House of Commons - Communities and Local Government Committee

The Balance of Power: Central and Local Government - Communities and Local Government Committee Contents

Memorandum by Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government, Oxford University (BOP 58)

A NEW LOCALISM?

This evidence discusses the place of local government in the British constitution. It conclusion is that the main barriers to a new localism are not constitutional, but political and cultural. The achievement of a new localism depends not upon a new constitutional settlement, whatever that may mean, but primarily upon a sea-change in public attitudes. If that occurs, then there is no constitutional reason why there should not be a much greater degree of decentralisation and devolution.

1. LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE CONSTITUTION

If the sovereignty of Parliament is the main principle of the constitution, then clearly there can be no guaranteed role or constitutional status for local government. Every current local authority is a statutory creation of Parliament. From this point of view, local government has no independent constitutional status. Were a government to seek, by statute, to abolish every local authority, it could, so it seems, legally do so.

Nevertheless, when we say that something is unconstitutional, we do not generally mean that it is illegal. If, for example, the Queen were to ignore the advice of her ministers and refuse assent to a bill passed by Parliament, that would not be illegal. But it would be unconstitutional. For the sovereignty of Parliament is "underpinned by a corpus of custom and convention as to the manner in which that sovereignty should be exercised".[40] From this point of view, local government is and always has been very much a part of the British constitution. Indeed, until the devolved bodies were established in the 1990s, and, with the exception of the Northern Ireland Parliament which sat from 1921 to 1972, local authorities were the only directly elected representative institutions in the country apart from Parliament. There is, therefore, a broader sense of the term "constitutional" in which it refers to the conditions under which political authority in a democracy ought to be exercised. It is in this sense that local government is a part of the constitution.

The constitutional status of local government was recognised by the government which, in 1998, ratified the Council of Europe's Charter of Local Self-Government. This Charter is regarded by the Council as an analogue to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention defines the rights of the individual: the Charter defines the rights of local communities and their elected representatives.

But the Charter, unlike the Convention, does not bind those member states of the Council of Europe which choose to ratify it, and there is no European court to interpret its provisions. The Charter is an international treaty, but it does no more than lay down principles and standards for local democracy. Ratifying it, therefore, is no more than a symbolic commitment to the values of self-government.

The Charter lays out the principles required to develop democratic local authorities with, "a wide degree of autonomy with regard to their responsibilities, the ways and means by which those responsibilities are exercised and the resources required for their fulfillment".

Perhaps the two most important articles of the Charter are Article 2 which states:

"The principle of local self-government shall be recognised in domestic legislation, and where practicable in the constitution".

And Article 3 which states:

"Local self-government denotes the right and the ability of local authorities, within the limits of the law, to regulate and manage a substantial share of public affairs under their own responsibility and in the interests of the local population".

The problem is, however, that, because Britain lacks a codified constitution, implementation of the Charter lies at the discretion of central government. It is therefore doubtful whether ratification of the Charter has of itself led to any major improvement in the status of local government. But, even in countries with codified constitutions, the balance of power between central and local government depends less upon the constitution than upon political and popular attitudes.

There are in fact strong obstacles to be overcome before there is a genuine acceptance either by central government or indeed by the people of "the principle of local self-government". These obstacles are not mainly, or even primarily, constitutional, but political and cultural. The constitutional subordination of local government to Parliament is underpinned by its striking political weakness and by popular attitudes which favour centralisation. Britain has in fact become, despite devolution, a profoundly centralised country.

2. LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LOCAL ELECTIONS

Despite much rhetoric about the values of localism and decentralisation, there are few indications of any great popular support for local government in Britain. Turnout in local government elections is generally between 30% and 40%—the lowest by far in Western Europe. In Ireland, turnout in local elections is around 62%, in Germany it is 72% and in Sweden 88%.[41] Turnout is lowest in inner city seats and amongst the less well-off—precisely those social groups who, so it may be argued, need the vote the most. It is difficult to explain low turnout by a lack of interest in local issues, since survey evidence shows that 67% of 18 to 24 year olds, the generational group least likely to vote, say that they are in fact interested in local issues. Survey evidence further seems to indicate that people "want to be involved and have their say, but the structure and culture of politics alienates and deters them".[42]

Moreover, those who do vote seem to be making a judgment not so much on the effectiveness of their local council as upon the effectiveness of national government. That is the main reason why, when an incumbent administration has been in office for some time, there is a swing against it in local elections. In 1979, when the Conservatives came to power, they controlled 244 local authorities in Britain, while Labour controlled just 109. By 1996, one year before the end of the long Conservative reign, they controlled just 14 councils, while Labour controlled 207. After the 2008 local elections, by contrast, Labour controlled just 48 local authorities while the Conservatives controlled 215.[43]

Voters treat local elections, not primarily as a means of deciding local issues, but as a plebiscite on the record of the government of the day. That is also how the results are described in the national press. Local elections are interpreted as indicating the likely fate of the government at the next general election, not as a judgment on local matters or the performance of particular local councils. Perhaps the voters have logic on their side in treating local elections as miniature general elections. If central government effectively makes the crucial decisions for local authorities, including decisions as to how much local authorities are allowed to raise in council tax and how much they are allowed to spend, then the only purpose of a local vote seems to be to send a message to central government. It is however partly because local government seems to be so little valued that national governments of both political parties have been able to take powers away from local authorities with so little protest.

