Table 1
Memorandum by the Institute of Local Government
Studies (INLOGOV) (BOP 22)
SUMMARY
— Local Governments need to be seen as
local democratic political institutions rather than the delivery
arm for central government policy at local level.
— Proposals for change need to be judged
in terms of the degree to which they will enhance the democratic
governance of local communities. Local leadership is exercised
by a wide range of people through a variety of different processes
and at its best a local authority is the unifying and representative
local parliament.
— Local Councillors should have real political
power to represent their constituents and to influence the strategic
direction of local policy and services.
— Political power should grow up from citizen
to government with power of political decision-making resting
at institutional points as close as possible to citizens and local
communities.
— Local Governments require significant
legislative and taxation powers if they are to represent the views
of local individuals, communities and citizens and translate their
aspirations into effective service delivery outcomes.
— Such powers are necessary for Local Governments
to embrace place shaping as the central aspect of their political
and strategic roles.
— This will necessarily mean that different
places will develop different policy and service delivery solutions
reflecting their local circumstances and preferences. The "post-code
lottery" criticism will be replaced by a "post-code
democracy" which recognises and responds positively to diversity.
— Councils representing smaller geographical
areas (eg parishes, towns, districts) with real and substantial
powers would enable people and communities to reconnect with their
Councillors and their Local Government.
— Local Governments should be able to raise
locally democratically accountable taxes such as a local income
tax.
— The central-local concordat could be
a force for change if it was implemented in spirit as well as
to the letter.
1. FURTHER DEVOLUTION
— Does local government need greater autonomy
from central government? If so, in what ways?
— Do local government's role and influence
need to be strengthened in relation to other public services,
such as policing and health?
1.1 There is a tension between local government
as a delivery arm of central government policy and local governments
as local democratic political institutions. Increasingly, the
former role has been emphasised by central government to the detriment
of the latter. At Westminster, the role of Parliament is to hold
the Executive to account and to pass legislation: Acts of Parliament
that define the legal framework through which the country is governed,
and above all the annual Finance Act that determines levels of
taxation. In contrast, Local Governments have limited powers to
legislate or raise taxation and are held to account for their
performance predominantly by central government rather than local
councillors and the communities they represent.
1.2 Underpinning the argument throughout
this paper is the view that proposals need to be judged in terms
of the degree to which they will enhance the democratic governance
of local communities. Local leadership is exercised by a wide
range of people through a variety of different processes and at
its best a local authority is the unifying and representative
local parliament. (INLOGOV 2007)
1.3 Local election turnouts will rise if
people feel that voting will make a real difference. This is more
likely to happen if councils have clear responsibilities, control
the budgets to deliver them, and have the confidence to take new
initiatives and experiment—with the implication that some
councils will do things that others will not. Responsibilities
and challenges should be exercised by local councils—in
line with the doctrine of subsidiarity to which the Government
committed itself in 1997, when it signed the European Charter
of Local Self-Government. This would entail sharing or passing
down many of the resources for regeneration, economic development,
skills training, transport and housing held at regional or national
levels, and some of the responsibilities of primary care trusts.
1.4 A radical devolution would require a
settlement that gave local authorities the responsibility for
raising a substantially greater share of their income than at
present, with central government block grants used to provide
equalization. The result would be different kinds and levels of
provision around the country—the outcome of local democratic
choice. In effect the fear of different councils providing different
services with differing standards, sometimes disparagingly termed
"a post-code lottery", would be replaced by "a
post-code democracy" with communities determining what they
want local governments to do and not to do. It would also mean
that legal restrictions could be removed. A symbolic act would
remove the restrictions that prevent local authorities building
new housing for rent, in situations where they could demonstrate
that, with prudential borrowing, they could manage that new housing
profitably.
1.5 Recent white papers and legislative
changes have begun to recognise the case for giving limited new
powers to local authorities, for example the powers for councils
to create bye-laws, levy spot fines and license public bus routes.
