Examination of Witnesses (Questions 482-499)
MR JEREMY
SMITH AND
MR MARTIN
WILLIS
15 DECEMBER 2008
Q482 Chair: Can I welcome you to this
session in our inquiry on the balance of power? As I am sure you
are aware, we have had a number of sessions already and we have
also had a visit to Denmark and Sweden to look at the system of
local government in those two countries. What do you think are
the key lessons that we could learn in this country from the local
government system of our European neighbours?
Mr Smith: Thank
you for inviting us. My main lesson from quite a few years working
in the European domain is that you really have to look at the
whole system of a country and you cannot necessarily pluck bits
and pieces out of it. Having said that, as I put into my written
submission, I think the UK as a whole—especially England—is
an outlier in the more centralised scheme by comparison with anyone
else. That therefore creates a political culture which we would
argue needs rebalancing. On the issues, in most countries there
is an interest obviously in the quality of services. In some countries
like France it is considered almost unthinkable that the central
government intervenes in the local domain but, for the most part,
there is no question of the degree of central inspectoral system
that we have had in this country over recent years. I think that
raises a question to think about. The issue of finance which other
witnesses have talked about as well is obviously very important.
If you look at the system as a whole we are certainly not the
weakest financially, but the amount of control and discretion
is very limited in this country by comparison with many others.
Lastly, the lack of constitutional status in any shape or form
in the UK seems to make us not absolutely unique but in a very,
very small minority amongst European countries. I still believe
that, although constitutional issues are not the final word in
anything, it is essential if we are to rebalance our whole democratic
system that there is some restatement, probably in legislative
form, to get there.
Q483 Chair: Mr Willis, do you want
to add anything?
Mr Willis: The key point I want
to add is the issue about size. It is an issue that we emphasised
in the written evidence that we put forward. There is the enormous
contrast in the ratio of councillors to the numbers of people
they are representing from as low as 100 to 200 in France up to
figures of fewer than 1,000 in most of the comparative European
authorities that we looked at; whereas in the UK we are up to
figures of well over 2,000 and approaching 3,000. In some authorities
that are being developed now there are over 4,000. That key issue
of size is one about the extent to which it is possible for local
councillors to know their local people, to have a relationship
with local people, to have communication with local people and
vice versa and for that to be the life blood of democracy.
The other contrast to that is the evidence we showed, particularly
from the BMG Research survey that was done alongside the Lyons
Report. It was probably more dispiriting than we expected in terms
of the degree to which people not only did not know who their
local councillors were and did not have contact with their local
councillors, but felt no degree of affinity with their local councillors.
That contrasts with some of the evidence from Europe.
Q484 Chair: Mr Smith was talking
about the need to look at the whole system. Of course in places
like Denmark and Sweden they have proportional representation
so, although the ratio of electorate to councillor may be smaller,
the link between a councillor and a specific area is less clear
than it is in this country. Do you take that into account?
Mr Willis: That is absolutely
right but nonetheless, if you have the number of people who are
represented by a councillor, whether it is through a single, transferable
vote or whether it is through any other system of proportional
representation, there is still that linkage which is more purposeful
than if you have 4,000 or 5,000 people that somebody is trying
to represent, or in some instances within the UK we are talking
about average populations per councillor of over 100,000.
Q485 Anne Main: That would beg the
question then how on earth can any Member of Parliament understand
and have a linkage with our constituents if you are saying it
is a sheer size thing, but I will pass on from that. Would you
not have concerns if you made the link as small as, say, a couple
of hundred per councillor that you would have such a large volume
of councillors that it would lead to a sclerosis in the system
in terms of getting anything done?
Mr Willis: My colleague, Jeremy,
will give you more examples I am sure of how this works in the
European context. What we are talking about is a relationship
between representative democracy and participative democracy.
