Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560-576)
COUNCILLOR DAVID
SHAKESPEARE, COUNCILLOR
RICHARD KEMP,
COUNCILLOR KEITH
ROSS AND
COUNCILLOR SHARON
TAYLOR
15 DECEMBER 2008
Q560 Mr Betts: That is another issue,
is it not, about the new burdens situation?
Councillor Ross: It is all part
of the same issue.
Q561 Mr Betts: You think there should
be at least an independent element brought in to examine the real
costs of new burdens and the equalisation process?
Councillor Shakespeare: That would
be really good.
Councillor Taylor: Off course,
in Europe there is this process—I am a Committee of the
Regions (CoR) Member in Europe—so anything that is likely
to impact from European legislation at a local level we have the
opportunity to examine. I do not pretend the process is perfect,
because it is not, but we do have the opportunity to have a look
at new legislation which is coming from Europe and saying, "We
think this is what will happen to this once it goes into European
legislation" and to make sure that when Parliament passes
that legislation, they do understand the impact at local level.
I think there is a good case to be made, on the financial side
but for other things as well, for there to be a way of local government
inputting into legislation to say, "Just what will the impact
of that be at local level?"
Q562 Mr Betts: I want to come back
on the new forms of taxation in a second because we have forgotten
about that one, it has not really been answered. Coming back to
a model we saw in Denmark, which was quite interesting, where
each year central government and the Danish local government association
sit down together and work out first of all from a central government
point of view what they think the totality of local government
spending should be because they say, as central government, from
a macroeconomic policy point of view, "We have a right to
have a say in that". Then they look at any new burdens and
assess the cost of them and then they agree the total amount of
local government spending. Then the local government association
goes back and negotiates with its members which local authority
should spend what. They do not have a capping system individually,
effectively they have an agreed cap which the local government
association helps to enforce. Does that appeal?
Councillor Shakespeare: I think
if we were offered that we would bite your hand off.
Councillor Taylor: We would!
Councillor Shakespeare: That would
be an aspiration to work towards. We just talked about councils
raising more of their own income, just talking about the equalisation
factor, the transparency in that would be a big move forward if
we could understand it. At the moment, as I said—you talked
about councils raising more of their own revenue—year after
year of relentless equalisation in my own authority has meant
we are already raising 81 per cent of our own funding and only
19 per cent comes from central Government. That is what it has
done to many, many authorities in the South East. For example,
following that, it was the Government that had to invent its own
safety net to stop a meltdown in public services in the South
East, the floors and the ceilings were there to try and soften
the blows which were coming out of resource equalisation.
Q563 Mr Betts: Do you not think 50
per cent is enough then because if you transfer the business rate
back, you have got 50 per cent?
Councillor Kemp: No, it is far
more complicated. If you remember the Lyons Report, he gave a
very difficult to read thing which had all 400-ish local authorities
which said at one end there were about 30 authorities that got
and at the other end there were 30 authorities that gave and about
300 authorities it was very little different. That is the point
David is making. The question then comes as to what you do in
cities like mine and yours—I was trying to make the point—where
there is a bigger aggregation of poverty which cannot be met from
the local resource. How then do you put the money into the Liverpools
of this world? I am quite clear that we still need support over
and above what we could hope to gain locally, although our economy
is doing very well at the moment. That is where the difficulty
comes. We must not confuse that with the general issues against
those councils.
Mr Betts: I understand that. Various
studies have shown that you could probably go up to about two-thirds
raised at local level and then a third from central Government
would be sufficient to achieve full equalisation, but you could
do more. In Sweden it is interesting, they work on a 15 per cent
government grant roughly for equalisation purposes.
Chair: It is not a government
grant, it is collected by the rich authorities and then given
to the poor.
Q564 Mr Betts: That is true. If you
want to shift from 50 per cent up to 66 per cent, what would you
do?
Councillor Kemp: You are quite
right, you are edging us towards trying to point out a difference
between us and the differences are then quite clear, are they
not, just as they are between the parties in Parliament. We do
not share a common view on how you would collect that last element
of money to bring you up to the equalisation gap, if I can put
it that way. We have different views on that and those need to
be sought out. There are some things we are quite clear on though,
for example revaluation. If you are going to have a property tax,
you cannot set it on a 1981 level and keep it there forever, so
we have some things in common. It is pointless us saying that
we are not like yourselves, party politicians, and there are some
areas in which we will differ.
Q565 Mr Betts: Something like revaluation
is something you could give to an independent commission to oversee.
Councillor Kemp: Theoretically
it is if it was allowed to do it, it has not been allowed to do
it because the valuation and tribunal thing is an independent
body.
Andrew George: May I go back to
the issue of powers?
Chair: Yes, and then I want to
wrap up the constitution bit at the end.