This is disappointing, given earlier talk of "double devolution"
the first part of which was more devolution from central or regional
government to local. In the opening paragraph of the Strong and
Prosperous Communities White Paper, the Secretary of State wrote
of "a rebalancing of the relationship between central government,
local government and local people." Such a rebalancing must
involve significant shift of powers, or at the very least of discretion;
yet there is no clear indication of either. If anything, the move
to Local Area Agreements and some of the provisions of the Police
and Justice Act 2006 take powers away from local government
and redirect them partly to government regional offices.
1.6 Some of the ways that this could be
done are relatively clear—the powers to invest in council
housing, or to purchase houses where banks or building societies
are about to evict residents who can no longer pay their mortgages;
investment in youth work and facilities for young people; support
for innovative forms of public transport; environmental wardens;
means of opening up schools and other facilities to make them
centres of community life. In addition, local councils should
have a much greater say over the built environment and its uses,
through the planning and licensing systems and the encouragement
of small-scale energy saving or creation. Such powers would enable
local governments to embrace the opportunities and challenges
of place shaping, defined by Lyons (2007 p 3) as "the
creative use of powers and influence to promote the general well-being
of a community and its citizens".
1.7 Fewer and fewer services are provided
directly by councils. Housing is the obvious example. But 120 councils
have transferred services to leisure, arts or sports trusts—and
more to private companies. Schools are run by governing bodies,
or their head teachers, or the private interests that support
academies. Buses are run by private companies, no longer by councils.
Many important decisions are taken in partnership bodies, such
as Local Strategic Partnerships, or their sub-committees that
agree the targets for Local Area Agreements, that involve one
or two councillors at most, and are heavily influenced by the
professional officers. The result of all these changes is that
councillors are far less involved in the fabric and detail of
local decision-making than, until comparatively recently, they
were.
1.8 This is compounded by the pressure to
make savings—the Gershon process—which is leading
to almost identical services across the country, and is a strong
disincentive to take initiative, eg using the well-being powers
now available.
1.9 Central government often appears to
understand local councils as delivery arms of the welfare state.
In that case a small number of large councils makes sense, and
backbench or non-executive councillors may seem at best a luxury,
at worst individuals who get in the way of efficiency savings.
But this perspective gives far too much emphasis to the levels
of council tax, and far little value to civic pride, initiative
to organise for local improvement, and the single-mindedness though
which councillors and local residents often defend what is dear
to them.
1.10 If we want a revival in local democracy,
reflected in turn-outs in elections, enthusiasm in opinion polls,
and real diversity and imagination across our country, then we
have to have smaller councils and give them more power. UK citizens
are under-represented in terms of the ratio of councillors to
public. Taking England alone, which is significantly more generously
represented than Scotland or Wales, our average of over 1,300 persons
per councillor even before the reorganization of the 1970s was
higher than that for all other comparably sized European countries.
After reorganization the figure rose to over 2,000, and today
it stands at over 2,550—between three and four times the
average for Western Europe and far higher than that of any country
except Ireland.
1.11 Findings from some of the recent officially
commissioned research on public attitudes to local government—eg
for the Lyons Report (BMG, 2007) and the Councillors Commission
(2007)—make disquieting, if familiar, reading. Most people
understand little about local government. They have only a fairly
hazy knowledge of the services it provides and how it works, and
even less about how it is financed. Their views of councillors
are frequently cynical and contemptuous, even though they rarely
meet one in person. They mostly have minimal awareness of what
councillors do and how they spend their time, but accompany this
with a vague sense that most of what is done locally is effectively
determined by ministers and central government, and that voting
in local elections is therefore largely a waste of time. All these
widely held perceptions can be argued to stem directly or indirectly
from one feature that characterises the almost unique way in which
we "do" local government in the UK—namely, its
quite exceptional scale.
1.12 What most people think of as local
government—not "their" local government, as they
rarely have any sense of identification with it—is today
about as remote from their daily lives as it is possible to be
while still daring to call itself "local". For many
it is geographically remote, but for even more it is remote emotionally.