Most local authorities at the moment have extensive systems of
trying to get public voices heard through public meetings, through
citizens' juries, focus groups, young people's parliaments and
so on. Where you have a system of local representation where local
people feel that they are represented by somebody whom they know,
they then become the voice of the local community. Through systems
of representation, they then form the regional, local council
or whatever else that might be. We are not talking about 1,000
people sitting down and making decisions.
Q486 Anne Main: What about at parish
level—I have been a parish councillor as well—where
you can be representing a small number of people but it is not
the engagement that is the problem; it is the lack of power that
is the problem. I wonder how really crucial size is to this?
Mr Willis: You are absolutely
right. In terms of parishes, I think they spend less than half
of one per cent of local government expenditure. The parish is
crucial. You have to have a system whereby a person who represents
a small community can have access to decision making about key
issues, whether it is to do with larger services such as health
or services such as the police or the current local government
services which are within the local domain.
Anne Main: Therefore it is not
necessarily size; it is power.
Q487 Chair: Can we turn to the issue
of powers and talk about the additional powers that you would
want local government to have in this country that it currently
does not have?
Mr Smith: The first thing is to
get out of the ultra vires trap. There is a lot of debate
in the country about whether local authorities are using the wellbeing
power and I think that is a false question. The wellbeing power
should be the power of general competence i.e., the power to do
anything at local level that is relevant to local interests unless
it is clearly ascribed to some other part of the governmental
system. We have to make sure the judges and the courts understand
that as well because of the whole history of hundreds of years
of the ultra vires doctrine, but there should not have
to be a question of whether you are doing this for the wellbeing
of the community as against under some other statutory hat. The
question should be are we doing it for the wellbeing of our community
almost irrespective. Although there are clearly statutory functions
that need to be performed to do with education, social services
and all the others, we should be moving away from this division.
The other issue is the question of whether there are services
now run in terms of health, the police and others through the
quango systems and whether local democracy should have a say.
I believe that the answer is yes but we need to look carefully
at what are the various options for doing that instead of reorganising
wholesale everything all at once. Some degree of local democratic
control over the health service seems to me to be something that
we ought to be aspiring to.
Mr Willis: There are two levels
to the answer. One is a level of talking about individual services
such as police and health, where more local, democratic control
would mean a people's voice at local level. I know that other
people at the Committee have talked about that. The issue that
I would like to focus on is the issue of strategic commissioning
in relation to place shaping because that is work that currently
at INLOGOV we are doing with a number of different local authorities.
That gets you into influencing in a very different way. It gets
you into looking at things from a people base. For example, in
Birmingham where I live, you are looking at what makes Birmingham
a great place to live in, what makes Birmingham a great place
to grow up in—even what makes Birmingham a great place to
die in so that people are not moving away. You are then saying,
"What powers do people have?" People's powers then become
much broader. When you are talking about older people, you are
not talking particularly about health and social care because
those are simply issues at the periphery of most people's experience
most of the time. You are talking about shopping, going to the
libraries, transport, buses, the police, what is happening at
Tesco and Sainsbury's, how people are getting into town, how people
are making sure that they are getting neighbourhoods which they
feel safe in. It is perhaps surprising when you start with a blank
piece of paper but the strategic issue becomes things like the
quality of the pavements which I know some councillors have criticised
and said, "All people are interested in is the quality of
pavements." Without good pavements, people cannot get out
and see friends or go to the shops. People cannot get to school
if they are taking children to school. Those then become the issues
that make independence so crucial to people within a neighbourhood.
Q488 Chair: How could you possibly
describe that as a strategic issue? I can see absolutely why pavements
are important, not least in making sure people do not end up in
A&E, but it is not exactly a strategic issue. It may be an
issue that would be highlighted by the public, which would not
be highlighted by council officials or councillors, but it is
not strategic.
Mr Willis: It is strategic because
it is strategic to people's experience of every day life.
Chair: I think I am losing a grip
on what "strategic" means.
