Examination of Witnesses (Questins 120-139)
COUNCILLOR JILL
SHORTLAND, COUNCILLOR
SUSAN WILLIAMS
AND MR
JULES PIPE
7 JULY 2008
Q120 Andrew George: I am going to
ask three questions, one to each of you. Councillor Shortland,
are you not simply agents of central government? If you were replaced
by quangos and commissioners, would your local electorate notice
any difference at all? Convince me that you do make a difference
other than the political froth of argumentation that goes on in
the council chamber.
Councillor Shortland: If you look
at where the agencies already exist and the work that they do,
if central government decides that an agency's focus should change,
they just drop what they are doing and move over to the new focus.
For example, recently lots of Arts Council funding was suddenly
dropped and all the community was left in the lurch. They moved
away to funding in a different way.
Q121 Andrew George: That is just
initiative funding, not statutory duties though, is it?
Councillor Shortland: No. I think
there are some statutory duties amongst that. I am using that
as an example. The local people have nowhere to go other than
the minister himself, who is not accountable to them electorally.
They have no way of fighting that decision other than doing a
bit of publicity and hoping the government will change its mind.
If local authorities were not there, local people would have no
way of changing the priorities. I come back to what I said right
at the very beginning. Central government ministers, MPs that
are elected, can only do what they can do if they have power.
If they do not have power, all they can do is argue and there
is nobody accountable to the local people. There is nobody accountable
to my local community in terms of concessionary fares for example,
where the local authorities are having to close swimming pools
and other things in order to meet the costs of concessionary fares,
because they have nowhere else to fish in the pool for money.
Q122 Andrew George: Councillor Williams,
turning the question entirely on its head, those services like
police and health which are currently delivered by quangos, by
commissioners, by people appointed by central government effectively;
are those the kinds of powers that you think local authorities
should be taking over?
Councillor Williams: That is an
extremely good argument for that, yes.
Q123 Andrew George: How would you
be able to convince me and the government that you can and should
take those on? Why would it improve services?
Councillor Williams: We could
argue about the health service until next week but I do not think
we are going to. The health service currently suffers from a complete
lack of local accountability. I still cannot understand why such
a local service can be delivered effectively from Whitehall.
Q124 Andrew George: Mr Mayor, taking
that a stage further, if local authorities are to take on that
type of responsibility—let us take health—that might
result in postcode lotteries; in other words, variations in services
at a local level. Is that something that you would consider desirable
if we are to pursue the argument of devolution which I think you
were enunciating earlier?
Mr Pipe: Obviously government
will want to see minimum standards. We already have a postcode
lottery for absolutely every single service that local government
runs and that is acceptable because that is local government.
It is democracy. If people think that there should be a balance
of funding of the local pot shifted away from street cleaning
and they think why do they have a street cleaner on every two
streets, it does not matter if we have a bit more litter and we
use that money to spend on something else. Those are the kinds
of decisions that local people should be entitled to make. If
people do not agree with what is being proposed, then vote them
out and get somebody else in that you can agree with. This goes
back to the funding issue. What local government would really
like is the flexibility of the total pot. People have advanced
arguments on the Directly Elected Mayor (DEM) issue that, if you
go for a DEM, you should have more say over the totality of public
expenditure in your locality. I am sure every council leader would
agree with the same.
Q125 Andrew George: Given the fact
that often the contrast between one area and another is something
which is highlighted by the media, other than the media, are there
any others? In other words, is the contrast the postcode lottery?
Is that something which your constituents complain to you about,
contrasting your service with those of other areas?
Mr Pipe: That is always going
to happen. People are going to see that those streets over there
are cleaner than ours. I am not talking about Hackney because
our streets are rather clean.
Q126 Andrew George: Is it a major
theme or is it something which is more in the media than in the
local discourse?
Mr Pipe: The local government
concordat certainly is not something that they discuss in the
pubs, highways and byways of Hackney, but up and down the country,
certainly on visible services, that is the kind of pub type conversation
that you will get. They will say, "I went to such and such
a park. They have great services there. In my council, the parks
are terrible," or whatever. You will get those real conversations
on the street.