Q566 Andrew George: Given that I
was raising issues about the devolution of powers and we had a
bit of a discussion on the broad-brush issues of that and given
that the issue on which you have become most animated has been
policing powers, and that is certainly something which is certainly
very much part of the inquiry, an area we are looking at, as I
understand it, in the Policing Bill your objection to the directly
elected crime and policing representative is that this is creating
another body outside that of the work which the councils do with
the police. Is that your primary objection? It is not that it
introduces an arm of accountability locally, it is that it is
creating yet another body that is coming into the frame. Is my
understanding correct?
Councillor Kemp: All three parties
have proposals for the sheriffs, directly elected police boards
or the CDRP (Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership) which we
all oppose. We oppose it on the practicality that it will not
introduce localism because we do not think localism needs introducing
because we think it is working well. We think it will stop things
happening, it will stop partnership, it will expose the police
to extremism, because at the moment they are partly sheltered,
and the political parties will not appear at their best when we
start fighting police bodies because we will be fighting. For
example, the BNP have made it very clear they want to come into
this picnic. There is a whole series of practical reasons. We
do not have the opportunity to expose that, but our colleagues
are appearing before the Home Affairs Select Committee tomorrow
to talk about that.
Chair: I think it is interesting that
you are all agreed, and at a national level—I would not
speculate about the three of us—the parties are divided.
That is actually quite interesting.
Q567 Andrew George: If I can relate
it, which is what I am trying to do, to this inquiry. If there
was an opportunity for local authorities to have greater powers,
greater say in the way in which the resources available to the
police are deployed, decisions which are currently taken via the
Chief Constable or the constabulary and, in fact, the local authorities
may well be consulted about the way in which the police establishment
is deployed across its own patch, would you not welcome that opportunity
and the addition of such powers?
Councillor Ross: I would welcome
more co-terminosity because my own force straddles four or five
authorities, so how can we have a meaningful conversation? Our
indirectly elected members at the moment are coming from different
authorities, so I think there is a job there as well.
Councillor Kemp: In terms of where
we are with the police, again it comes back to this power or influence
thing. I am very satisfied on Merseyside that the Chief Constable
listens, works very closely at conurbation, city, district, neighbourhood
and ward levels, that we know who we are relating to and that
the money is reasonably well spent. I do not think we would have
more than five per cent difference if we controlled the budget
than the Chief Constable does now because we are talking about
a place in which we have massive influence on what the Chief Constable
and the police authority already do. That is what we want to achieve
with all the other partners around the LSP table. If you were
going to choose examples, we would choose other ones to have a
go at in the public sector, like the Environment Agency, the Government
Offices, the Regional Development Agency, things like that.
Q568 Chair: Can I move on to constitutional
issues and first ask each of you whether you believe the Central-Local
Concordat has had any impact and, if so, whether you can point
me to something where it has had an impact?
Councillor Taylor: I think the
answer to that question is not as much as we would have hoped
it had and I think we all need to work on that. It is clear that
there are things which still remain to be done in terms of this
Concordat between central and local government and it is work
to carry on with. We have not got as far as we would have liked
to have got with it. The point I raised earlier about local government
contributing to the debate about legislation before it becomes
legislation is what I would want to do. I would want to have a
great deal more consultation, firstly, on the financial burdens
which are coming to us and, secondly, on the impact of legislation
at local level before we get to the position of it already being
in place or debated in Parliament.
Councillor Ross: I cannot argue
with that.
Councillor Shakespeare: I would
certainly agree. The Concordat was signed with a flourish, but
if I got out my microscope and looked at the outcomes, they would
be very tiny indeed.
Councillor Kemp: I would agree
that signing a piece of paper does not change things, it is what
you do with the piece of paper when it is signed. Something else
which happened last year was the Local Government Act 2007, supported
by all the parties, there is a duty to co-operate and that is
what the Concordat is about, we co-operate nationally and everyone
is supposed to co-operate locally. All the people, the 23 agencies
which were named on the face of the Bill as having a duty to co-operate
with local government, you go and ask them what they are doing
about the duty, because I have tried this, most of them do not
know yet that they have a duty to co-operate and that takes a
big culture change to move things on from central government.
Q569 Chair: Turning to central government,
which central government departments would you finger, if I can
put it that way, as being particularly poor at co-operating with
local government?
Councillor Ross: The information
I have, and I will not be backward in coming forward, is Defra.
Q570 Chair: In what way? Do you want
to give an example?
Councillor Ross: We have a Rural
Commission and historically it worked extremely closely with Defra
on many environmental issues, and the message I am getting is
that work is not as good as it used to be.
Councillor Kemp: My own preference,
if we were fingering one, and we could finger a number for different
reasons, would be Ed Balls' Department, Department for Children,
Schools and Families. We have great difficulty in many cases in
bringing in the universities, the colleges at a strategic level.