3. POLITICS AND THE SENSE OF LOCALITY

Why is local government so little valued in Britain? Local government, if it is to be effective, needs to rest upon a well-defined sense of locality. The fundamental problem confronting advocates of localism, however, is that of recreating a sense of locality in what has become a rootless society. During the 20th century, the sense of locality was continually undermined by geographical and social mobility. This does not mean, of course, that the vast majority of the population was in continual movement. Only a minority of the population, even at the beginning of the 21st century, move very far during their lifetime from where they were born. But it is increasingly the energetic and ambitious minority, the socially mobile, which also tends to be geographically mobile. These are precisely the people who might be expected to assume leadership positions in local government. That is a problem which can be expected to intensify with the expansion of higher education. It is currently a government aim that 50% of young people should go to university. This means that increasing numbers of the ambitious and energetic will leave their local roots behind them. The kind of locally rooted society once celebrated by novelists such as Arnold Bennett will have gone, never to return.

During the 20th century, the sense of locality was radically undermined by developments in transport, and, in particular, by the development of the motor car, which tended to obliterate the distinction between town and country. The suburban commuter came to replace the local craftsman. It became easier to work in the town, but to live in the suburbs or the countryside. Work-place and service centre came to be divorced from home, which became a retreat to be enjoyed in the evenings and the weekends; one became less rooted in the area in which one lived. A locality was no longer a natural resting-place to which one remained rooted throughout one's life, but rather a place for arrival and departure. One was, as it were, always in transit.

The problem of preserving a sense of locality against strong countervailing trends is of course not peculiar to Britain, but is common to most, if not all, industralised societies. Whether these trends can be resisted depends in large part upon political arrangements, and, in particular, upon the connections between local and national politics. But politics in Britain has been characterised by a sharp separation between local and national political roles, with the local being strictly subordinate to the national. There is of course a link in that there are many MPs who are former councillors. Indeed, over the past hundred years, there has been a steady rise in the percentage of MPs with local government experience. In 1911, for example, if Ireland is excluded, 29% of MPs had local government experience, while in 2006, the figure was 54%. But there has been a steady decline in the number of MPs who remain councillors once they have been elected to the House of Commons. In 1889, shortly after the first elections to the new county councils, 87 MPs (and 131 peers) were also councillors, and remained councillors. In 2006, by contrast, just 18 MPs were councillors. Of these, 16 had first been elected in 2005, and most of these could be expected to leave their local council in due course. The other two, who had first been elected in 2001, were a husband and wife team, Peter and Iris Robinson, who represented constituencies in Northern Ireland. It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that "In recent decades almost all newly elected MPs who were councillors have either immediately resigned from their local authority or simply have not stood again when eligible for re-election as councillors".[44] One important reason for this is that it is rare for someone to be elected as an MP for the constituency in which he or she had been a councillor. John Major, the first Prime Minister to have been a councillor since Clement Attlee, had been a member of Lambeth council. As a Conservative, he would have had little chance of being elected in Lambeth, but he eventually secured adoption for the safe Conservative constituency of Huntingdon. Similarly, a Labour councillor in Henley or a Conservative councillor in Tower Hamlets would have hardly any chance of being returned as a local MP. They would have to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Over the past 150 years, there have been only three politicians who have defied this trend and built national political careers on their success in local government—they are Joseph Chamberlain, Herbert Morrison and Ken Livingstone. Perhaps Boris Johnson will be a fourth. It is, in my judgment, the first past the post electoral system and its natural concomitant, the safe seat, which encourages this disconnection between local and national politics. There are grounds for believing that local political vitality is sapped in Britain as a result of the sharp division between national and local political life: the former does not draw strength from the latter, and neither does the latter gain any real voice in national affairs.

The sharp separation of national and local spheres contrasts strikingly with politics on the Continent and in the United States where success at local or provincial level provides both a springboard for national advancement, and also an opportunity for a national leader to gain executive experience. In the United States, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been state governors before becoming president. In Germany, every Chancellor between Kiesinger in 1966 and Angela Merkel in 2006 had been the leader of a provincial government, not a member of the Bundestag. In France, many leading politicians, including ministers, have been mayors of the constituency which they represent in the National Assembly, and they retained their position as mayor even after being elected to the national legislature. As Interior minister in Jacques Chirac's government, for example, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted upon remaining President of the General Council of Hauts de Seine. In the summer of 2008, no fewer than 282 out of the 577 deputies in the National Assembly were mayors, and 380, including the 282 mayors, remained members of a municipal council. Other deputies remained members of other local authorities. Indeed, in the summer of 2008, there were only 68 deputies in the National Assembly who retained no local government position at all.[45]

4. LOCAL AUTHORITIES AND THE POLITICAL PARTIES

Local authorities in Britain are larger than those on the Continent, and therefore less local. The average population of the lower tier of local government in Britain, the district council, is, at around 139,300, by far the highest in Western Europe. The next largest is Ireland where the average population size is around 93,000, followed by the Netherlands with 49,000, Portugal with 32,349 and Sweden with 29,200. In Germany, the average population of a gemeinde is just 9,000 while the average size of a French commune is 1,500.[46] There is no reason to believe that the larger local authorities in Britain are necessarily more efficient than their Continental counterparts.