Their district or unitary authority is as likely as not named
after a river, Anglo-Saxon settlement, or compass point as after
a real place. Its perhaps 45 councillors attempt to "represent"
collectively a population of well over 100,000 and individually
electorates of several thousand. And the local media revel in
telling them that, whatever may be their personal experience,
theirs is officially only a 2-star council anyway.
1.13 Table 1 presents measures of the
UK's scale of local government, and of one of its consequences—its
exceptional representational ratios: average population per council
and average number of persons per councillor. The figures are
for principal councils only, and it may be asked why the 10,000 or
more parish, town and community councils are excluded. It is no
slight at all on their important representational role or on the
range of services they provide at what is often called the first
tier of our local government. But, with only about a third of
England's population living in an area with one of these local
councils (Jones et al., 2005), they are far from universal.
Nor are they statutorily part of the nation's local government
structure of principal councils; and, regrettable though it may
be, they are responsible for services that in total amount to
under half of 1% of all council spending (CSPL, 2005, Appendix
D, para. 1.5). They are not, in short, seriously or fairly to
be compared with, say, French communes or German Gemeinden
with their extensive arrays of major service responsibilities
and their powers of general competence.
1.14 The "scale factor" impinges
upon just about every aspect of our local government. By effectively
determining the numbers of councillors we have, it influences
the roles they adopt, the time they can give to them, the ways
in which they perform them, the nature and frequency of their
contact with their electors and constituents. From the public's
perspective it similarly influences their relations with their
local government and the likelihood of their knowing personally
or living in the same neighbourhood as the councillors for whom
they are asked to vote. Further, as was mentioned almost in passing
in a recent article on French politics in the journal, Parliamentary
Affairs, it affects their level of political trust:
"A poll conducted in 1990 showed desperately
low ratings for political parties and `politicians in general',
but confidence levels of 73% for mayors and 70% for the 36,500 local
councils (assembling over half a million elected councillors)
which form the bedrock of democratic representation in France.
Proximity clearly constitutes an important factor in the retention
or breakdown of political trust." (Shields, 2006, p131)
1.15 Scale too provides one of the necessary
preconditions for UK central government's uniquely detailed concern
with, intervention in, and control of the activities and, above
all, the finances of individual local authorities. Such central
control, regularly criticised by bodies like the Council of Europe
and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE),
requires not only a politically centralist mindset, suggesting
that this degree of micro-management is both desirable and appropriate,
but a scale of "local" government to make it a feasible
proposition. As can be seen from Table 1, even if national politicians
in other comparably sized European countries possessed the mindset
and interventionist instincts, the scale on which their local
government is organised would thwart them. In this country, successive
governments of both parties have shared the mindset and utilized
the scale.
1.16 David Miliband, in his term as a DCLG
Minister, infused his speeches with fascinated references to French
local government and its 36,000 communes. He made similar
comments about the county of Norfolk, with its seven district
councils and 21 market towns (see Wilson and Game, 2006,
pp. 384-85). 12 of these market towns have populations of
over 5,000 and, not just in France but in most other European
countries, would be communes or municipalities with a full range
of local government powers and responsibilities. Instead, their
"local self-government" is confined to the limited functions
exercisable by a sub-principal town or parish council, while their
identities are otherwise suppressed within "compass point"
or amalgam districts—North Norfolk, South Norfolk, King's
Lynn and West Norfolk, Breckland—which themselves are likely
soon to be merged into some even more amorphous "Rest of
Norfolk" unitary authority with perhaps, in total, a quarter