Q489 Mr Betts: I am not sure where
this big division is about powers that are needed. We have mentioned
the police and health. You rightly said we have already had discussions
that have identified two areas where there is real potential for
local authorities to have more responsibility on local issues.
I am not sure what more a local authority could do if it had a
power of general competence as opposed to the wellbeing power.
What would be allowed by a power of general competence that is
not currently allowed? In any case, local authorities are not
using the wellbeing powers, are they, by and large?
Mr Smith: My argument is that
that is not a question that should continue to be the question
that bothers us because the wellbeing power, in legal terms, is
an add-on to the other functions of local authorities. It should
be treated as being the basis for action by local authorities.
Rather than thinking: am I using the wellbeing power or another
power, it should be a judgment in terms of what is called place
shaping or doing things that are of local importance to citizens.
It should be a choice that is made because of what you want to
achieve, not because of looking back on the legal powers that
exist to do it. I am not bringing you with me obviously. In other
countries, if I may try again, if you look at all the constitutions,
they say everything that is not given to someone else is open
to the local authorities to do. I am trying to argue that that
is what we need to get to so that there is that sense in the local
authority that we can do anything lawful that is for the benefit
of our community and we should not be worrying about whether it
is wellbeing or social services.
Q490 Mr Betts: Instead of local authorities
having to look for a specific power to do something, somebody
would have to look for a reason in law why an authority could
not do something?
Mr Smith: Yes. That is what happens
in most European countries.
Q491 Anne Main: One of the biggest
things that gets my constituents agitated is planning because
they believe that is place shaping at the ultimate level locally,
but they feel that they have to abide by regulations that are
brought down from Government or even housing targets. How would
you resolve that? The argument for many people is stop letting
Government tell us we have to have X thousands of houses. Let
us decide what sort, what density and so on. You said what is
not decided by somebody else can be done locally. From my experience,
they want some of the things decided by someone else to be done
locally. Could you comment on that?
Mr Smith: Yes. Any planning system
is a shared competence, not in the sense that everyone does everything,
but in the sense that there has to be a clarity about the legal
framework as to what is decided at national level, at regional
level in countries where there is a regional form of Government
and what is local planning. If you included parish and community
councils in the British setup as local authorities, we would look
very normal compared with other countries in Europe. It is the
fact that they have so little power that means we kind of ignore
them for most cases. Therefore, the question of what is appropriate
for planning frameworks is in any country an issue that has to
be worked out. There is not an absolute model as to what is the
very local planning and what is done from the regional or the
central level. It has to be worked out as to what is suitable
to the local community.
Q492 Anne Main: How do you make this
work then? I am still struggling to see which strategic thing
you would want repatriated to a local level where local people
can say, "I do not care what the Government is saying. This
is what we in X town should have." How do you make that happen
so that they feel they have control?
Mr Smith: My argument is for the
basic services such as health, particularly primary health; you
can also include the natural monopolies which have been mainly
privatised but which are public services in the sense that they
are given to the public to have some say. I am not saying control;
I am saying to have a greater say on behalf of your citizens in
relation to those services for example. The issue is not so much
the repatriation of things like planning at a local level or all
aspects of planning because you have to have strategic planning.
You have to have regional planning.
Q493 Anne Main: It is just having
a greater say?
Mr Smith: It is a question of
having fewer controls. In health, it is a strategic choice, if
I may say so, for us as a country as to whether we wish to have,
as in some countries, the whole of the health service being subject
to the local democratic process; or whether you want an existing
health service such as we have with a greater local, democratic
input to it. That is a discussion to be had.
Anne Main: What do you mean by
"local, democratic input"? Does that mean they can say
yes or no to things?
Q494 Chair: You were both quite vague
about how exactly you would get local accountability over the
police and the health service for example. If you felt able to
be a bit more specific, that would be helpful.
