Examination of Witnesses (Questions 228-239)
MR MIKE
MORE, COUNCILLOR
COLIN BARROW
CBE, MS MOIRA
GIBB CBE AND
COUNCILLOR KEITH
MOFFITT
10 NOVEMBER 2008
Q228 Chair: I am not sure whether you
have been here through both of the previous sessions? Excellent,
great. So I do not need to repeat the bit about only one of you
speaking unless absolutely necessary on each question. Can I start
off then with the issue of the use of existing powers, to ask
each of you whether you think that you currently have sufficient
powers to enable you to fulfil your place-shaping roles, and what
you would do differently if you had a power of general competence.
I do not mind which one goes first.
Councillor Barrow: I will take
it first, if you like. I think this is, if I may say so, not the
biggest issue. The issue is about being hamstrung. But we have
the powers to do really quite a lot if we want to. The issue is
that we do not have the entire freedom to spend our money the
way we might want to. That is not the issue, because the power
of general economic well-being actually allows for much of what
we might want to do. The trick is to build in other partners into
that enterprise, people who spend vast amounts of public money
in our boroughs, to stitch those people into a process is the
much bigger issue than having or not having the power of general
competence.
Councillor Moffitt: I think in
the case of Camden, our frustration again is not so much about
the powers that we have, but the fact that we have been given
the top possible score by the Audit Commission, and yet we do
not seem to be trusted to run our affairs. We are subject to an
intense regime of inspection and regulation that just does not
seem to match with that top score from the Audit Commission.
Q229 Sir Paul Beresford: What does
it cost you? All of this auditing and CPAs and checking and rechecking
and revalidating by the government; have you any idea what it
costs?
Ms Gibb: We have not done the
sums, but it is very clear, and in a way it is difficult because
actually it is a lot of time and preparation that is invisible,
and actually gathering it together, but just since the Audit Commission
came to us last December and reported in May on our score, our
top performing children's services has eight different sets of
inspectors coming in to do different things. We all have a limited
amount of attention, and I think our concern is not so much about
powers, but actually trying to ensure that public sector spending
is used as well as possible. My analogy that I think is relevant
is combined heat and power, that so much of the electricity is
lost in the transfer—60%, I am told, and I think that central
government trying to direct things locally just loses a huge amount
of the power, as it were. We are much better placed to actually
know what would work in a particular setting. I think our sense
is that they do not ask us often enough, they set out to do things
from the centre without taking into account what our experience
and knowledge of the locality is. It's a kind of waste of resources.
Sir Paul Beresford: What is your council
tax gearing?
Q230 Chair: Could we try and stick
to the first point, before trying to get on to a different one?
Councillor Barrow: Could I answer
Sir Paul's question from Westminster? He asked how much does all
this cost. We think we have about 45 people doing the government's
bidding in the sense of measuring what the government has asked,
not just delivering what the government has asked us to deliver,
but measuring whether we have done it or not. That costs about
£2 million a year.
Q231 Chair: Would you not have to
measure it anyway, for your own management?
Councillor Barrow: We would have
to measure some of it for our own purposes, but you could imagine
that some of it is unimportant to us, it is important only to
the government.
Q232 Chair: Can you give an example
of that which is unimportant to you and important to the government?
Councillor Barrow: The amount
of tactile paving that is on the edges of our roads.
Q233 Chair: That is presumably quite
important to people with visual handicaps.
Councillor Barrow: It is, but
it might not be important to us, we might elect for it not to
be important to us. That is the point I am making. The government
does not get to choose what is important for us. It can choose
what is important to it.
Q234 Sir Paul Beresford: So what
is your gearing? In other words, for every pound you spend doing
this stuff for government that you do not want, what does it cost
the council taxpayer?
Councillor Barrow: It is about
four to one.
Q235 Chair: Just to go back to what
you were saying at the beginning, Councillor Barrow, about partnerships,
this is a different point, so what is it that prevents you from
working in your partnerships as effectively as you would want
to at the moment?
Councillor Barrow: Let me take
worklessness. We have some wards in Westminster where 45% of the
people do not work, where people have not worked for three generations.