of their present councillors.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT SCALE AND REPRESENTATIONAL
RATIOS—BRITAIN AND EUROPE
| Population
(millions)
| No. of tiers of
sub-national
government
|
Number of lower/lowest tier (most local) principal councils
|
Average
population |
Total number
of councillors
|
Persons per
councillor |
| France | 60.7 | 3
| 36,782 Communes | 1,650
| 515,000 | 118 |
| Austria | 8.2 | 2
| 2,380 Gemeinden | 3,440 |
40,570 | 201 |
| Spain | 40.3 | 3
| 8,108 Municipios | 4,970
| 65,000 | 623 |
| Germany | 82.4 | 3
| 12,434 Gemeinden | 6,630 |
198,000 | 418 |
| Italy | 58.1 | 3
| 8,101 Comuni | 7,170 |
97,000 | 597 |
| Greece | 10.7 | 2
| 1,033 Dimoi, Kinotites, | 10,360
| 18,600 | 573 |
| Finland | 5.2 | 1
| 444 Kunta | 11,710 |
12,400 | 418 |
| Belgium | 10.4 | 3
| 589 Communes | 17,660 |
13,000 | 800 |
| Sweden | 9.0 | 2
| 290 Kommuner | 31,000 |
46,240* | 195* |
| Portugal | 10.6 | 2
| 309 Municipios | 34,300
| 9,000 | 1,200 |
| Netherlands | 16.4 | 2
| 467 Gemeenten | 35,120 |
9,600 | 1,713 |
| Ireland | 4.0 | 2
| 88 Towns, boroughs | 45,000
| 744 | 5,375 |
| Denmark | 5.4 | 2
| 98 Kommuner | 55,000 |
2,520 | 2,142 |
UK 1975 | 56.0 | 2
| 547 ALL principal councils, incl counties
| 102,000 | 26,280 | 2,130
|
| UK 2008 | 60.8 |
2 | 468 ALL principal councils
| 130,000 | 22,270
| 2,730 |
| UK 2009 | 60.8 | 2
| 433 ALL principal councils | 140,000
| 20,970 | 2,900 |
Main source: Wilson and Game, 2006, p 263
Notes: * includes "alternates", elected at the
same time.
1.17 Miliband also floated the idea of a new role for
parish and town councils, and it is arguable that, were that role
to be genuinely enhanced and with it that of these councils' elected
members, it could prove perhaps the most powerful boost of all
to local empowerment and civic engagement. However, the structural
reform that Miliband actually set in motion—the drive towards
more and larger unitaries—takes us, in these terms of scale,
even further out of line with the rest of Europe. With a net total
of 35 councils due to disappear in 2009, there will be approximately
1,300 fewer councillors. In this new generation of unitaries,
roughly 760 councillors in 9 county-based councils (ie
excluding Ipswich and Exeter) will endeavour to represent over
3 million residents, or more than 4,000 per councillor.
1.18 The "democratic deficit" arising from
this continuous enlargement and de-localisation of our local government
is inestimable, but not unquantifiable. In Northumberland, to
pick a single example, there were, in the comparable area prior
to the nationwide reorganization of local government in the early
1970s, 22 councils with a total of 647 elected members.
From 2009 there will be one council of 67 members—a
reduction of nearly 90%—for what in area is the seventh
largest county in England. Devolved government it might be; local
it most certainly is not.
1.19 Do local government's role and influence need to
be strengthened in relation to other public services, such as
policing and health? NHS Foundation Trust staff can become members
of the trust, and can elect governors from their membership. This
presents a danger of trusts becoming to a certain extent provider
led. One way of combating this problem would be to replace this
element of governance with a greater local authority involvement.
The NHS would have a much stronger motivation to satisfy local
needs if it were locally funded through local taxes and subject
to local democratic control. A local income tax would facilitate
this. The same solution could be used to make the police more
accountable to local concerns. In the USA police forces are much
smaller and more concerned to respond to local needs.
2. FINANCIAL AUTONOMY
To what extent do the current arrangements for local government
funding act as a barrier to local authorities fulfilling their
"place-shaping" role? In particular:
— Does local government need greater financial freedom?
If so, in what ways?
— Should local government be able to raise a greater
proportion of its expenditure locally?
— What effect does the capping of council tax rises
have on local accountability?
2.1 The high level of central funding is at the root
of problems with local democracy, and the solution is to give
local governments control of local democratically accountable
taxes such as a local income tax.
2.2 Local government should have more freedom to decide
its policies in relation to local residents' preferences. However,
the present balance of funding, whereby central government finances
around 75% of local current expenditure means that central government
understandably desires to control and direct local government.