Councillor Shortland: You get
people moving to areas dependent upon—
Mr Pipe: The schools.
Councillor Shortland: It is not
just schools now. We get people moving into Somerset for health
services: health tourists we call them. People move down to the
area because they have elderly relatives who they know will get
a better standard of care in our authority area.
Q127 Andrew George: Quangos deliver
whereas local government does not?
Councillor Shortland: No. I am
talking about social care, not the PCT services.
Q128 Anne Main: You spoke about powers
of the police and health being brought down. What level are we
talking about? Are you talking sub-regional as being a level that
was acceptable? Are you talking of sub-regional level, county
level or district level? How far down do you want the power to
come?
Councillor Williams: Just thinking
of the structures that are in place now for Greater Manchester,
probably a sub-regional police service would be appropriate. There
was talk a few years ago of making the police service much broader
so Greater Manchester Police would give a county-wide police service,
but sub-regional and local as well.
Mr Pipe: The PCT is the easiest
one because you simply do the commissioning and it would be an
extension of what local authorities already do about so much social
care. PCTs would definitely be straightforward. The police are
more difficult. Certainly in London I would want to see more direct
say over the neighbourhood teams but generally on the borough
police an accountability of the borough commander to the authority.
Councillor Shortland: I would
agree. We already have coterminosity with our PCT, so we are delivering
most things together. Hence the comment earlier about adult social
care. We are already working together so that would be a natural
one to move over to local authorities and, to a greater extent
as well, the police services. Our police authority is Avon and
Somerset and the Somerset sections are two police sectors coterminous
with out county boundaries. We are already delivering the neighbourhood
work together collectively.
Q129 Anne Main: Sub-regionally in
Somerset? That is not west, is it? That is sub-regional?
Councillor Shortland: Avon and
Somerset is the police constabulary area and Somerset is the county
area. We are already doing that work together anyway.
Q130 Chair: You have a two tier system
obviously which neither of the other two have. The London Mayor
is a bit different. Are you suggesting it should be at county
level that all of that coordination would occur then in every
case?
Councillor Shortland: No. In Somerset
already, in coordination with the police, they have two police
districts—
Q131 Chair: I understand that point.
As a generality, would you expect it to be the county that would
be the elected voice for the police and health or are you suggesting
a role for districts?
Councillor Shortland: If you take
the police as an example, at the neighbourhood level, the neighbourhood
policing, the work with the neighbourhood beat managers and the
beat teams is already done at a sub-district level because it
is at an area level in south Somerset.
Q132 Mr Betts: The commissioning
of the health services is a big idea. Across local government,
irrespective of party, you are going to advance a major opportunity
to expand local government's remit and the importance in local
communities. One, accountability: PCTs are not; local government
is. Secondly, to join up health and social care together in a
way with joint arrangements. Some will work better in other areas
than they do in some. To pull this together under local government's
overall responsibility seems to me to be an issue that could really
take the agenda forward. Do you think people at local level will
be concerned to find local councillors, as they might think, dabbling
in health, with party politics being brought to the National Health
Service, or do you think now that the reputation of local government
is so much enhanced compared with where it used to be that people
will feel reassured about having health run by local councils?
Councillor Williams: If it works,
they will be pleased with it. We, like Jill, have already started
building up that partnership with a PCT. If it draws down economies
of scale and enhances services to people, I think they will be
happy.
Mr Pipe: I would agree. It would
also depend how it was done. You are absolutely right in what
you just said. So much already is delivered jointly. It would
be an expansion of that. If it was dressed up as, "We are
passing local health services to the local council", that
would be selling it rather badly. I am back to the perception
lagging behind the reality when I mentioned businesses. If it
was an incremental move and the accountabilities were moved, it
would not generate negative publicity. For example, when councils
took on the scrutiny role of local health services, no one minded
and said, "This is councillors dabbling in health issues."