Britain now has both the largest average size of local authority in Western Europe and the lowest turnout. These two facts may well be interconnected. For, in seeking to adapt local government to modern conditions, a structure of local government has been created that is not very local. The 2008 White Paper noticed, a "disconnect between the place people say they live in, and the name of the local authority which delivers their services and collects their council tax. So for example a resident of Malmesbury or Pewsey, in Wiltshire is unlikely to say they live in Kennet, even if that is the name of the council which collects their tax every year".[47] In larger authorities, it may be more difficult for councillors to be aware for themselves of conditions on the ground, and therefore more discretion is inevitably left to officers. By contrast, in a smaller local authority, it is more likely that a councillor will live among the people she is trying to serve and she will have a more intimate knowledge of the matters the council is dealing with. She will not be so dependent upon officers' reports, for her knowledge will be first hand. Also she can gather local opinion. Local government to be strong needs to be built on the basis of real communities.

The 1972 Local Government Act, by creating larger local authorities, also strengthened the grip of tightly organised party politics upon local government. Because the Act created larger local authorities and larger local government wards, it heralded the demise of the independent candidate in local government. For independents were no longer able to canvass the large wards created by the reform. Wards containing more than around 2,500 electors are probably too large for an independent to canvass. To canvass larger wards requires the help of the party machine. In the 1970 county council elections, the last before the 1972 Act, there were only four counties with wards averaging more than 3,000 electors where the majority of councillors were without party labels; conversely there were only four counties with wards averaging less than 2,000 electors where the majority of councillors did have a party label.[48] In most of the new county authorities created by the reform, the ratio of councillors to electors was around 1 to 5,000, while in some it was 1 to 10,000 or even more. Before reorganisation, independents held a majority in 13 English counties and were the largest single party in five others. By 1977, they controlled just four county councils.[49]

It would be quite wrong to idealise the independent councillor. Nevertheless, a local authority with strong independent representation might well be in a better position to stand up for local interests and to resist central government than a local authority dominated by party political councillors.

Of course, party politics in local government is by no means a recent development. Indeed, political parties contested local elections well before the county councils were created in 1888. What is more recent is not the contesting of local elections by political parties but the very tight party political management of council business.[50] The one does not necessarily imply the other. At Westminster, there has been a strong trend towards greater back-bench independence over the last 30 years. This means that local councils are probably now under tighter party control than MPs in the House of Commons. Tribal politics is in sharp decline at Westminster, but not perhaps in a number of local authorities.

The danger would be if councillors, who are essentially members of the lay public volunteering to take on an unpaid political role, come to be seen by the public as having become mere emissaries of national political parties. Were that to happen, and perhaps it has already happened in some local authorities, independent-minded people would be deterred from seeking election to local authorities.

The reform of local government embodied in the 1972 Act found it difficult to secure popular acceptance. Indeed, there was pressure to reform it almost as soon as it had been passed. The unpopularity of the Act was partly a consequence of the runaway inflation of the 1970s which would have made life difficult for local authorities, however they had been organised. Nevertheless, a system more rooted in popular sentiment might have been better able to withstand many of the attacks made upon it. For when local government came under attack from the centre during the long years of economic crisis following 1974, it was unable to mobilise public support in its defence. Far from defending local councillors as bastions of local democracy, many members of the public seemed to regard them as representing "them" and not "us". Part of the appeal of Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 until its abolition in 1986 was precisely that he was regarded as an independent-minded figure who would be as willing to challenge the leaders of his own party, Labour, as he would the Conservatives, and he was perceived by voters, even by those who had little time for his Left-wing views, as being genuinely concerned with the interests of Londoners. For this reason, the campaign against the abolition of the GLC did seem to strike a genuine popular chord. It was an illustration of what might have been had there been equally independent-minded figures in charge of local government elsewhere. But in the rest of the country, local government found itself friendless and unloved, lacking the popular support which would have enabled it to resist the assault from the cent

5. TERRITORIAL EQUITY

We have seen that trends in society have been working in the 20th century to weaken localism, and that the reform of local government, far from counteracting these trends, has actually helped to accelerate them. But, trends in post-war politics have also been distinctly unhelpful to those who sought to preserve localist values. The development of the welfare state has been a powerful factor encouraging the centralization of government. For a fundamental principle of the welfare state is that the distribution of benefits and burdens should depend not upon geography but upon need. That was difficult to achieve with a service which remained under local authority control. Before 1939, much of the health service was in the hands of local government. But local health services were something of a patchwork, their effectiveness depending upon the party composition, efficiency, and, above all, the wealth of individual local authorities. Doctors' salaries also varied depending upon the wealth of the local authority in which they worked. Sir George Godber, a former Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Social Security, who had been involved in the early planning of the National Health Service, observed that "Anyone familiar with the pattern of development of local authority health services before 1948, despite the fact that they were then limited and at relatively low cost, knows well that the wealth of an authority has a direct bearing on the quality of the service provided. A county like Surrey, for instance, was able to recruit doctors for its public health services in the 1930s much more easily than a country borough like, say, Bootle, for the simple reason that it offered œ600 a year as compared with œ500 a year, which was the minimum negotiated rate".[51] Aneurin Bevan saw local control as incompatible with the idea of a national health service, largely because he wanted to avoid the anomalies which had characterized the prewar health system. Bevan nationalised the local authority hospitals in order to develop what he hoped would prove a uniform system of health care for Britain. It would be the minister, and not local authorities, who would be responsible for the health service. It can be argued, indeed, that the decline of local government began with the Attlee government, a government dedicated to creating a welfare state, in which anomalies resulting from geography were to be overcome through a truly national welfare policy. Admittedly, neither the Attlee government nor its successors succeeded in achieving territorial equality through policies of centralisation. There remain considerable divergences in service provision between different parts of the country. It is often used as an argument against centralisation that centralised management of, for example, the National Health Service has not succeeded in eliminating territorial disparities. But that is a fallacious argument. For the territorial disparities are seen as reasons for criticism, not for celebration. Most people resent the postcode lottery, rather than applauding it; and only central government is in a position to remove territorial disparities. It would not be easy to remove such disparities in a service that was run by local authorities. In the 20th century, the principle that citizens in different parts of the country should have an equal right to social benefits came to displace concerns about the representation of place. Perhaps, devolution, if it is a success will help to restore the primacy of the representation of place. It is too early to tell.