2.3 This desire for control manifests itself in central
inspection, comprehensive performance assessment and the forthcoming
comprehensive area assessment, requirements for efficiency savings,
council tax capping, and the shift to a much higher proportion
of specific grant—with dedicated schools grant a notable
recent example.
2.4 Although this desire for central control is understandable,
resulting from the high proportion of central finance, it is also
dysfunctional, leading to all the problems of central planning,
where decisions made centrally suffer from a lack of the necessary
information to make the decisions, as the information is situated
locally (Watt, 2004, 2006, Hayek, 1948)
2.5 If the balance of funding problem were redressed
by giving local government powers to raise a greater proportion
of their finances locally, through local taxes subject to accountability
to those paying, the motivation for the mechanisms of central
accountability and control described above would wane, to be replaced
by stronger and more informationally efficient mechanisms of local
accountability.
2.6 To achieve this, the pressure for ever greater "efficiency"
savings will need to come off, and councils will need to find
their own resources. Examples of local taxes would be sales taxes
on electricity, gas, or fuel (the latter having the advantage
that those who visit and area and use its roads and other facilities
will pay—all too often it is people from outside an area
that use the subsidised arts or community facilities that are
available). Of course such taxes will be unpopular—and may
lead to some councillors and their parties being voted out of
office. But if they really believe that an action is right for
their community, then they will persuade the public that it is
right to pay, and the result will be the revival in community
spirit that politicians from all parties talk about, while few
seem to have a clue as to how it might be achieved.
2.7 Capping is motivated by the high proportion of central
funding, as when council tax rises it is difficult for local voters
to distinguish whether the cause is lack of central grant or high
local spending. As central government is a likely to get the blame
for council tax rises as local government, it feels compelled
to control such rises through capping (Watt, 2004, Fender and
Watt, 2002). Capping is bad for local accountability. Local voters
should be free to vote and pay for a high level of local services,
or alternatively low local taxes and low services.
3. EXISTING POWERS
— To what extent are local government services a
product of national or local decision-making?
— Does local government make adequate use of its
existing powers, such as its well-being, charging and trading
powers? What scope is there for greater use of those powers?
3.1 It has been argued above firstly that central government
policy has resulted in fewer and fewer services being provided
directly by local government and secondly, that local government
has increasingly become the delivery arm of central government
for those services that have remained. This section will focus
on the existing powers of councillors to effect and influence
local policy and service delivery.
3.2 The Local Government Act 2000 brought in major
changes to the roles of councillors. A minority became cabinet
members, meeting regularly to take decisions and to co-ordinate
their council's activities. The rest, often described, slightly
disparagingly, as "backbench councillors" lost their
positions in committees where legally and sometimes with real
influence they took decisions and moulded their council's policies.
3.3 Committees were a very successful form of training.
Newly elected councillors would observe what was happening, go
on visits or to conferences, learn from the questions asked by
their colleagues and the—generally helpful—answers
given by the council officers. After a time, they would contribute
themselves, and after a year or so, by which time they would have
been involved in difficult decisions about their department's
budget for the next financial year, they would have a very good
grasp of what that part of the council's work involved.
3.4 This also meant that they were taken seriously by
council officers who knew that a disaffected councillor could
cause them all sorts of problems in committees or full council
meetings. Conversely, council officers realised that these councillors,
whatever they age, background, gender or ethnicity, were serious
people, with something to contribute, who had not been elected
by their ward for nothing.
3.5 The situation now is that non-executive councillors
are much less well informed than they were, while officers know
that they do not need to treat them so seriously. Indeed many
third tier officers and below hardly meet councillors, because
it is their superiors who attend cabinet and scrutiny meetings.
3.6 The scrutiny system works well where there are good
relationships with the Executive and sympathetic officers. It
has been able to contribute useful policy development work on
narrow fronts—picking up areas where co-ordination with
other departments or agencies is needed, or where policy can be
improved, but finding it very hard to keep up with the detail
across the whole front of a department's working. It is very dependent
on effective chairing—and often it is the chairs who become
well informed but much less so the remainder of their scrutiny
committees.