Q571 Chair: No, that is a different
department.
Councillor Kemp: This is why I
am getting a bit confused. It is the education sphere generally.
When it comes down to schools, for example, because of the local
management of schools, although it has got `Liverpool' or wherever
on the front, people think we can influence things and we often
cannot bring the local management of schools into the partnership
in our ward which is desperately needed. I must say, and I do
not want to go back to Baby P, having worked alongside Ofsted
inspectors, I think they are on another planet altogether.
Q572 Chair: Councillor Kemp, do you
think devolution applies from councils downwards as well as from
Government to councils?
Councillor Kemp: Absolutely.
Q573 Chair: Your most recent remarks
about local management of schools being a bad idea rather suggests
you do not think it should be.
Councillor Kemp: Absolutely not,
but what local management of schools has done has reinforced a
silo to make sure that if the head teacher is good, they come
in and work with us, but if they choose not to, they and their
governors just say, "We don't care about anything else",
so it is the way it is being done. I think we should not ask for
more influence as local government unless we are prepared to give
more influence in our turn. I would be happy to send you a copy
of a booklet we produced, which Mr George has already had, about
the politics of the community and community politics, which is
all about this.
Councillor Taylor: If we have
got a local agency that is not delivering or we feel does not
understand what the priorities of our community are, it is our
responsibility as councillors to bring that agency to the table
and say to them, wherever it is, come and be accountable to the
people that you serve in this area. I would like to turn that
round and say it is part of the council's responsibility to do
that. Whether it is the Police Service or the Health Service or
Children, Schools and Families, whichever agency it is, if we
are not there asking them why they are not delivering our communities'
priorities, it is fundamentally part of our role to do that. We
should be more demanding of them at local level and I think that
is something we are all looking at in the LGA to say just how
do we do that. That is not saying we can make them come, but what
we have been talking to you about today is creating a culture
where the whole delivery of public sector work for our communities
forms part of the public's ability to come and talk to all of
us about what we are doing and what we are not doing, which is
even more important.
Q574 Chair: I think you were all
sitting here when we were talking to the previous witnesses about
the European Charter of Local Self-Government. Do you have a view?
Do you think there should be, for example, a parliamentary committee
which checks that everything the Government is doing is consistent
with the European Charter of Local Self-Government? Do you think
there should be a joint parliamentary local government committee
that did that?
Councillor Shakespeare: I think
somebody should. Jeremy was quite reticent about what it should
be, but there are powers at the Council of Europe to go on inspection
visits and write reports, but I am not sure anyone takes a great
deal of note of what those reports are if they are reporting on
a national government like the UK one. Something independent within
the UK which is policing those kinds of constitutional issues
between central and local government relationships and partnerships
would be very useful, yes.
Q575 Chair: Sort of off-Gov?
Councillor Shakespeare: Yes.
Councillor Kemp: I also have the
European portfolio at the LGA at the moment. First of all, I think
there are many lessons we can learn, as you have tried to do,
by going to see the way other local government systems work. I
am delighted that you have been to Denmark. I think you ought
to widen the question because there are a number of ways in which
you should be saying how will councils who deliver a lot of what
legislation introduces be involved in the scrutiny process. For
example, I would like to see appropriate council leaders, and
not something for the leader of the council, it might be an education
portfolio holder looking at an education bill, joining in the
scrutiny process as part of a select committee, bringing very
practical experience to bear as the theory is discussed by Members
of Parliament. What are the Regional Select Committees? I have
not got a clue and, in fact, I would guess that very few people
know who the regional ministers are. There are a number of interactions
which we would propose from the LGA if you wanted us to do that
to make sure legislation, whether it originates in Brussels or
elsewhere, is actually more effective and of more worth for local
government.
Councillor Taylor: I think it
was disappointing to see that local government is not included
in those Regional Select Committees. It would have been a big
step forward, I understand that, but it would have been a very
good step forward because all of the issues around economic development
and spatial planning are things which we fundamentally do on a
day-to-day basis. It would have shown a great step forward for
Government and local government working together to include both
parts on those Regional Select Committees so we are both examining
what is going through as it happens. That would have been fantastic
but, regrettably, it was decided not to do that.
Q576 Chair: I did make precisely
that proposal in my evidence to the Modernisation Committee but
obviously I was not sufficiently persuasive! Thank you all very
much indeed.
Councillor Kemp: Can I say we
too will be giving you some reading. On the press at the moment
is One Country, Two Systems; how national and local democracy
can work together to improve Britain's boosting culture. If we
have failed to make our point because of our nervousness at the
intellectual hothouse we have been in today, our offices have
put it in writing on our behalf, Chair.
Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much.
| 