In the 1970s, a further factor accelerated the decline of local government, as voters came to worry about the quality of local authority services, and especially education. This brought ministers into the detailed management of these services, something that, until then, they had on the whole sought to avoid. In the 1970s, it was, in particular, education which became a focus for popular concern as parents began to complain about the quality of education that their children were receiving in local authority schools. These parents were not mollified by being told that they should complain to their local councillor or to the Chief Education Officer of their authority. They argued instead that the quality of education was an issue of national significance, that politicians constantly promised in their election manifestoes to maintain and improve educational standards, and that, therefore, it was central government that was responsible for the quality of education in the schools. Politicians, for their part, came to believe that complaints about education could cost them votes in a general election. If governments were to be held responsible for the quality of local authority education, it was only natural that they should seek the power which could enable them to exercise that responsibility effectively. It was for reasons of this sort that James Callaghan, as Prime Minister, launched in 1976 a "Great Debate" on education, calling for higher standards in schools, and insisting that school standards were a responsibility of central government. He demanded, in particular, that government be allowed to enter what had hitherto been regarded as the "secret garden" of the curriculum, something which, so he believed, could no longer be left to the uncoordinated wishes of teachers or local authorities. The debate launched by Callaghan culminated in 1988 in the Education Reform Act of Kenneth Baker, Education Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's government. This Act provided for, amongst other things, a national core curriculum in the schools, national monitoring of standards in the schools and the nationalization of the polytechnic sector of higher education, hitherto the responsibility of local education authorities. The centralisation of the education service continued under the governments of John Major and Tony Blair, with the establishment of a national curriculum and national funding formulas for schools. The Blair government also began to implement a wide-ranging programme of city academies to counter the weaknesses of the comprehensive system and to deal with the problem of failing schools. Most of these academies are free from local authority control, and responsibility for them lies in the last resort with ministers at the head of a Whitehall department. Governments, however, have centralised the education service not primarily because of a desire to secure more power for themselves nor because of a fundamental disdain for local authorities, but as a response to perceived inadequacies of a major public service, inadequacies which had led to considerable public disquiet. For education, although it had been in large part the responsibility of local authorities, is not a local service, but a national one, in that questions of educational performance and achievement are of national significance. In the post-war years, therefore, governments had been compelled to take an interest in the performance of local education authorities; and, when that performance had been held to be inadequate, it was almost inevitable that they would take a greater degree of control over the education service.

6. A NEW LOCALISM: REFORM OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT FINANCE

During the 1970s, economic pressures accelerated the trend towards centralisation. Hard-pressed by inflation, governments came to believe that local authorities were profligate in their expenditure and needed to be controlled by cutting government grant to local authorities. But this might not be sufficient. For local councils, instead of cutting expenditure, could instead raise the rates provided that they could secure sufficient electoral support. The domestic rate combined with the business rate allowed some authorities, for example, some London boroughs, and, in the late 1980s, counties such as Hertfordshire and Surrey, to finance virtually all of their expenditure from local sources. The level of the rates lay outside government control, and was regarded by the Treasury as a loophole in the system of public expenditure control. During the 1980s, there was a major constitutional change in the methods by which governments sought to control local expenditure. Previously, governments had sought to control the global total of local government expenditure by varying the amount of grant which they paid to local authorities, that is by varying the amount derived from central taxation. But, in the 1980s, central government sought to determine how much individual local authorities should spend, and how much local revenue derived from local taxation, they should be allowed to raise. The Local Government Finance Act of 1982 first established expenditure targets for individual local authorities, and central government began to develop indicators, standard spending assessments, by means of which it could decide how much each local authority ought to be spending. The implication was that it was no longer for the local authority itself to decide what its pattern of expenditure ought to be and how much it should be spending, but rather a matter for central government.

