Localism - Communities and Local Government Committee Contents

Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-48)

CLLR COLIN BARROW, CLLR STEVE REED AND CLLR RICHARD KEMP

1 NOVEMBER 2010

Q1   Chair: Good afternoon. If we could make a start to the first evidence session the Committee's taking into localism. I thank the three of you for your submissions, for coming along and for starting slightly earlier than we'd initially planned. That's appreciated. For the sake of our records, could you just indicate your name and the organisation you're here on behalf of?

Richard Kemp: I'm Councillor Richard Kemp. I'm from Liverpool City Council and I lead the Liberal Democrat group at the Local Government Association.

Colin Barrow: I'm Colin Barrow, the leader of Westminster Council.

Steve Reed: I'm Steve Reed. I'm the leader of Lambeth Council and I'm the deputy leader of the Labour group at the LGA.

Q2   Chair: Thank you very much. To begin with, could you crystallise for us the essence of what you believe localism to be and whether you think that your definition has some differences or contradictions with those of your colleagues who are here today?

Richard Kemp: Localism is involving people, wherever possible, in the decisions that affect their life, and devolving to officers, members and civil society - that's probably the easiest way to describe it - power to make those decisions at the lowest possible level, so we meet the real needs of local communities and individuals, not the perceived needs of people in Whitehall and town halls.

Colin Barrow: That's eloquent. I think we all believe that decisions should be taken as close to the people who are affected by them as possible. A localist is somebody who believes that that principle trumps the fear of a postcode lottery.

Steve Reed: I don't disagree with much of that. I'd add to it that I think we're looking at equalising the power relationship between the citizen and the state, or between pubic services and the people who use public services, so that citizens are able to become active shapers, rather than just passive recipients, of services. Localism is about putting in place the mechanisms that allow that transfer of power to happen and have meaning in terms of the services that people receive.

Q3   Chair: Are there any differences between you?

Richard Kemp: The differences are probably less between us, who believe in localism, and people in our parties, in either local government or central government, who don't.

Colin Barrow: I agree with that. I think there are many people who believe in localism some days of the week and not on others. Those who call for oversight of local government performance, for accountability and so on and so forth, having local government account to the centre, presumably following a uniform set of standards that has been appropriately worked out — those people are the enemies of localism. I'm not saying that they're not doing the right thing; I'm just saying it doesn't tend to localism if you have a uniform set of standards, set at the centre, to which we must pay heed.

Steve Reed: I guess the reason we've been asked here to speak on localism is that, within each of our parties, we are seen as people who are promoting that agenda. If you'd invited different people, you would have got a different view. I think it's fair to say that, within the parties, there are people who advocate and are pursuing this agenda, and others who pursue different agendas. I guess over time within local government, because we have a lot of places doing slightly different things, we'll see what works and what doesn't work. I think there are some differences between what the Government says and what the Government does on localism.

Q4   George Hollingbery: There seems to me to be a potential tension between what you would describe as "extreme localism", where there are no duties proposed for councils at all - they can do what they like, as they like for their areas and judge what is necessary - and I guess the most centralising form of localism, where the Government has broad outcomes it wishes and makes those very plainly known. It is then your job to deliver them as you see fit for your areas. Where do you sit on the spectrum?

Colin Barrow: There are different solutions for different areas. For example, I can see that child protection is probably one where instructions from central Government would be paramount. Policing, equally a matter of applying the law, is probably one where local considerations would be given more weight. I can see that with things like family recovery, which is our programme, which we have spoken about, about unifying public services around a particular family, local discretion is really important. I think what we need is not something that's absolutely localist or absolutely centralist, and I don't think any of us would be "ists" of either of those things. You have to think in terms of making public policy about which tools to leave at the disposal of local government and which tools to keep at the centre, in order to get the right answer for public policy.

Steve Reed: I think that's right. Localism shouldn't mean the absence of local government. Local government will have a continuing and very important role within this, because local government is the tier of government closest to our communities and therefore understands the different makeup of our different communities, and therefore is best able to work with those communities to allow them to achieve the outcomes they wish to achieve.

We've been running a commission in Lambeth — it's just drawing to a close now — on turning our council into what we call a cooperative council, so working more closely with communities to achieve that rebalancing of power that I was talking about. One of the issues that's coming through is what kind of capacity and support communities need to allow citizens to participate, regardless of their starting point. You don't want services to be captured by one sectional interest that may then try to exclude other interests, for instance, middle class capture or one faith or ethnic group that meant they may try to exclude other groups.

You need to understand what capacity or support communities need. You need to have reserve powers in place to intervene if things go wrong or if that kind of service capture happens. I think you need to have an element of clear democratic accountability within the equation, and elected councillors, rooted in their communities, offer that.

