Examination of Witnesses (Questins 66-79)
COUNCILLOR JILL
SHORTLAND, COUNCILLOR
SUSAN WILLIAMS
AND MR
JULES PIPE
7 JULY 2008
Q66 Chair: Can I welcome the three of
you and say I note we have a change of witness at the last minute?
Obviously we welcome the fact that you have come but I will be
writing to the person we did ask to be a witness because it is
not normal for witnesses to be substituted. The Committee invites
people but obviously we are pleased that you are here and we can
draw on your experience. This is an introductory evidence session
of our inquiry on the balance of power between central and local
government. That means it is before we start the full inquiry.
We have had one session Sir Michael Lyons and various representatives
of think tanks. This is the second session. What we are asking
is that you suspend your positions as the leaders of different
councils and indeed your political persuasions. What we are asking
is for your ideas from first principles about the relationship
between central and local government, obviously drawing on your
experience, but not thinking narrowly from your current positions
in local government. We will be using these two introductory sessions
to help us to draw up the terms of reference for the actual inquiry
when we will then be advertising for evidence as usual. Can I
ask you to answer the most obvious question which is why should
local government be more than just a local administration of services?
Mr Pipe: I think there is a great
need for local accountability. All central governments will always
want to make local government a local administration. If a government
does not, certainly Whitehall departments will want to do that.
Why would they not, because they have a national agenda to deliver.
Local leadership and accountability are needed, local accountability
that is on a manageable scale for residents. Accountability up
to government for delivery of services is not on a manageable
scale. Also, I think there is a need locally to establish vision
and priorities for an area, commonly called "the place shaping
agenda" in the Lyons Report. That would have to be done locally.
There are too many differences within localities for that to be
a regional agenda. Those are a couple of principal things.
Councillor Williams: I would again
say why should we not? We are the ones who are held accountable
for what goes on locally. Therefore, I think we need to have the
tools to be able to deliver locally with more discretion.
Councillor Shortland: I agree
with what has already been said but I think there is an additional
point which is that, if you are thinking about nationally delivered
services, national politicians do not always look at what goes
on in a locality other than individual MPs looking at their own
locality. It is very difficult for individual MPs to be able to
understand what is going on in somebody else's locality that could
be quite different to their locality. It is about the needs of
the individual localities. It is the translation of national policies
into individual localities. It can be quite significant. From
my local perspective, in terms of the south west, you have huge
differences across the south west, let alone around the rest of
the country. I do think there are some significant differences
that not all individual MPs would know about.
Q67 Anne Main: I would like to pick
up Councillor Williams's comment about being the ones held responsible.
Do you believe the fact that you are elected makes a big difference
to be able to make the decision locally?
Councillor Williams: Absolutely.
We are elected to deliver locally. Therefore, we should be accountable
to deliver locally and we should also be afforded the discretion
on what is right for the locality.
Q68 Anne Main: If there was a committee
that did not have full electoral representation, would you feel
that was a disadvantage in local decision making?
Councillor Williams: No, but it
is up to us, not elected through the polling station but local
partnerships. They work with us to deliver. If you take the local
area agreement, the local strategic partnership is the delivery
body. We are the accountable body ultimately.
Q69 Mr Olner: Some of you seem to
be speaking differently. Councillor Shortland spoke about national
politicians. Mr Pipe spoke about civil servants leading the agenda,
apart from national politicians. You mentioned things coming from
Whitehall as opposed to national politicians. There does seem
to be a difference of opinion.
Mr Pipe: I do not think so. I
think it all fits. I was trying to say that, even if a government
was true to its word and wanted to be localist and was not trying
to be prescriptive, surely a government passes to civil servants
a political agenda to enact and wants to see its policies enacted
throughout the country. That is absolutely fair and right. Therefore,
that means that that is giving Whitehall a mandate to impose a
national agenda across the regions and the country through local
government. You will always have that tension. It is a tension
we will always have to live with. It is a dynamic equilibrium
and probably each side will continue to be pushed back from either
side of the divide.
Sir Paul Beresford: I have a little experience
of local government and also of being a minister for local government.