The Local Government Finance Act of 1982 began the process by which central government decided how much each local authority should be spending. The Rates Act of 1984 began the process by which central government came to decide how much each local authority should be raising from its own revenue, by empowering the Secretary of State to "cap" the rates, that is impose maximum rate levels upon local authorities. This principle of capping was continued during the brief period of the poll tax, and then with the council tax which replaced it. The Labour government replaced universal capping with selective capping of those local authorities which, so it believed, had overspent. In recent years, government has threatened to cap local authorities which allow council tax increases of over 5%. The effect of this is to constrain the decisions made by local authorities concerning the appropriate level of council tax and also local expenditure. Capping breaches the principle, which lies at the heart of an effective system of local self-government, that it is for the individual local authority to decide how much it wishes to raise locally, and that central control should be exercised solely through varying the level of central grant. But as central government came to increase its responsibilities, so the pattern of local authority finance came to reflect this increased responsibility. So, although, in theory, local authorities remained responsible for important public services, the pattern of public finance now legitimises central intervention. Local authorities are at present responsible for around 25% of public expenditure, but raise only 4% of tax revenue. They raise on average around 20% of their revenue from council tax. The rest derives primarily from central government grants and from the proceeds of the business rate which is raised by central government and then distributed to local authorities on a formula basis. Moreover, the amount raised by local authorities varies according to no discernible principle. In 2001, for example, St.Albans raised 50% of its revenue from council tax, East Staffordshire 40%, Somerset 30% and Newham just 11%. Most voters find it difficult to see any clear relationship between the amount they contribute to local government in the form of the council tax and the services which they receive.

A "new localism" would have to begin by reforming local government finance, since current arrangements sustain a centralist rather than a localist approach. When the bulk of local government revenue is raised from the centre, it is natural for local authorities to look to the centre rather than to their own voters for guidance. Instead of having carefully to balance out local needs and local taxation, local authorities find themselves pressing the centre for more money. They become one of the numerous interest groups pressing the centre for cash. They are put in the position of being perpetual grumblers. For, of course, it is always the case that services could be improved if more money were provided by central government; the demand for better services is, after all, nearly infinite. This puts a premium on buck-passing between local authorities and central government. Local authorities can always argue that local services would be better if only central government provided them with more grant. The government, however, can reply that local services would be better if local authorities were more efficient, and that rises in council tax to pay for better services are wasteful. The local voter has no means of evaluating these claims, for the system of local government finance establishes a regime of perverse incentives and serves to undermine the spirit of local patriotism which a good system of local government finance ought to sustain. Reform of the system of local authority finance, therefore, is a first precondition of an effective new localism.

7. THE NEW LOCALISM: STRONGER LOCAL LEADERSHIP

The Labour government, elected in 1997, seemed committed to reversing the long trend towards centralisation and to re-establishing the role of local government in the constitution. One way in which it sought to do this was to strengthen leadership at local level. The terms of the Local Government Act, 2000 required local authorities to replace the committee system, dominant in local government since even before the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, by either a cabinet or a mayoral system. The government seems to have believed that a more visible focus of executive leadership would encourage more transparent and accountable local government. The Local Government Act, 2000 required all local authorities to adopt constitutions providing for either a cabinet system or a directly elected mayor. The premiss was that a cabinet system or a directly elected mayor would, by formally recognising the role of the majority party and its leader, bring the structure of local government more in accord with the realities of modern politics. In addition, by dividing powers between the executive and back-benchers, the government hoped that the new arrangements would yield better scrutiny of local government, and that back-bench councillors would become the equivalent of members of Select Committees in the House of Commons. The government suggested, in regulations drawn up for guidance to local councils that, if decision makers were to be held to account, this will require a change in the way members have traditionally questioned decisions. Although this is a matter for political parties to consider—The Secretary of State believes whipping is incompatible with overview and scrutiny and recommends that whipping should not take place.[52]

The government no doubt hoped that many local authorities would seek the directly elected mayor option. For a directly elected mayor would be beholden, not to her party group, but to local electors. A mayoral system might thus help to break the hold of tribal politics upon local government. With an electoral mandate behind her, a mayor could mobilise public opinion and speak for local electors in a way in which the traditional council leader could not. A survey undertaken in 2004 showed that 57% could name their elected mayor from a prompt list, compared to 25% who could name their council leader. Name recognition rose to 73% for mayors in the north east.[53] Therefore, so it was hoped, a directly elected mayor would be able to provide a clear focus of accountability for voters, personalizing local government and making it more exciting. The traditional local authority leader was a local councillor, elected in a particular ward, chosen for the leadership position by her party from which she derives her power. A mayor, by contrast, would be directly elected by voters from the authority as a whole, and not just one particular ward, and so would derive her powers directly from the voters. She would be likely to hold a much higher public profile than the traditional council leader. Directly elected mayors, so it was hoped, could make a new localism possible. For, since they would provide more visible and accountable leadership, they, rather than central government would be held accountable for the performance of the local authority. Ministers, so it was argued, would be more likely to devolve where there were clear lines of accountability.