3.7 Non-executive councillors are involved in Development
Control, Licensing, Environmental Health, Standards, and sometimes
other regulatory committees. But much of the work of these committees
is delegated to officers, and, nominally at least, they are not
involved in policy development. Increasingly these committees
follow the advice of officers—most notably in planning matters,
where councillors are increasingly advised of the risks if they
go their own ways and reverse officer advice. A performance indicator
of the percentage of routine planning applications dealt with
in eight weeks is a further disincentive to imaginative rethinking
of planning proposals.
3.8 Since councillors are less well informed, and officers
less inclined to take them seriously, the amount of casework coming
to councillors has declined. This is also partly because councils
have opened other avenues through which the public can raise issues
or get access to services, but also because the council is now
often not the provider as it was in the past, eg of housing services.
Much of this advice work has also moved to MPs—who now nearly
all have local offices, regular surgeries, and often professional
case-workers.
4. IMPROVING THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
CENTRAL AND
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
— What difference has the central-local concordat
made to central-local relations?
— Should an independent commission be established
to oversee the financial settlement for local government?
4.1 The Concordat contains a number of welcome statements,
including:
"there should be a presumption that powers are best exercised
at the lowest effective and practical level" (HM Government,
2007)
and a recognition that the government will
"work towards giving councils greater flexibility in
their funding, to facilitate the wide degree of autonomy referred
to in the European Charter of Local Self-Government (HM Government,
2007)"
4.2 Not surprisingly, the two signatories of the Concordat
were effusive in assessing its importance. The LGA sees it as
"a significant and ground-breaking step .,.. in freeing councils
from control from the centre and allows them to represent better
than ever before the people they serve". The Government was
to be congratulated "for the courage and commitment shown
in making such public commitments to the further development of
a new way forward between central and local government."
4.3 Some of the language is indeed ground-breaking, particularly
if taken at face value—the commitments to subsidiarity and
greater flexibility in council funding; the acceptance of an equivalence
between local electoral mandates and the demands of national government;
the recognition of the inadequacy of the council tax system because
of its lack of transparency and accountability; the admitted unacceptability
of much of central government's way of working and of the need
for change.
4.4 On the other hand, there is an imprecision about
some of the key terminology that could be said to match its lack
of any legal or statutory basis and the absence even of any kind
of independent monitoring or enforcement mechanism, such as a
parliamentary committee. For example, who, (apart from the partners
to the Concordat), decides what "the lowest effective and
practical level" of service delivery is? Or when central
government's interest becomes "over-riding"? Or when
the "last resort" is reached, prior to central government
intervention? Or how fast "progressively" is, when it
comes to the removal of obstacles? Or how much, if any, increase
in funding flexibility needs to result from the process of merely
working "towards" it?
4.5 Favourable comment has been made about the several
references, both explicit and implicit, to the European Charter
for Local Self-Government signed by the government in 1997. Signing,
and even ratification (1998), however, are not the same as implementation,
and the Government has come under increasing criticism for its
failure to deliver the degree of devolution to which it supposedly
committed itself. It would be odd to draw attention to this particular
implementation gap, if Ministers had no intention of addressing
it.
4.6 The current Secretary of State described the Concordat
as the first step towards enshrining the role of councils in a
constitutional setting—in other words, in something like
Japan's Local Autonomy Law. Such a setting would, its advocates
claim, do things like:
— establishing a legal framework giving local government
a clear basis and a general competence for the benefit of its
citizens and other inhabitants;
— clarifying the distinction between powers delegated
to local government by national government, as compared to local
government's own powers;
— extend significantly local government's financial
capacities by increasing substantially its proportion of income
from local taxation and reducing the proportion from central government
grants, and by abolishing practices like expenditure and tax "capping".
If the Concordat is a first step towards actions like
these, it is appears at present to be at most a small step.
4.7 An independent commission along the lines of the
Australian Commonwealth Grants Commission could be an attractive
mechanism for resolving much central-local strife.
5. THE CONSTITUTIONAL
POSITION
— Given the UK's constitutional settlement, what
protection should be placed in law to ensure local government's
ability to fulfil its responsibility as a balance on the powers
of central government?
