings problems
as well so that we can learn from what works.
Q21 Martin Horwood: I was interested
in your opening remarks, when you mentioned inclusion. Until very
recently, social exclusion was a key remit of the Department,
and this is still listed on your website as a key remit. Obviously,
there is now an overlapping of responsibility with the Cabinet
Office and with the new task force on social exclusion. I am just
concerned that in that reshuffle of responsibilities nothing is
lost in the wash. Is there any residual part of the old Social
Exclusion Unit still in your Department; and, if not, what has
happened to the long list of quite interesting reports we were
told about in the annual report of ODPM last year, including young
adults with troubled lives, service delivery for people who move
frequently, excluded older people and so on? Can you assure us
that none of that very important work has been lost?
Ruth Kelly: I think the reorganisation
makes an enormous amount of sense. It is right to think specifically
about problems of groups facing particular issues of social exclusion,
for example children in care, or young women who become pregnant—teenagers,
or individual families with an extraordinary degree of associated
and complex problems.
Q22 Martin Horwood: I am sure that
is true, but I asked you a specific question.
Ruth Kelly: I am coming on to
that. It is important to give the context. It is right to have
that, and a sharp focus on that, together with our role as the
department of place thinking about social exclusion and deprivation
in places. That is how we have split the responsibilities, with
the Cabinet Office and Hilary Armstrong thinking about groups
and individuals and how they fare in society, recognising that
more than 50% of the socially excluded do not live in deprived
areas, with our Department thinking about social exclusion and
policy for social exclusion in areas, and area-based policies.
I think that that makes sense. That means that we have some of
the individuals who were in the Social Exclusion Unit still working
in our Department. In fact it has been split 50/50.
Q23 Martin Horwood: That answers
the first question. The second was the list of reports we had
in the annual report last year. What has happened to all of those?
Ruth Kelly: The individual policy
recommendations are owned by the Department that has direct policy
responsibility. That has always been the case and will continue
to be the case.
Q24 Martin Horwood: So you are confident
that none of them have been lost.
Ruth Kelly: Yes.
Q25 Alison Seabeck: With the White
Paper fairly imminent, will it reflect on the effectiveness of
local government scrutiny, and obviously its accountability and
moving that agenda forward? Are you confident that you can measure
its effectiveness?
Ruth Kelly: That is a very interesting
question. The answer is that scrutiny is hugely important and
I think under-developed. I think it could be taken to a new level.
The last Local Government Act talked a lot about the role of the
executive member and the leadership in local authority areas.
I think there is potential for a new re-invigorated role for the
ward councillor as advocates in their communities, championing
their communities, bringing different parties together, and making
sure that services respond to the needs of individuals and the
communities themselves. They also should have a stronger role
in scrutinising what is happening at local authority level. It
may go beyond the level of what is directly delivered by local
authorities to what is happening in a particular place. That is
something I want to explore in the White Paper.
Q26 Alison Seabeck: Would you consider
drawing people from outside the local authority into that scrutiny
process—bringing outside bodies in?
Ruth Kelly: How you develop the
scrutiny role is one of the issues we will think about over the
summer in the run-up to the White Paper. There is a huge potential
here to improve the way scrutiny is carried out, what sort of
services are scrutinised and who does it.
Q27 Alison Seabeck: The issue of
accountability links into the ODPM's agenda of double devolution.
What priority has that had, and are you close to understanding
how this idea, if you like, will work on the ground in terms of
the way communities would understand it? Are you getting closer
to getting to understand how you think it might work?
Ruth Kelly: What I have seen is
some incredibly exciting innovations in different parts of the
country. Yesterday or the day before I was in Lewisham looking
at some situations in which, for example, the community was able
to manage or even own assets themselves and run them in a way
that met the needs of the community. That is the sort of thing
that I think we can make much easier to happen than the case at
the moment. There is a huge tier of bureaucracy surrounding that
sort of local management of ownership of assets. First, you need
to know how well a local service is performing relative to other
services in different local authority areas and different parts
of the borough. You then need a mechanism that says that if you
have a problem it needs to be much easier to fix it than at the
moment. Third, it should be possible, where a community has the
capacity and the desire to want to manage that particular community
asset, for that request to be seriously considered by the local
authority.
Q28 Alison Seabeck: There are all
sorts of models out there, and I have some on my own patch, where
you can see they are working towards developing this sort of idea,
and they are all quite varied and different. But overlying all
that is a concern both from the general public as well as local
authorities, and I suspect central government, that there are
issues around standards, probity where assets and money are concerned.
If you are going to devolve sums of money to some of these groups,
what discussions do you have in the Standards Board for example
about how they would be involved—or would they be involved?
Ruth Kelly: Again, the local authority
would have to be confident in the capacity of the local community
to run or own an asset. I think this comes down to how the local
authority exercises its commissioning role in general. Of course,
it has to have confidence in the way that it does that and the
way in which standards are being met. This is something we need
to think through in the run-up to the White Paper but beyond that
as well, even getting to the point where we have the community's
roles seriously considered by the local authority is quite far
ahead of where we are at the moment. Trying to cut back some of
that bureaucracy is quite important. The detail of how that would
work in practice will have to be developed after that.
Q29 Clive Betts: Can I get an assurance
that in devolving powers to the local level and asking local authorities
to devolve power to the neighbourhood level, that we are not going
to be prescriptive from the centre about how that should be done;
in other words we are not going to say, "we will devolve
power to the local authority as long as you take advantage of
our wonderful offer again to have elected mayors, which you have
not taken up in the past, or that you can have powers as long
as you devolve to a specific form of neighbourhood government",
rather than allowing each local authority to work through its
communities and how it wants to do that?