Most local authorities, however, adopted the safe course of choosing the cabinet model. Between 2000 and 2008, there were just 33 local referendums, and they were successful in only 11 local authorities, excluding London. One local authority, Southwark, was required by the government to hold a referendum on the mayoral option, but the proposal was heavily defeated. Despite the seeming enthusiasm of the public for the mayor option expressed in opinion surveys, turnout in the referendums was generally low, even where all-postal ballots were held. In only one local authority area was turnout over 42%. The lowest turnout was in Ealing where it was 10%. Sedgefield, Tony Blair's constituency, rejected the mayor option in a postal ballot on a 33% turnout. There were, admittedly, signs that, as in London, the mayor option was succeeding in breaking down tribal politics. For, of the 11 directly elected mayors, 4 were independents. Nevertheless, the reform has clearly not succeeded to the extent that the government hoped. The government, therefore, in the 2007 Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act, removed the referendum requirement.[54] But that itself may not remove the political obstacles that lie in the way of the introduction of more directly elected mayors—public apathy and the hostility of entrenched local councillors. There is a case, therefore, for the government to require all urban authorities—unitary councils and metropolitan districts—to hold a mayoral referendum on the same date, so providing for a national day of debate on local government and galvanising interest in the topic; or even for the government to abandon the referendum requirement entirely, and legislate for mayors in urban authorities.[55] That would of course contradict the ethos of the reform of local government executive structures, that it should be for a local authority itself to decide what structure it favours. But it was by this method that directly elected mayors were introduced in Germany and Italy; and it may be argued that, paradoxically, central government intervention is required to bring about true localism.

It was widely thought that the government particularly wanted the great conurbations outside London to adopt the mayor option. There is some evidence that an elected mayor could help to create a sense of identity that would otherwise be absent in a large local authority. A political leader who was not a merely tribal figure but could be seen, as perhaps both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are in London, as "Mr" or "Ms" Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, etc. could help to regenerate a real sense of civic pride. If that happened, then, by stimulating local patriotism, the mayoral option could help defuse the sense of resentment in England which lies behind the "West Lothian Question". There is no logical answer to the West Lothian Question under a system of asymmetrical devolution. Nevertheless, perhaps the West Lothian Question is more of a political than a constitutional question. At present, resentment is merely simmering, but it could easily become more salient, especially if the government at Westminster comes to be dependent upon Scottish votes. But the experience of London has shown that the mayoral option seems to have stimulated a sense of belonging to London, a sense of "Londonness" which may even be stronger than the sense of Englishness. "For Londoners", an Ipsos-MORI report published on 7 April 2004, "Tired of London (Governance?) Londoners' Views Explained", concluded, "the city is a much stronger determinant of identity than any other local, regional or national boundary". Perhaps, therefore, the establishment of directly elected mayors in other large cities might weaken the salience of the West Lothian Question. There would be political leaders who could speak, not of course for England as a whole, but for some of the great English cities whose interests may have been ignored because they are unable, as Scotland is, to generate a powerful nationalist party.

8. A NEW LOCALISM: ELECTORAL REFORM AND DIRECT DEMOCRACY

Most local authorities, however, have chosen the safer option of a cabinet system. Such a system makes the governance of a local authority more transparent by bringing the machinery of party government into public view rather than hiding it through the fiction that the whole council can act as an executive body. But it can also sustain an outdated system of tribal politics in local government. If the new localism is to be a reality, that tribal politics must be broken down. One way of breaking it down would be to reform the electoral system for local councils, from first past the post to the single transferable vote system of proportional representation. For the first past the post system helps to entrench tribal politics in local government. Under this electoral system, many local government wards are permanently safe for one party, while a swing against a party nationally almost always means, as we have seen, that the local councillors representing that party are defeated in local elections. In single-member wards, there is no way in which the elector can distinguish between effective and less effective councillors. This means that effective councillors are doomed to defeat along with the less effective solely because the party to which they belong is unpopular at national level. Moreover, because so many wards are safe, many local elections are uncontested, and so electors find themselves disfranchised. In the year 2007, for example, in 30 out of the 312 English councils holding elections—nearly 10% of the total—at least one fifth of the wards were uncontested. In Wales in 2008, 102 councillors—8% of the seats on Welsh local authorities—were returned unopposed.

In many other English local authorities, there may seem little point in voting, since the outcome, under first past the post, is a pre-ordained clean sweep, with one party gaining nearly all the seats on the council even though its vote does not approach anywhere near to 100%. Such clean sweeps are much more likely to occur in local government than in elections for the House of Commons. The only parliamentary clean sweep in the 20th century occurred in 1931, when the Conservative-dominated National Government, with around 2/3 of the vote, won 554 of the 615 constituencies, and the opposition had too few seats to be able to scrutinise the government effectively. But clean sweeps occur quite regularly in local government. In 2007, for example, in East Hertfordshire, the Conservatives gained 47% of the vote, but won 84% of the seats on the council. Six wards, all with Conservative candidates, were uncontested. In Tunbridge Wells in 2007, the Conservatives won all the seats on 58% of the vote, the remaining 42% of the voters remaining entirely unrepresented. In Leicester, by contrast, it was the Labour Party which benefited in 2007, gaining 70% of the seats on just 39% of the vote. In Bolsover, too, Labour was the beneficiary in 2007, gaining 75% of the seats on 50% of the vote. The Conservatives did not put up any candidates at all, and so their supporters were in effect disfranchised.

Such outcomes cannot be good for democracy. To be effective, local administrations, like all governments, need a lively opposition to keep them on their toes and scrutinise what they are doing. One-party dominance, by contrast, means that there is no way to check the dominance of the party machine. Indeed, it may be argued that a permanent one-party local authority is almost as offensive as a permanent one-party state.

