Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
MR MIKE
MORE, COUNCILLOR
COLIN BARROW
CBE, MS MOIRA
GIBB CBE AND
COUNCILLOR KEITH
MOFFITT
10 NOVEMBER 2008
Q240 Anne Main: If your authority
is rated less than excellent, say, do you think then it would
be wise to give additional powers to authorities?
Councillor Barrow: Yes. You have
to make the philosophical point that if an authority is rated
less than excellent, there are two ways to correct it. One is
to send in the men in the black hats, the other is to send in
the electorate, and those two are two philosophically well-argued
points that everybody knows, but those are the two competing sources
of wisdom.
Q241 Anne Main: In which case then,
how could the police, for example, be accountable for delivering
national priorities if there were not national policing targets,
or are there certain strands that you say, no, those have to stay
with national targets?
Councillor Barrow: I think if
colleagues spend as much time in local community meetings as I
do, they will have heard exactly the same thing, that approximately
half of the views that the public express to us are about policing.
If ever there was something where the connection of the police's
activity with local demand needs to be there, it is in that context.
Is it murder or is it rioting, I do not know, that is a national—but
there are some things that are very important locally, and residents
have a right to have a say about that. It is a pretty disconnected
picture; even in one where—I chair a meeting every quarter
with the police commander, a great big public meeting, you have
never seen as many policemen in one room as for that meeting,
it is a very effective partnership, but in the end, it is dragging
the police kicking and screaming into local accountability, and
they have come a long way in the Met.
Councillor Moffitt: We are sometimes
set conflicting targets. There is a target about first entrance
into the youth justice system, our target is to get it down and
the police's target is to get it up, so actually some joined-up
working on the setting of targets would be extremely helpful.
Q242 Anne Main: But locally joined-up
thinking, and also trusting yourselves locally, because you did
say even if an authority is not rated excellent, it should be
allowed to make these decisions, so whatever the rating of the
authority, local priorities, local targets and joined-up local
thinking seems to be, correct me if I am wrong, what you are advocating.
Ms Gibb: Yes and I also I think
I would say a respect for local democracy. It often seems that
those other public services are directly accountable to the centre,
and do their best, I think, to join in partnerships, but if we
do believe that actually locally elected representatives matter,
then they ought to have a say in those other services as well.
Q243 Anne Main: And no stepping in
and rescuing you if it looks to central government like you are
not doing it as well as they would like you to?
Ms Gibb: I think it has to be
a settlement really, and I think it is an issue of principle at
the heart of this that somehow or other we have been turned into
the children —
Q244 Chair: Right, there are two
points we want to bring in on that. One is directly to Westminster,
who I believe had some investments in an Icelandic bank, and who,
as I recall—and I will look for the piece of paper with
the actual wording—have actually suggested that Government
should help you out. How is this consistent with you having freedom
to —
Councillor Barrow: I do not think
you will find that Westminster will have said that, I certainly
have not. What I have said is that the Government is at risk of
shooting itself in the foot in what it is trying to achieve in
financial markets, because if it says to local government, "You
are on your own, good luck, pal, you have invested in Iceland,
too bad", then the corollary will be that local government
will inevitably say, "Well, we are going to retreat to much
more cautious investments".
Q245 Chair: We understand that point,
I will read back to you from your own press release: "Along
with the Local Government Association and London Councils, we
will be lobbying the Government hard to underwrite these deposits
and ensure far greater financial security and probity in the UK's
banking system." Is that consistent with local authorities
taking responsibility for their failures as well as successes?
Councillor Barrow: If I may, Chair,
I was halfway through explaining what precisely it was we were
saying, which was that if the Government wishes to restore confidence
in the system, it cannot have £25 billion, being local government's
investments in—being pulled out for safer waters, because
that will be the inevitable consequences of saying, "You
are on your own". That is the slightly more indirect—though
there are people, and the LGA is one of them, saying we should
just be repaid, and we have not taken that view.