Worklessness is a huge problem, it is a cross public sector problem
in the sense that worklessness affects life chances, affects life
expectancy—life expectancy is different in one part of our
borough from another—and it is correlated with poverty and
worklessness. It affects civil order, it affects policing, as
we all know, many of you have been local councillors, you know
exactly how all this works. The only money that we have been able
to persuade our partners to put into the public service pot to
address the issue of worklessness is the performance reward grant
attached to the local area agreement. It is not possible to attach
a bit of the DWP's (Department for Work and Pensions) grant which
is approximately three quarters, so the DWP's funding for work
in Westminster, in benefits alone, is about three quarters of
the council tax entire spending; all of our spending on education,
all of our spending on social services is approximately equivalent
to the spending on benefits by the Benefits Agency. Now it has
to make sense to be able to demand, with our democratic accountability,
that a part of that is dedicated towards the relief of worklessness
in the area, because we can help to provide that economic development,
local knowledge, local understanding, all those things, which
are very difficult to persuade.
Q236 Chair: Are you asking more than
was put forward by some of our previous witnesses, where they
were suggesting that if by getting people into work, they reduced
the total benefit expenditure in their area, that they, the council,
should be able to keep that extra money; are you suggesting something
extra to that?
Councillor Barrow: I would not
particularly want to keep the extra money, but what I would want
to do is to enforce a regime of invest to save on all of the public
agencies who are working for the same end, it is that. So I would
like to be able to get a bit of that money which they will save
and say, "Let us have a go at saving it together", mutatis
with the other things.
Q237 Chair: I am not sure whether
Camden actually is using all the powers that it could do, is it?
Councillor Moffitt: We think we
are very ambitious in using the power of well-being, for example,
in social cohesion, which is a massive issue for Camden. It is
a very socially and ethnically diverse borough, we have really
pushed the envelope on social cohesion. I am a great believer
in measuring what is going on in your borough before you try and
act on it, and we have carried out a series of social capital
surveys, and we actually use that as the basis for our actions
on social cohesion. We feel those have been enormously effective.
So when we had two of the bombs in Camden on 7/7, we were very
well placed, because of all the work we had done on social cohesion,
to react to that.
Q238 Chair: Apart from the necessity
to report to central government, are there any other things that
prevent you at the moment from doing things that you want to do?
Ms Gibb: Probably resources, but
I think that our concerns are more about the relationship between
central and local government, rather than individual powers, because
again, usually resources are required to go with delivering those.
I think we would welcome the sense of the local council, the democratically
elected body convening, I think Lyons' view on that seems to me
to make sense, to have the opportunity to convene local services
in the way that others have referred to, in the interests of the
local community. I think everything that is required to do to
fit one size really makes us less effective and therefore ultimately
Government and public services less effective.
Councillor Moffitt: If I could
add something on housing, that Colin just mentioned, it is a source
of great regret in Camden that we have lost £283 million
because we did not go down the ALMO (Arm's Length Management Organisation)
route on decent housing. Again, it fell to us, as a top performing
borough, to be told we were going to be dictated to as to how
we could run our own housing, it just did not seem right, and
the people of Camden are very aggrieved about that. Not just us
as councillors, but the people of Camden are upset about it too.
Q239 Anne Main: Do you actually feel
that you should have more powers given back to you, because then
you can have greater decision-making, instead of actually being
dictated to, in the way you just said? For example, you gave the
ALMO as a perfectly good example. Do you think there should be
more and more powers given back to you, and in which case, which
particular ones?
Councillor Barrow: Some freedoms
and flexibilities on housing would be helpful. For example, we
have quite a difficult situation for housing, because not only
do we have, as in common with all other Central London boroughs
(very expensive property, not quite as expensive as it was, but
expensive nevertheless, quite expensive property), and it is a
huge economic magnet for people coming into it, but the bureaucracy
that you have to go through to build and deliver social housing
on the ground is phenomenally complex. I can add, I may be one
of the few people who does understand local government finance,
but I have to say, housing finance completely leaves me in the
dark. It is unbelievably complex, and wherever you go, there is
a Pooh Trap about charity status, about tax, about public sector
borrowing requirement, about some agency or another that is interfering
with the whole process. It really does need clearing out, and
happily, not solely in today's trailer, but it needs some attention
paid to it, because it is not effective, it is not easy to do
what we might want to do.
Chair: There is a review going on, of
course.
|