In national elections, the "wrong" side wins very infrequently. In the 26 general elections in the 20th century, just three—the elections of 1929, 1951 and February 1974—resulted in a party with the most votes winning fewer seats than its main opponent. In two of these cases—1929 and February 1974—the outcome was a minority government which was unable to survive for a full parliamentary term. Such perverse outcomes, however, occur, year after year, in local government elections. In 2006, for example, 6 out of the 32 London boroughs were afflicted by the wrong winner syndrome. In 2007, the party with the most votes failed to win the most seats in 15 out of the 312 English local authorities. In 2008, there was a particularly flagrant example in Cardiff, where the Liberal Democrats, third in the popular vote, gained more seats than the Labour and Conservatives combined, and therefore led the council. The consequence of such distortions is that, year after year, voters are not given the result for which they have asked.

The distortions of the system are by no means random. The clean sweep tends to benefit the largest party, the Conservatives in rural areas, Labour in the inner cities. The system thus exaggerates social and geographical divisions, making England appear more divided than in fact it is, by depriving the Labour minority in the countryside and the Tory minority in the conurbations of their political voice. The Labour Party is sometimes accused of being insufficiently sensitive to the needs of rural areas. If that is so, that may be because the Party has so few councillors in rural areas, while the Conservatives for a similar reason may be insufficiently aware of the problems of the inner cities.

The first past the post system is currently used for local government elections only in England and Wales. In Northern Ireland, the single transferable vote system of proportional representation has been used since 1973, while the Scottish Parliament provided for it to be adopted in local government elections from 2007. Scotland offers a striking contrast to England in the working of local government elections. In 2003, Labour had won 71 of the 79 seats in Glasgow on just 48% of the vote, and had won Edinburgh despite winning less than 28% of the vote, while in Renfrewshire, the SNP had won control of the council despite being outpolled by Labour. No such anomalies occurred in 2007, and there were no uncontested seats at all. Indeed, the average number of candidates per ward was over twice as many as it had been in 2003, since all elections were competitive. 74% of first preference votes helped to elect a councillor, as compared to 52% of votes in 2003, and there was a 9.5% increase in valid votes cast. The local elections in Scotland, therefore, helped to produce much more genuinely representative local government than local elections in England. In addition, the single transferable vote offered voters a choice of candidate from within their favoured party. For, under this system, in place of the "X" which the voter places by her favoured candidate in the first past the post system in single-member wards, there are multi-member wards and the voter casts her vote preferentially, "1", "2", "3" etc. The single transferable vote system thus combines a primary and an election, and it is a primary in which every voter takes part simply by casting her vote. There is no need for a separate primary election in which fewer are likely to participate, with participation in primaries frequently being restricted to party members. The single transferable vote system enables voters to vote across parties if they so wish, and to discriminate amongst members of their favoured party. So, for example, a Labour voter might choose between various Labour candidates, on the basis of who had been, or might prove, the more effective councillor. The system thus enables a much more discriminating choice to be made between candidates.[56]

It is perhaps not for the government to decide upon the best system for each local authority area, but for local voters themselves. Under the Local Government Act, 2000, 5% of registered electors in every local authority area were given the right to secure a referendum on whether their authority should have a directly elected mayor. It would be natural to follow this precedent by allowing 5% of the registered electorate similarly to secure a referendum on the local voting system. A change in the electoral system is, in my judgment, an essential precondition of the new localism.

The 2000 Local Government Act created an important constitutional precedent in providing for use of the initiative at local level. This was is the first time that voters were given the power to overcome the wishes of their local council, and to repair what they may see as a sin of omission on the part of a local authority which refused to hold a referendum on the mayor option. The initiative, I have argued, could be used to secure a referendum on a reform of the voting system in local government. But, there seems no reason why it should be confined to this issue. It may be argued that, if the voters are to be entrusted with deciding upon the voting system for their local authority, they might also be entrusted with decisions about, for example, the shape and size of their local authority budget and the level of the council tax, the organisation of education in their local authority, and a host of other issues. A wider use of the initiative would be a real example of "double devolution", that is devolution not merely from central government to local authorities, but from local authorities to the people. It would be a radical constitutional change, but perhaps one which could genuinely stimulate interest and participation in local affairs.

9. CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

In 1894, following the Local Government Act establishing elected parish councils, an Act which completed the great Victorian enterprise of establishing a representative system of local government in Britain, a Continental lawyer, Josef Redlich, observed that "England has created for herself "self government" in the true sense of the word—that is to say, the right of her people to legislate, to deliberate and to administer through councils or parliaments elected on the basis of popular suffrage—And this is the root of the incomparable strength of the English Body Politic".[57] During the 20th century, Britain moved far away from that inspiring vision. Indeed, by 2007, one authority could insist that "Local government is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a part of the British constitution".[58] It remains to be seen whether the 21st century will succeed in reversing that trend, so that local government becomes, once again, part of the constitution.

The demise of local government has not been without its political costs. Local government has the potential to be closer to the citizen and more responsive to her needs than national government. It is easier for the citizen to contact local councillors and officials than to get in touch with officials in Whitehall, who are protected from her by distance and by time. Local government, moreover, is predominantly government by lay people rather than by professional politicians; and government by many more people than can hope to find themselves returned to Parliament. There are at the present time just 646 MPs, but around 22,000 local councillors. Local government is in essence, as Redlich noticed, a form of self-government, and self-government ought to be a vital part of any well-functioning democracy, a school for participation and training in the arts of politics.