Q246 Mr Betts: Just a couple of issues
there: there might be an argument for saying that actually local
government is an awful lot better run now than it was 20 years
ago, and one of the reasons is that central government has insisted
that standards get raised, and has taken the opportunity to insist
that there are targets to measure that improvement by. Secondly,
if the alternative is you leave it to the electorate, there are
some rather bad examples, are there not, like Hackney a few years
ago, where the electorate kept changing their minds about who
they wanted to run the council, but it still got run very badly.
Councillor Barrow: Yes, it is
a philosophical debate to which I can adduce no evidence whatsoever.
You are asking for evidence, I am not going to give you evidence,
I do not have any.
Q247 Chair: Such refreshing frankness!
Ms Gibb: I was just going to say
that if it is about Government setting targets, then why is local
government the most improved part of the public sector? I think
local government must have done something itself; I think it was
challenged by various target setting and regulatory inspection
regimes, but it has raised its game. It seems to me again that
the sense in central government is that actually, with due respect
to my political colleagues here, that it is the management of
local government, so there is a desire to see it as just the administrative
end of central government, and actually I think the bit that is
missing is respect and a proper place for the democratically elected
government that is not local administration, it is local government,
and therefore that central role in relation to the other public
services in their areas as well is very important and has not
had enough attention.
Anne Main: Can I just task you on that?
That was leading on to what I wanted to ask, about the respect
for the representatives of local government. I am sure we have
an excellent group of councillors here in front of us, but some
people have argued that the very fact that we do not have very
high quality calibre councillors is because they are not actually
allowed to do a lot, and if actually they had more influence and
more say, you might attract younger, more dynamic, more business
savvy councillors in.
Chair: As they obviously are!
Q248 Anne Main: I am saying they
are, but it is an issue in some areas that people do not put themselves
forward.
Councillor Moffitt: It is an issue
about retention. I would say I have eight councillors under 30
on my council, and they have given up four years of their life
at a point where a lot of people are pursuing their careers very
vigorously, and they are not really sure how much influence they
have. Equally, members of the public come along to us and ask
us to put things right, and as Colin was saying, we end up saying,
"No, that is the police, that is TfL", so that is a
very frustrating position to be in, so I think it means a lot
of people come into local government with high hopes and then
do not stay, which is very sad after four years of learning and
personal investment, that they do not feel they can make sufficient
impact to want to stay.
Q249 Andrew George: The impression
I get is that despite the ambitions, you are relatively impotent
agents of central government, and that is very frustrating to
you. I just wonder whether I could test your ambition and vision
by asking you the magic wand question, and that is the government
comes along and says to you, aside from war-making powers, you
cannot declare UDI, you cannot change Treasury priorities, but
underneath that, what two policies would you deliver tomorrow,
given freedom to actually range very widely? So what are your
ambitions in terms of being given more freedom and power, what
would you take on, what would you do?
Councillor Barrow: Do you mean
what would we deliver, or do you mean what powers would we want?
Q250 Chair: Both really. What powers,
and what would it allow you to do with them?
Councillor Barrow: I would like
the power, as the local democratic authority, to direct a proportion,
I do not know what that proportion is, but to direct a proportion
of the DWP's, the police and the Health Service's budget to priorities
determined by the council, in the interests of the place-shaping
role, be that 20%, 10% or 50%, I do not know, I have not thought
about it in that much detail, but to be able to ask for a proportion
of that as being part of the local authority scene, that would
enable us to deliver what I touched on earlier on, which is a
comprehensive programme of getting after the sort of social costs
of worklessness, and so on and so forth, community cohesion, all
that sort of nest of things that I can explain but all obviously
belong together.
Q251 Andrew George: It is quite complex
obviously.