Mr Willis: There is a number of
different issues. Can I come back to the issue about a general
competence, which your colleague asked, and then I hope progress
in terms of the other questions that have been asked? A lot of
what we are talking about is about mindsets rather than simple
answers that are yes or no. You have heard from others at this
Committee about the extent to which local government feels it
cannot do anything now without checking whether first central
government is approving of it. You have heard other people talk
about how a lot of the pressure for guidance comes from local
government. People say, "We need the guidance before we can
determine what we can do locally." There is now this mindset
where people feel, even though the powers exist at local level
to do things in a way which represents local people's views, they
cannot do things unless central government has prescribed it,
even though that is not what central government itself has intended.
How do we then get back down to a local level and local self-determination?
If you look at different cities and different towns, there is
considerable difference in the amount of investment they put in
play areas, in swimming pools, whether they have central areas
without traffic and so on. What we are talking about is the balance
in terms of the extent to which local people can have an influence
to determine their own town, their own city, their own community
in the way that they themselves want to represent it.
Q495 Mr Betts: One of the big areas
where people have thought change might be appropriate is financial
autonomy. Do you think that a greater ability to raise a higher
proportion of councils' revenue, rather than having a grant from
central government, is essential if we are going to have a truly
free and independent local government?
Mr Willis: The straightforward
answer is yes. Money is a means of communication. It is the way
in which we conduct certain transactions between people and hold
people to account. A key issue at local level is, if I am paying
money, am I getting value for money? Am I getting something which
I think is valuable to myself, to the community and seeing that
relationship as being tangible and transparent? Yes, we would
argue strongly that a higher proportion of money for local government
should be raised locally and held accountable to the electorate
locally.
Q496 Mr Betts: Michael Lyons thought
all we needed to concentrate on was local authorities' freedom
to spend the money they had and really we were getting distracted
by the arguments about increasing proportions of money being raised
locally and that always got bogged down in rows and disagreements.
He felt that was really almost a side issue that we should not
get pushed into.
Mr Willis: As others have said,
Michael Lyons's analysis was trenchant. I think his recommendations
were timid.
Mr Smith: If I may come to the
European Charter of Self-Government which has those principles
in it, one is that there should be an ability to raise own resources
and, secondly, that as far as possible grants should not be earmarked.
There should be discretion within the use of them. That is what
we have signed up to as a country. The problem with the British
one is also that we have no diversified system of local financing
which means the gearing impact makes it very, very expensive as
you know to add to local taxation, even if were not capped. The
present system needs greater diversity in the tax base and we
also need greater discretion in terms of how the money is spent.
Q497 Mr Betts: Amongst a number of
organisations and people involved with local government are MPs.
There could be general agreement that local authorities need a
greater ability to raise money themselves. More money should come
from local sources rather than central government grant and we
should have a bigger variety of sources for local authorities
to draw from. The harder question to answer is what precisely
should those new sources of taxation be. That is where the disagreements
usually begin for individuals who might have common cause on the
general issue. What are your prescriptions then?
Mr Smith: I am here in my individual
capacity but I have members who are in the LGA and they may have
different perspectives. At a personal level, I still believe that
you need some link with a kind of business rate or something similar
to that that has an ability to determine locally. That is very
important because I think the link between the local authority
and the business community does need to have that aspect to it.
Q498 Mr Betts: If we transfer the
business rate back, that would hardly get us to around 50 per
cent of the money being raised locally which does not put us in
a terribly favourable light compared with many other European
countries.
Mr Smith: There are many different
taxes but they are also being squeezed in some ways as well. Some
of them are not countercyclical. If you have some taxes on business
or some taxes on business activity or hotel taxes and things like
that, they can raise more in good times.
Q499 Mr Betts: What are you recommending?
Mr Smith: My view is you need
a wider property tax. I think that some form of income tax, the
use of income tax is worth pursuing, personally. That is a personal
view.
Mr Willis: A straightforward local
income tax is a tax that people understand. It is a tax where
people see the relationship between what they earn and what tax
is being spent. It is a tax where people can be held to account.
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