It is always a balance. On the one hand you have local government
that hates being restricted. You cannot scratch your nose with
your left hand because the government says you have to use your
right hand. The prescription seems to me, over the last ten years
or so, to have become very much harder, more expensive, more detailed
etc. On the other hand, government has the things it wants to
do. When they look at local government, they see a sea of faces
from competent to utterly incompetent.
Q70 Chair: Also in Parliament, I
have to say.
Mr Pipe: I do not think it has
got worse. It changes.
Sir Paul Beresford: What we are trying
to find out is what you suggest should be done to get that right
balance. I think it has gone too far personally.
Q71 Chair: Paul, we are not supposed
to be arguing amongst ourselves. Would the witness like to try
and answer whatever the question was?
Mr Pipe: I think the initial question
was: has it got worse? I do not think it has got worse. It has
changed and it will always change. The regulatory framework will
always change. Local government financing changes, sometimes at
the margins, sometimes in a greater way. That is often what local
government rails back at, about a greater burden. Often it is
just difference; it is just change.
Councillor Williams: I wanted
to comment on the cost of reporting back to local government.
The cost on average to local authorities is £1.8 million
a year to report up to government. In addition there are between
600 and 1,200 items on which we have to report up to government.
The reason that maybe there is a bit of disagreement around the
table is because national government has to decide what it will
allow local government to do.
Councillor Shortland: The issue
for me is more that different parts of national government ask
you to report on different things. If they all got together and
said, "We want one single report", that would be much
easier for us to understand. We have to join things up together
at a local level for the comprehensive area assessment. It is
very difficult to do that if the government does not have a country
assessment that they have joined up at central government in terms
of creating a comprehensive country assessment. If they had done,
maybe it would be easier for us to understand.
Q72 Andrew George: On the one hand
you are agents of central government; on the other hand you are
dynamic place shapers. What stops you delivering your vision for
shaping your place?
Councillor Shortland: What stops
me from delivering in my place? I have already mentioned one thing
which is the fact that government is not joined up. I can come
together with health people locally, police locally and come to
some arrangements about programmes that we want to deliver in
order to tick the right boxes for central government; but then
central government departments do not do the same so there could
be different targets set for those individual, different components.
For example, different targets set for health and different targets
set for the police that do not allow us the freedom to be able
to move on. The second barrier is all the other agencies that
work around my area, whether it be county-wide or sub-regionally
or regionally. We have lots and lots of different government agencies
that we have to work with but they have no duty to cooperate with
us. They are only answerable to an individual minister. For example,
the Regional Development Agency. There are lots of others I could
name. There are about 123 in the south west alone, different government
agencies who are only answerable to central government. Although
some of them are named in the new duty to cooperate, the vast
majority are not. How do I improve things in my area if they have
no duty to cooperate with me?
Councillor Williams: There are
two main elements to this. The first is the ever changing goal
posts of legislation and the second is finance. On the first,
I will give you an example of that: the local area agreement.
We have signed up to the first local area agreement only months
later to have to start working on the new local area agreement.
I am almost meeting myself coming back with different types of
area agreement. What was quite frustrating about that process
certainly with the new local area agreements is that we were led
to believe that there would be up to 35 targets. It became very
clear that we were being pushed towards 35 targets and some of
those almost seemed mandatory from government. The second element
is finance. My local authority—I will not mention individual
local authorities too much—when you include council tax
got 3.8% increase in funding this year. If you reckon that public
sector inflation is running anywhere between 5 and 10%, you can
see the constraints that we are under. If you also take government
initiatives which seem on the face of it to be very laudable,
and they are, like concessionary fares and free swimming, that
often translates into a huge cost for the local authority. I will
give you another example. Concessionary fares in the first year
cost us in the local authority £700,000.
Q73 Andrew George: More than the
grant you were given?
Councillor Williams: Correct,
because the way it was distributed was contrary to how the PTA
(Passenger Transport Authority) redistributed the funding.
Chair: Can we park the finance issues
until later? Can we not get too much into the nitty gritty of
detail because this is a high level concept discussion. We do
not want each of you saying how you are badly done by. I recall
that from my days in local government.
Q74 Andrew George: We take that as
read.
Mr Pipe: Sometimes the question
is asked: "What other powers would you want?" There
are issues that I have about planning and licensing. I have absolutely
nothing to do with either apart from setting the policy originally.