Ruth Kelly: What really matters
to me here is the principle that there is neighbourhood engagement.
Quite how that is carried out, I think there is a strong argument
for looking at local authorities and allowing innovation in relation
to that. We will set out in the White Paper the way forward, that
there may be some role for prescription—I am not saying
there is no role for prescription. But it will probably be more
enabling than a precise form as to how it should happen. I cannot
answer all your questions now because that is the policy-making
process that will go on in the run-up to the White Paper. You
are also interested in whether there is some sort of deal here
where we would say to a local authority, "you have to have
a certain form of leadership in relation to certain powers".
My answer here again is based on principle: I think that the more
powers that are devolved to the local authority level, the more
important it is that there is strong stable leadership, which
is accountable to people. That could be through a mayor but it
could be through a number of other forms. Again, we have not prescribed
the approach; I have not said that there is a fixed blueprint
that I would adopt in that area.
Q30 Clive Betts: You talked before
about other departments being engaged to trust local authorities.
Given the importance of local transport for sustainable communities
and particularly in terms of public transport trying to deal with
the issue of social exclusion, are you having discussions with
the Department for Transport about how local authorities could
have more powers to influence and determine local bus services?
Ruth Kelly: Yes, we are having
discussions both at official level and also at political level
about how to respond to the cases that have been made by local
authorities in city regions, which include a vast array of issues,
but of course also transport.
Q31 Dr Pugh: Reading from your speech,
the sentence which says, "at the crucial local authority
level we need stronger accountability to citizens", I am
not sure who "we" is in this case: do you mean stronger
accountability to citizens? I think that in your neck of the woods,
and certainly in mine, the local authority has to put itself up
for election three out of four times—but central government,
we ourselves only head up to the electorate once every four years
or five years or whatever. Can you anticipate that in a local
authority the test that they need stronger accountability to citizens
would turn back on you and say, "why do they need it when
we here, in this place, do not?" Do we want more elections
for local government, fewer elections to local government? What
are we talking about here?
Ruth Kelly: You are not asking
me about national government here, are you?
Q32 Dr Pugh: No. You have made the
case saying we need stronger accountability to citizens, and I
was aware that in an awful lot of local authority areas, they
have elections and they take place more often than not; and that
seems a strong form of accountability. Presumably, that is not
what you are talking about, and it is a greater form of accountability
than we have here.
Ruth Kelly: There are several
forms of accountability of course. What I think is important is
that the citizens know who is taking the decisions. It is pretty
fundamental. If they know who is taking the decisions, then they
can vote for them at an election, praise them if things go well
or indeed blame them if things go badly. That is just one issue
that I am very concerned about.
Q33 Dr Pugh: And they do not know
locally who is making decisions?
Ruth Kelly: The other issue I
am concerned about is that local leaders of places ought to be
able to develop a vision for the future for their place. That
means having some sort of mandate which is strong enough for them
not only to develop a vision but also—
Q34 Dr Pugh: Is that not what an
election is supposed to do? Is that not what happens at central
government—
Ruth Kelly: There are all forms
of elections: direct elections, indirect elections, annual elections,
non-annual elections, elections for leaders, elections for ward
councillors—they provide different forms of accountability.
Q35 Lyn Brown: Crudely, if you are
going to ask local government to give up stuff to the control
of local people rather than under their control—and in London
one presumes the additional powers asked for by the elected mayor
will take some powers away from London boroughs—I am just
wondering if you were thinking of giving them anything juicy,
and whether or not that might be in the White Paper?
Ruth Kelly: I am obviously not
going to comment on the GLA Review, which is being announced tomorrow—I
am sorry to disappoint you! The principle of devolving more to
the borough level and devolving more from government to perhaps
the city regional level, is a good one. I think there is scope
there for us to think really seriously about where powers should
be located and what would be the appropriate level; or whether
it should be at neighbourhood level. I want the White Paper to
think through those questions.
Q36 Anne Main: This is very important.
When we are talking about people needing to know who is making
decisions, it would be disingenuous if we did not accept that
there are levers and carrots and sticks and all the other things
that trigger decision-making at local level. It might be looking
at the local authorities making that decision, but it is put in
an invidious position where it has to make a decision. I think
we have got to be a bit more open and honest about what pressures
are put on local authorities, and not just say they need more
say about what they so, if we do not actually give them the wherewithal
to do it. Would you agree with that?
Ruth Kelly: The question is, should
we devolve them?
Anne Main: No, funding. It has got to
accompany it.
Q37 Sir Paul Beresford: It is not
just funding; it is funding and freedom. It is no good saying
to them, "you have got the opportunity here of going for
it; and by the way we need to see your plans and approve them
before you do anything": that is what is happening.
Ruth Kelly: I think we have moved
in the direction of giving local authorities more flexibility,
but not sufficiently. The advent of the local area agreement process
was a big ambition for the Government but has not yet transformed
things at the local level. People say that it is quite bureaucratic.
There is an opportunity therefore through the new annual rounds
of negotiation to make it less bureaucratic, to give local councils
more flexibility over their duties and to streamline the management
system as well.
Q38 Anne Main: Ambitious—
Ruth Kelly: That is what I am
talking about. All of these things fit together.
Q39 Martin Horwood: In the answer
you have just given you were skipping deftly from the devolution
of power to local government to devolution of power to regional
government and back again. I think you are absolutely right; it
is critical that people know where decisions are being taken;
but is it not a problem that the answer in a lot of cases now
is regional government where there is no democratic accountability?
Ruth Kelly: There is some democratic
accountability at local level and another form of accountability
which is indirect accountability. Something like 60-70% of the
regional assembly members are councillors, so there is a form
of democratic accountability. There are appropriate powers at
that level, and appropriate powers devolved to others as well.
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