Councillor Moffitt: If I could
have one, I suppose I would like to have that power that the public
assume you have: in my ward, we have a major transport interchange
that we would like to bring together. At the moment, I feel impotent,
it feels like waiting for somebody else to come along and do something,
waiting for the private sector or TfL to come along. I would like
to be in the position maybe to issue bonds, raise money and make
it happen. Again, that is the sort of thing the public imagine
you can do, so they imagine you are not very good at your job,
because you are not doing it.
Q252 Andrew George: Would that address
the fundamental issues which actually concern your local population
most?
Councillor Moffitt: That totally
would. That is an issue about transport, about safety, about economic
well-being of the community, and there is a danger of having to
wait for somebody else to come along and come up with a solution,
rather than putting it forward yourself.
Chair: Which I think brings us nicely
to local government finance.
Q253 Mr Betts: So is the fact that
you can actually raise only such a small amount of the money you
spend yourselves a major obstacle to you actually having a real
ability to change the lives of people in your communities?
Councillor Barrow: It is. Westminster
is probably unusual, Camden is pretty close, but in being host
to this massive shop window for England, being the West End and
the whole Central London thing. Kensington and Chelsea, you, we,
the City of London, and so on, we all experience that sort of
thing. We have to deliver that, it is a sort of responsibility
to look after it, keep it warm and fuzzy and functioning for the
benefit of everybody, because frankly, anybody who goes to Barnsley
is coming through London, if they come from abroad. That is how
it works. So we have a responsibility, but we have to pacify our
residents and so on and so forth to encourage them to act as hosts
to that whole area, and we have to connect local people with the
employment opportunities. So that is a huge responsibility that
rests on us. The obvious mechanism for expressing that responsibility
is the business rate, because we collect £1 billion in business
rate and we get back £154 million. You might say, well, we
are undeserving, and are we not frightfully rich, and so on; we
are not, we have four of the most deprived wards in the country
in Westminster. I think we have the two most deprived wards in
the country. So it would be nice for two reasons: firstly, to
make those connections and alleviate all of that, the second is
that big business needs big infrastructure. A lot of chaps were
concerned about how to fund Crossrail; we could have done the
whole thing, just us. But we would have needed the business rate.
Mr More: Can I give an illustration
of this dynamic? If you take localism, it means that every area
is different, and if you take the Westminster economy, we represent,
I think, nearly 3% of the total GDP of the country in the eight
and a half square miles that is Westminster. We have 250,000 residents
who live in the borough, we have more than a million people who
visit the borough every day, be it for work, be it for tourism
or whatever, and we have the business community. The sense of
the council being able to reflect and represent and engage with
all of those in a rounded way is a fundamentally local question.
A national system, which in a sense focuses on business rate as
if that is not the reality, that we are so responsible for so
much of the economy, is potentially distorting the mechanisms
of engagement the City Council can have. We have three business
improvement districts, and they are very good and very effective,
in Oxford Street, in the West End and in Paddington, but they
are distinctive and particular, rather than opening up more general
openness to the business community.
Q254 Mr Betts: This is fine, the
Treasury are going to sit there and think, that is great, but
currently we are putting more business rate effectively back into
some areas than we are collecting from them, some of those are
clearly deprived as well, and if we localise the business rate,
we as a Treasury are going to have to fund or give extra money
to those areas without a great deal of ability to claim business
rate. So is there not an element of fairness in the current system,
just on the matter of principle that it is more democratic?
Councillor Barrow: I do not think
it is actually more democratic, just because it has been arrogated
to central government, it has gone from one democratic level to
another. What you have though is disconnected the business from
the rate. The business has no vote, the business has no connection,
there is no partnership in relation to the business rate, it is
just taken into the centre and redistributed. So there is no engagement.
We actually engage with very big businesses in the centre of town,
over really quite small sums of money, on Streetscape and that
sort of thing, because we cannot discuss the major things that
affect major contributions to the business rate, because it is
all dealt with by the Treasury.
Q255 Mr Betts: Is it just the business
rate where you would like to see change in terms of more devolved
ability to raise finance, or do you have other ideas about how
you would raise more money locally if you had the chance, or do
you think you should just be given the general freedom to raise
money?