— What role should Parliament have in the protection
of local government's position within the UK's constitutional
settlement?
5.1 As a creature of Statue, British local government
is subject to constant change emanating from a superior constitutional
source: central government. Much of the change that is imposed
upon local government because of the need for governing institutions
to respond to two competing sets of requirements: those that drive
and are driven by either, technocracy or democracy. In all major
re-organisations of local government, the attempts to find a structural
fit between these two mutually antagonistic factors have seen
the latter lose out to the former. The question of local government
size is part of the clash between technocracy and democracy that
has been played-out in various reforms of local government in
Britain. Indeed, current discussions about unitary councils and
city-regions will ultimately result in larger, more remote and
technocratically driven units of local government
5.2 Copus (2006) set out a construct for British local
government that would rest on the creation of a new constitutional
settlement between the centre and the localities. It explored
the role of newly empowered local government within the context
of a federal UK, and addressed how the politics of these new councils
should be conducted.
5.3 Key to this role is the radical shift from local
government being seen as predominantly administrative bodies which
provide central government with the mechanism by which they can
communicate with, and control, sub-national political communities
to "units of government in their own right that have emerged
from, and represent some clearly defined communities of place
and that are powerful mechanisms of self-government".
5.3 In particular, the paper explored what new forms
of political accountability would be required in this new constitutional
settlement and to whom local government should be accountable.
It also examined the mechanisms by which that accountability can
be secured. The paper set out a radically new context for central—local
relationships resting on a new balance of political power, responsibility
and accountability.
5.4 A principal feature of this argument is that political
power should grow up from the citizen to government with power
of political decision-making resting at institutional points as
close as possible to the citizen and to local communities. This
may be parishes, towns or districts with the shape, size and boundaries
of councils set and decided by local people themselves.
5.5 Thus rather than it being seen as Parliament's role
to protect local government's position within the UK's constitutional
settlement, the suggestion here is that political power should
be seen as resting with the citizen "who can overturn the
decisions of a council, enforce particular acts and actions on
the council and, remove councillors and mayors from office"
(Copus 2006).
REFERENCESBMG Research (2007)
Lyons Inquiry Survey. Norwich: HMSO
Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) (2005) Getting
the Balance Right: Implementing Standards of Conduct in Public
Life: Tenth Report of the (Graham) Committee. London: TSO.
Copus, C, (2006) British Local Government: A Case for A New Constitutional
Settlement, Public Policy and Administration, Vol 21 No
2, Summer 2006
(The) Councillors Commission (2007) Research Report 2—Understanding
the barriers and incentives to becoming and remaining a councillor
in England. London: DCLG.
Fender, J and Watt, P A (2002) "Should Central Government
Seek to Control the Level of Local Authority Expenditures?"
Fiscal Studies, vol 23, no 2, June, pp 265-285.
Hayek, F A (1945) "The Use of Knowledge in Society",
American Economic Review, 35, 519-530.
HM Government (2007) Central-Local Concordat, 12 December
2007.
INLOGOV (2007) Strong and Prosperous Communities: A Contribution
to the Debate. Birmingham, Inlogov, The University of Birmingham
http://www,inlogov.bham.ac.uk
Jones, A, Burnley, J, Cox, E and Newman, I (2005) The Potential
of Parish and Town Councils to Support Neighbourhood Arrangements.
London: LGIU.
Lyons, M. (2007) Place-Shaping: A Shared Ambition for the Future
of Local Government. http://www.communities.gov.uk/documnets/localgovernment/pdf/158064.pdf
Shields, J (2006) Political Representation in France: A Crisis
of Democracy? Parliamentary Affairs, 59:1, 118-37—http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/59/1/118
Watt, P A (2004) "Financing Local Government", Local
Government Studies, 30, pp. 509-523.
Watt, P A (2006) "Principles and Theories of Local Government",
Economic Affairs, Vol 26, No 1, March pp 4-10.
Wilson, D and Game, C (2006) Local Government in the United
Kingdom, 4th ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
September 2008
|
