Memorandum from Professor Gerry Stoker (BOP 33)

 

1. I strongly endorse the Committee's decision to consider the issues around the balance of power between central and local government. This is not because I care a great deal about constitutional issues. Like most UK citizens I do not spend many hours reflecting on what exactly the respective responsibilities of central and local government should be. What drives me to this issue, and gives it for me great importance, is a concern about how enfeebled citizens feel about their engagement with our political system.

 

2. The 2008 White Paper Citizens in Control notes:

 

In the period from April to December 2007, only two-fifths (38%) of

respondents to the Citizenship Survey felt they could influence decisions in their local area and one-fifth (20%) of people felt they could influence decisions affecting Great Britain ( page 10)

 

These figures suggest a gap between the local and the national sense of subjective empowerment. But what I find really worrying is that while issues of scale, complexity and resources mean that influencing national decisions could reasonably seen by citizens as a massive task some 60% of us think that task is beyond us at the local level as well.

 

3. In a globalized and interdependent world it may become increasingly impossible to offer citizens a direct sense of empowerment which makes the importance of affording those opportunities at the local level even more vital. The reason why the balance of power between central and local government matters is that we need, if democracy is going to a living practice rather than a spectator sport for most citizens, to create a far wider set of opportunities for real decisions to be made at the local level that people care about.

 

4. The Labour Government since 1997 has been slow to recognise the importance of these issues. Its agenda for local government has been more managerial and focused on service delivery. And to extent the agenda has delivered local government is better managed, more strategic, and more joined up than ever before. It delivers many services with efficiency and many of its practitioners have delivered real and imaginative community leadership. The trouble is that citizens have been largely left behind in this managerial revolution.

 

5. The Green Paper of the Governance of Britain in 2007 shows the glimmer of some recognition that advances in local government competence and capacity may not be delivering much to invigorating our democracy. The Green Paper tells us:

 

Creating a more participatory democracy requires a healthy representative democracy at local level. It also requires citizens to understand the roles of central and local government, and who can be held responsible for the decisions and services which affect their lives

 

I agree with that statement but consider that the Green Paper rather underplays the role that local government might have in re-invigorating our democracy. It proposed constructing a concordat to set out the balance of central and local responsibilities. And that was delivered but it was and is simply not enough of itself to support a healthy representative democracy at the local level alongside new mechanisms of public engagement. Let's explore these points a little further below.

 

6. There are several reasons to be believe that a more robust and effective system of local representative democracy would benefit our attempts to re-invigorate our politics. The local is an arena that the less partisan more free-flowing politics that addresses issues that people care about could flower because doing what is right for your area or community is a positive basis for a more consensus building politics. Moreover because it is local it can offer an engagement that is accessible to all. That is not to say that all is well with local politics in England but the potential of local politics can be seen not only through abstract argument but it also demonstrated on a regular basis in practice.

 

7. To make space for a more vibrant local politics we need to take steps to change attitudes and practices in the Westminster and Whitehall village. We need to challenge the unthinking centralism that pervades the way national decision-makers respond to policy problems. What is required is not every more elaborate strategic partnerships where centrally-funded agencies and local authorities sign off on agreed plans and targets and rather something that breaks the mould. Options to be considered include a parliamentary device that would vet legislation to see if it was sufficiently respectful of localism. Or perhaps a Cabinet Office function for checking all proposals - legislative and non-legislative- to see if a localist solution had been considered before a nationally-driven policy option was chosen or another national body created. Another option is to establish create a new statutory body to protect and promote local government. It would be charged with making Whitehall proposals local government friendly, demonstrate learning from and the value of local solutions, engage in local -driven knowledge transfer. Panics about charging for bin collections would be replaced by an assumption that local government is designed to enable us to pilot solutions to challenging issues.

 

8. Some movement on local government finance is essential. A democratic system where all but 4 or 5 per cent of revenues are raised and allocated centrally through Whitehall is odd in comparative democratic terms and unsustainable. It is difficult to do a lot in the short run but perhaps one option is doing something more to give even more flexibility over the business rate and perhaps also hand over responsibility for allocating centrally collected funds to an independent body. Given the highly politically charged nature of local tax changes, as the poll tax fiasco demonstrated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the only long-term way forward, if substantial changes are going to be implemented, is to have a cross-party group charged with coming up with a consensus set of proposals for a better system of local government revenue raising.

 

9. Finally we need to return to the agenda of how to reconstruct local politics so that it works better in both its representative, direct and participative aspects. Here the agenda for change is vast and the range of institutional devices that could be brought into play developing on from our own and others' practices is vast. The options stretch from more elected mayors or electoral reform, through citizen initiatives or referenda to participatory budgeting or internet focused deliberation. Some of these options are reviewed in my book Why Politics Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and together with many colleagues in the political science community I am in position to provide evidence on what works and what does not, against a range of objectives ( see for a start the Political Studies Association Failing Politics? A Response to The Governance of Britain Green Paper, 2007)

 

10. But the real issue is not just the institutional design of mechanisms but the political will to create a system not subject to veto and control from political elites but rather designed with the citizen in mind. That for me is the real goal of shifting the balance of power between central and local government.

 

September 2008