Richard Kemp: It also depends on which part of a service you're talking about. In the document that we wrote, we give five levels in which a conurbation is effectively governed. If we just take the police, for some things, such as dealing with serious crime and dealing with drug trafficking, you need a regional presence; you need big forces working together. That needs one type of governance. When you talk about the problems of parking, antisocial behaviour, liquor licences in my ward, I want to talk either to my PCSO or the inspector if they're going to the committee. I don't think it's as easy in most cases to say, "Health goes one way; police goes the other". It's which particular service you're dealing with at the time. We would assume that the key word is "appropriate". What is the appropriate level at which you can maximise engagement and maximise local knowledge? That will depend on which particular branch of the service you're trying to deal with.

Q5   James Morris: Councillor Reed, I think you said that sometimes there's a mismatch between localist rhetoric and what the Government means by it, or what they end up delivering. Were you reflecting on recent experience or the experience of the last 10­15 years, in terms of the mismatch between rhetoric and reality, and what we can perhaps learn from that experience?

Steve Reed: I think it's fair to say that, under both the present Government and the previous Government, it hasn't entirely happened. There's a lot more talk of it now that I see. The Big Society implies that there's going to be a lot more devolving of power down to local communities, but quite often they seem to be wanting to bypass local government and seeing it as just an obstacle. Some of local government is an obstacle, but local government at its best and most engaged can be one of those tools that enable communities to do the things they want to do. Simply bypassing it could have the impact of pulling the rug from under our communities and leaving them to sink or swim, rather than giving them the appropriate level of support that they will need to participate.

For instance, the Spending Review we have at the moment, which is hugely frontloading the reduction in funding to local government, I think restricts and reduces our ability to transform services in a way that could empower communities in that way and will, instead, push us towards simply closing services down and creating a space into which something else will come. I suspect that something else would be more likely to be the market than the community, because the market is in a better position straight away to come in with different offers.

Q6   James Morris: You see local government as being the prime mover of this whole agenda. You see that local government should be sitting right at the centre of this.

Steve Reed: I see local government as being a key partner for the community in achieving what they want to achieve. At its centre must be the community, not local government. Much of government is things that are done to people, rather than things that people can control. We've seen falling levels of confidence in public services like the police and the Health Service, despite improvements, as assessed externally, and significant investment. There's clearly a mismatch between what people perceive and what the Government believes is going on. Part of that is that we do things to people and communities rather than empowering our communities and citizens to make their own choices about the kind of services that they receive. In all of the rest of our citizens' lives, they experience choice now and, in public services, too frequently they do not. If we get that right, we can change the perception, but that is about giving the communities and service users the tools they need to participate in shaping them, and local government has a role to play there.

Q7   George Freeman: To move from the philosophic to the practical, it's invaluable having three experienced councillors who've led within authorities, I'd invite you to share with us, because this isn't a new idea, specific examples, possibly of the best one from your own experience, of localism in action, of councils making things happen and, alongside that, how you would see in your own authority this agenda playing out in the next two or three years. What would you assume — and you're free to do it in your own way — and what you would like to see going forward in terms of applying those lessons of best practice?

Richard Kemp: The thing I was most proud of in Liverpool was a programme called Include, where the council looked at the problems of Liverpool 8 or Toxteth, as you might know it, and said, "We can't deal with them all but there's someone who can." We invited a local housing association, which owns something like half the housing stock there, to be our agents in developing new responses, new engagement techniques, a whole range of new activities, to pull together the public sector. It's often a myth when you say, "There's not much money available." Actually, there's often lots of money, but it's in 57 different pockets with 57 different mission statements, that are often competing.

Now, in Liverpool's context, although there's been a change of control, that has been built on by the new Labour­controlled council, and they've set up a coalition of the willing in north Liverpool in three of the most deprived wards in the community. They're doing a thorough mapping exercise of everything that gets spent, everyone who works there. What outputs, what outcomes, are required? The older hands among you will say, "Wasn't that what the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal was all about?" And I say, "Yes". In Liverpool, we thought that was a really good programme. We're still doing it. It's a pity the Government stopped after five years.

Q8   George Freeman: If I've understood you correctly, the gist of that best practice is inter­agency working around the sense of Total Place. It's about getting the agencies together and saying, "What does this place need?" That can go on without the residents in that area.

Richard Kemp: No, because it's only by doing it at that level that you can effectively involve residents. Most residents are more intelligent than the rest of us; they don't want to spend their evenings in church halls or going to meetings. They'd rather lead their lives. If you say to them, "What about your street, your schools, your shopping centre?", they want to be involved in that. If you create a decision­making process for councillors and staff from all the agencies, then they can effectively interact with the local communities and the local communities, more importantly, can interact with them, but they don't want to be involved in the local development framework for the city. They do want to say what their shopping centre should look like, and it's our job to knit them together.

Colin Barrow: I've never answered a question as put. I'm going to answer the question twice, in two different ways. One is that we gave £2 million to all our councillors, not individually but collectively. We split it up by ward and we gave them £100,000 to spend in each ward, to be agreed between the three councillors and with certain oversight from the centre about doing it legally. They could pretty much get whatever they wanted. They could get a park bench. What that did was force councillors to do what only some councillors do, which is actually talk to their residents with the cheque in hand, saying, "I could do this directly now, this afternoon. Shall I do it or not?" What councillors often do is represent the position of residents to other people and hope that they get the right outcome.