A strong system of local government can act as a powerful constitutional check upon the power of the centre. Strong democratic local institutions allow reforms to be adopted and evaluated at local level before being adopted on a national scale, after which they cannot be withdrawn without massive dislocation. For innovations to be successful, there needs to be honest feedback on progress. Centralised decision-making is unlikely to achieve this. Local experimentation, by contrast, is best placed to identify failure before it is implemented on a national scale. Pluralism, therefore, as well as providing for a necessary check on government, is also likely to lead to more efficiency in government. If knowledge derives, as Karl Popper believed, from a process of trial and error, then local government is best placed to ensure that such a process of trial and error actually takes place. One commentator described the move towards comprehensive education in the 1960s as not "inherently foolish". What was wrong "was the scale of the experiment and the absence of honest feedback on progress.—The widening gap between the self-congratulation of the educational establishment and the everyday experience of parents propelled educational reform to the top of Britain's political agenda—the common-sense belief that central co-ordination and direction are bound to improve performance remains ingrained despite the contrary evidence derived from the failure of planning in both government and business organizations around the globe. In an uncertain, changing world, most decisions are wrong, and success comes not from the inspired visions of exceptional leaders, or prescience achieved through sophisticated analysis, but through small-scale experimentation that rapidly imitates success and acknowledges failure". For public sector services, local government offers an excellent institutional framework which allows for such "small-scale experimentation" to take place.[59]

Perhaps the strongest argument for local government, and indeed for devolution and decentralisation in general, is that it can, at its best, stimulate a sense of local patriotism which can lead to real improvements in the public services. In a decentralised system of government, each local authority will strive to ensure that its own performance is better than that of its competitors. One local authority may say that, although it receives insufficient funds from central government, it has done wonders with its schools for children with special needs, which are far superior to those in neighbouring authorities. A neighbouring authority might counter that, although it does not receive sufficient funds from the government, it has done wonders with its nursery schools which are far superior to those of other local authorities. The emphasis is on local pride and achievement, on what has been done, rather than upon grumbling. Such healthy competition may well be the best way to raise standards in the public services.

Conversely, a centralized system institutionalises grumbling. For, if those who run a centralised system declare that their services are effectively run, that they have made major improvements, the government is always likely to respond that, if that is the case, it will shift resources to other services. Anyone in a centralized public service who trumpets success is letting the side down. The emphasis must always be, therefore, not on successes, but on deficiencies so that the government can be persuaded to provide more resources. This must have a demoralizing effect on any organization. An organisation which can never be seen to be successful, but must always be in the position of pointing out its deficiencies so that it be awarded extra funds, is not likely to stimulate that pride in performance which so often produces improvements in services.

At present, however, the place of local government, and of the new localism in the new British constitution, remains quite uncertain. For, as we have seen, there are strong political and cultural forces underpinning the centralisation of government. The hurdles which a policy of genuine decentralisation has to surmount are very high. But these hurdles have been erected not only by central government or by politicians ambitious to extend their power. They have been erected by the people themselves, whose professions of localism are often belied by their actions. The new localism can only be effective if there is a positive demand for diversity, a greater demand for diversity than seems currently to be present, in England at least. The Blair government may have helped create that demand, perhaps inadvertently, through its policy of devolution. For, if devolution is seen to work well in Scotland and Wales, it is possible that it will create a demand for diversity within England. A revival of localism must depend upon there being a greater willingness to tolerate local divergences than has been apparent in recent years. Nevertheless, popular demands for "localism" or greater local control are often combined with criticism of a "postcode lottery", criticism of the fact that standards are different in different parts of the country. Localism, however, is likely to intensify the postcode lottery. To give local authorities power is to give them the power to diverge from neighbouring authorities. It is to give them the power to improve services, a power that may or may not be used wisely. It is therefore inconsistent to seek local autonomy and yet to decry the "postcode lottery".

There can be little doubt that popular pressures during the post-war years have served to enhance rather than to counterbalance centralisation, and that it is, in the last resort not the politicians but the people themselves who are to blame for the demise of local government. Any reversal of this trend depends upon a radical change in popular attitudes. As yet, there is no sign of any such radical change. Until it occurs, the new localism is likely to remain little more than a rhetorical flourish.

November 2008

40 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business, 1986,Cmnd. 9797, 1986, para 3.4. Back

41 See, for comparative figures of turnout in local government elections, J.A.Chandler, Explaining Local Government in Britain: Local Government in Britain since 1800, Manchester University Press, 2007 p 321. Back

42 Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power, CM 7427, 2008, para 1.34. Back

43 Collin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, "The Demise of New Labour? The British `Mid-Term' Elections of 2008", The Forum, 2008, Article 7, p 2. Back

44 Chandler, Explaining Local Government, p 235-6, 242. Back

45 Information kindly provided by the French Embassy. Back

46 See the table in Chandler, p 321. Back

47 Communities in Control, para 4.25. Back

48 Michael Steed, "The New Style of Local Politics", New Society, 5 April 1973, pp 11-13. Back

49 Wyn Grant, Independent Local Politics in England and Wales, Saxon House, 1977. p 2. Back

50 Ken Young, "Party Politics in Local Government: An Historical Perspective", in Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business, Research Volume IV, "Aspects of Local Democracy", Cmnd. 9801, 1986, pp 104-5. Back