It is obviously down to councillors on the respective committees
to make decisions within that framework. The national legislation
is really quite prohibitive about what you can turn down. Sex
encounter establishments are increasingly on the agenda. For me
in Hackney, it's betting shops. After Westminster, we have the
highest number of betting shops anywhere in the country in a local
authority. In one street a third one has recently opened. I was
very angry when I heard one morning on Radio 4, a minister saying,
"We have given local government the power to control what
appears on their high street." That simply is not true. When
taking up the minister on that in writing, in the end he had to
accept that it was market forces that drove that. For example,
if you have a financial services shop selling insurance or a bank,
which are popular, there is nothing local government can do to
stop those turning into betting shops. That is a big thing. It
is not additional powers. It is giving local government the powers
that local people think it has. Local people cannot understand
for a second when committees very reluctantly say, "Our hands
are tied." Secondly, data and the lack of accuracy about
ONS (Office for National Statistics) data. Hackney—
Q75 Chair: We really do not want
to go down that road because that is being looked at by the Treasury
Select Committee. I recommend their report to you.
Mr Pipe: We reckon we are under
counted by 7% so I am glad it is being looked at somewhere. There
is a lack of coterminosity between many of the organisations expected
to work in a locality. Whether we are in the northern region for
the Government Office for London, whether we are in the eastern
region for something else, that does not help. The threat of PCTs
(Primary Care Trusts) being changed in London, whereas in the
rest of the country they have gained coterminosity in a lot of
places recently, we are about to lose that because the 30 odd
PCTs, it seems, are unsustainable in London. Losing that will
become a great barrier.
Q76 Andrew George: On the issue of
place shaping, Councillor Williams, you were touching on area
based initiatives, the single regeneration budget to enable renewal
and progress and coastal town initiatives, those kinds of initiatives
which the government sends out to local areas. How do those impact
on your ability to be able to shape the place or are you simply
delivering what the government is trying to get you to deliver
through silos of funding?
Councillor Williams: I hate to
be more cynical and more seeming like I am badly done to but I
do feel that we are increasingly dancing to the government's tune.
The local area agreement is a good example of that when we really
did try to shape that in accordance with what our partners wanted.
You end up almost following the government line. On the multi-area
agreements, which I think in their own way will perhaps be the
real test of whether government is willing to allow a sub-regional
discretion to deliver, they may be the real opportunity to make
a difference. I am not sure that local area agreements are. They
were supposed to be the arm of the sustainable community strategy.
They have almost superseded it.
Q77 Dr Pugh: We have all put a lot
of work into constructing local area agreements, constructing
them again and going back over them and so on. There are two views
I have teased out from what you have been saying so far. One is
that they are a misnomer. They are not local area agreements;
they are full of central directives for things you ought to do
locally. The other view, which is probably closest to my view
prior to your evidence, is that they are simply the summation
of what people are currently doing in a rather bland kind of way.
Which of those views is more nearly correct? Is there some third
view or concept that I have not hit upon?
Councillor Shortland: I think
it is the first of those, in my opinion. Local area agreements
that I have been involved with—this is now the second time
round, as has already been said, were not just a collection of
what we are already doing, although obviously that forms the basis
for the local area agreement, what you are already doing, because
it is stretching you and moving you into new areas. The direction
that we get from central government is quite clear and harsh.
Q78 Dr Pugh: Is that the common perception
of all of you?
Mr Pipe: Not in Hackney. I can
see why LAAS (Local Area Agreements) might have that description.
In Hackney, we did not start from the indicators but from what
we saw Hackney as now and what we wanted it to become. It was
a discussion about a `story of place' with our partners. It was
a discussion of what we wanted to see and that drove what the
35 indicators would be. Obviously then there is the discussion
between local government about what those 35 should be but in
our case that did not go too badly. There are probably some learning
points that will perhaps be relevant to your next questions.
Q79 Dr Pugh: Regardless of what they
are, if they do not get delivered—let us say you formulate
them and they simply languish as dusty documents without making
much impact to the real lives of people—who is ultimately
accountable for that, because it seems to me the local area agreement
is primarily owned by the local strategic partnership, above all,
is it not?
Councillor Williams: Yes.
| 