Councillor Moffitt: I mentioned
bonds; to be honest, I have not thought this through very carefully,
because it seems fairly unlikely to happen in London, but maybe
it is a response in the present financial situation with the recession
if local government is going to take a lead in that situation,
take a lead in making investment, we need fundraising powers.
Q256 Mr Betts: How, what? Any thoughts?
Via a local income tax, presumably.
Councillor Moffitt: Sorry, I was
not speaking very clearly, I did mention the idea about using
a local government bond to raise money, on things like the interchange
I have talked about. We are extremely fortunate in Camden in fact
we have a major project at King's Cross Central that still appears
to be going ahead, which is very helpful for us, but there are
certainly many other local authorities, I think, who would welcome
being in a position to inject money into similar large scale projects,
maybe not quite so large, to be able to give their own economy
a bit of a push at the moment.
Councillor Barrow: As a matter
of principle, I think local government ought to be free to raise
taxes in whatever form it chooses, and exempt people from taxes
in whatever form they choose, and be accountable to the electorate
for those choices. I can see no reason why not particularly. I
am no fan of more taxes, nor more types of taxes, but as a matter
of principle, it may be that successors of mine might want to
raise a tourist tax, because we have huge numbers of tourists
and so on and so forth. Might we want to do that? Yes, we might.
We are not going to, but people might, and I do not see any particular
reason of principle why we should not be allowed to.
Q257 Andrew George: Can I just ask
whether you have made any kind of assessment about the potential
use of the Sustainable Communities Act within your local authority,
whether you have any plans to use it; do you have any intention
to consult your local communities and to apply the provisions
of the Act within your own borough?
Councillor Moffitt: We are at
a fairly early stage, I do not know if you want to add anything,
we think we are doing a lot of the things already that the Act
would enable us to do. So to be fair, I think we are not racing
ahead in looking at its potential. Do you want to add anything
to that, Moira?
Ms Gibb: I think again, when you
ask Government why they are doing something, you often get the
answer, well, these authorities over here are not doing anything,
but we are; well, tough, you still have to consult your community.
Most of the things that we are being asked to do, we do already,
people have lots of opportunities to be consulted, and we would
certainly consult on it, but it is again a national directive
to local government.
Q258 Andrew George: No, of course,
theoretically at least it is a route by which you can gain additional
powers if you make a good case, is it not?
Mr More: I think we in Westminster
welcome the Sustainable Communities Act, we see it as consistent
in the line of direction that we as a City Council have gone down
for some considerable time, giving examples that we are engaging
with local communities in a structural, formal and informal sense
all the time. The level of engagement and consultation is huge,
the number of groups with whom we work all the time is huge, and
that is consistent with that. We have initiated an audit of public
spend with which we have engaged with all of the agencies who
spend in Westminster, starting with the City Council, breaking
that down ward by ward, and then looking to bring in PCT, DWP
and other spending, by all public spenders in the borough. That
is in part to inform for us the basis of beginning to recognise
the huge sums of money that will be spent by public services in
Westminster, and on that basis, to begin to develop this idea,
what can we do to pool and to integrate? Also to use that as a
topic which we have not really touched on in community yet, which
is the concept of local commissioning, so if we were to take the
worklessness agenda, one of the barriers that we find at the present
time is that we find it very difficult to share data with the
DWP and JCP, and analyse data about worklessness and where it
is, we want that in order to be able to develop meaningful strategies,
to tackle worklessness, natures of jobs, what sectors, what location.
We are actually barred, in a sense, from getting the full benefit
of the information and data from DWP and JCP. So that is a matter
of practice which is very important, in terms of forming a kind
of local commissioning concept.
Q259 Chair: You are barred because
of the Data Protection Act, presumably?
Mr More: Various reasons—yes,
absolutely. DWP rules are not to give us, even though it is anonymised
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