In the same way that scrutiny took an interest in the local health
economy, the extension taking an interest and control over the
local health economy too, done in a similar way, should not frighten
anybody.
Councillor Shortland: We already
have joint appointments. I think most councils are either moving
towards or already have joint appointments on public health. We
have two officers now working on public health across Somerset,
paid for jointly by the PCT and the county council. The public
health officer sits on our executive. We have one of our members
and officers who sits on the PCT as a member of the council as
opposed to being the board appointed by central government. We
are already doing it on our own in spite of government.
Mr Pipe: A lot of these things
come about because of positive cooperation between bodies as opposed
to the more solid accountability that would come about by a joining
up of them. I have an excellent relationship with my borough commander.
The council and police cooperate very closely. It is because we
get on well. But, it is almost down to personalities and that
is probably not quite right, is it? It ought to be on a firmer
footing than that, with proper accountability.
Councillor Shortland: By default
instead of design.
Q133 Mr Olner: I agree. I think this
is a new role for local government to play as elected people as
opposed to officers fulfilling these roles. I asked you a question
about capping. Do you think police authorities, if you are playing
a senior role in them, ought to be capped as well?
Mr Pipe: That is almost beyond
my area of knowledge because we are dealing with the MPA (Metropolitan
Police Authority). What I was arguing for really was control.
Mr Olner: My local police authority was
capped.
Q134 Chair: It is probably relevant
to the other two of you if you do have police authorities.
Councillor Williams: I would say,
like local authorities, they should not be capped.
Q135 Chair: No; whether you should
get rid of them. If you want councils to be accountable, should
you get rid of them? Bill strayed into capping but should the
police authorities be scrapped if local councils have that accountability
directly?
Councillor Williams: Possibly
so, yes.
Councillor Shortland: Before you
start looking at who is scrapping this and who is doing what,
I think you start to look at the functions of the police authority.
What are they actually doing? Most of the functions of the police
authority are around the back office, the business side of it.
It is the constabulary, the chief constable, who decides the format
and the working of the police, not the police authority members.
That is more the control that I am looking for, looking at what
the chief constable does and having some influence over that,
rather than the working of the police authority. I sat as a police
authority member for a year and could not quite understand from
the beginning to the end of that year what real influence they
had over the constabulary. I would much rather not say, "Let
us scrap that and have that power" if that is all I am going
to get.
Q136 Dr Pugh: If it is the case that
we ought to scrap the police authority or democratise it, what
on earth—maybe this is a rhetorical question—was the
point of having independent members dragooned on or volunteering
themselves on and magistrates who are supposed to add to the democratic
accountability mix in some way? Is it your view that they currently
do?
Councillor Williams: I think they
do but if you were going to restructure the police in terms of
incorporating them into local government, councillors sit on the
police authority anyway. Would there be a need for a police authority?
Q137 Dr Pugh: I was asking more about
the independent members and the magistrates who are thought to
have quite a distinctive role, quite separate from councillors,
and to bring something to the feast which ordinary, democratically
elected people could not.
Councillor Shortland: The independent
members are appointed by central government. The magistrates,
as I think everybody knows now, are not local people any more.
They have a disconnect with the local community. I am not entirely
sure whether the outcome that was intended when those people were
put on to police authorities has been achieved.
Q138 Sir Paul Beresford: We have
elected Mayors and you say the chief constable runs things. Can
we elect a chief constable?
Councillor Shortland: That is
a difficult question to answer because I am not entirely sure
that the power the chief constable holds is necessarily held at
a chief constable level.
Q139 Sir Paul Beresford: Instead
of having a police authority?
Councillor Shortland: The power
that the chief constable holds is for the whole of the police
force area. There are some aspects of police work that I think
are more appropriately held at a local authority area level. Neighbourhood
policing has been a really good initiative. We have PCSOs (Police
Community Support Officers), a really good initiative. Why is
the chief constable still holding reign over that work? If it
is accountable to the community, beat managers and PCSOs cannot
be moved from communities. Why should it not be done locally by
local councils?
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