In this case, they had direct power and that power immediately transmits itself to the people they're talking to, and a very helpful dynamic sets itself up and rolls out. It connects the councillors; it connects some residents. It doesn't connect all residents. It's a bit imperfect but it's better than the alternative, which is to retire to city hall and throw a service at a resident.

On the subject of Working Neighbourhoods funding, we have some very poor parts of Westminster, and we put in whole processes to create neighbourhood­driven renewal. They turned out to be pretty expensive and, when the money ran out or stopped, we were still stuck with these structures and, in thinking about the Big Society, we came to the conclusion that, actually, we could make a big step here. I took one of the participants in this programme and said, "Couldn't we redesign the services around what you might want?" She was a volunteer; she still is a volunteer, very experienced in all the ways of the public service. She said, "It's jolly nice to go to the office that you've set up to administer this Working Neighbourhoods funding and actually talk to the girls in the office, do the photocopying and do all the things that we do. You can't stop that office." I said, "No, what I'd really like to do is to give you £1,000 to do the photocopying. I'd like to send you down to Kall Kwick, and I'd like to pay for the coffee that you provide for your neighbours to come and do this with you. I'd like to spend some of the change on buying policemen, and filling in potholes and doing those things that you ask of me." She goes, "Okay, that's fine then." The office was costing £500,000 a year, which should have been spent on services that should have been commissioned by volunteers. They only need a little bit of support to get them to do that job, and then the rest will follow.

Steve Reed: I'll give you a slightly different model around youth services. The reason I think it's important we find a different way to deliver youth services is that those services are discretionary, not mandatory. The last time we had cuts on the scale we're about to see, in the 1980s, youth services were decimated. Some period after that, we reaped the whirlwind, with higher levels of disaffected young people, higher levels of youth offending and higher levels of violent crime, particularly in poor urban areas, so we need to find a different way to deliver youth services to protect them.

We had a programme running on an estate in Brixton called the X­it Programme. That's a very poor community. Something like 70% of people who live there would be workless. There are very high levels of youth offending. I would say the majority of young people living on that estate would be involved in gangs one way or another, and the most violent of those gangs would be involved in very serious levels of offending, including knives and guns. A lot of people on that estate would know somebody who had been shot or seriously hurt, for instance. Therefore there was a desperate need to tackle the high levels of gang activity.

The programme we ran there, the X­it Programme, worked as a partnership between the council, the police and the community, where older young people, who had previously been offenders, were trained to act as mentors to their younger brothers and sisters and people living on the estate who were starting to offend. By helping to set up and divert them to a range of other activities and programmes, where they could experience success or develop healthy interests, sometimes for the first time in their lives, we were able to reduce re­offending by young people by 72%, which was the highest level of any programme of its kind anywhere in the country. The key to it was the fact that it was designed and delivered by people in the community, who had greater credibility and reach into the parts of that community which needed to be got, in order to be diverted away from the ruinous course that they were taking. I say "ruinous", both personally and in terms of what it was doing to their estate.

At a second and related group, who I met very recently on another estate in north Brixton, I met a woman called Mimi Asher, who was the mother of a teenage boy who had started to get involved in a gang. They knew somebody from the estate who had been killed as a teenage boy. She was terrified, naturally, about the prospects for her child getting involved. She, working with other members of the community, particularly parents but not only parents, also a faith group and to an extent a local youth club, set up a range of activities on the estate, including a football team, cookery lessons, dance lessons, food sharing, talking to local shops to get them a bit of work experience, talking to a local college to get information locally about the courses available. Over the course of three years, those people got 60 young people out of gangs and got their lives back on track.

I don't know if you remember but, three years ago, on the front of the Sun, there was a teenage boy holding a machinegun. That boy is now positively engaged in this group and goes around the estate finding other young people and getting them out of trouble, rather than putting them into trouble. What I'm interested in is that we learn some important lessons from that. Councils generally in urban areas will spend several hundred thousand pounds targeting young people who become involved in violent youth crime of that kind. Mimi Asher and her group, with only one grant of £15,000, got the same number of kids out of offending as the council does. Could we use community­led commissioning to put the resources, both the money and the professionals available to the council, to put them at the disposal of the community, so that they can take decisions for themselves about what activities they need to provide to prevent youth offending.

Chair: We have to go and vote, so we will back in 15 minutes at the latest.

  Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

  

  On resuming—

Chair: I understand we have some time constraints on when we finish so, without wanting to curtail discussion, reasonable conciseness in both questioning and answers will probably get us through the wide range of subjects we want to try to talk about. I think you wanted to pick up on something that was said earlier, Mike.

Q9   Mike Freer: It's just a very quick one. The example of localism was fantastic, but it was based on a presumption of a well funded council having £2 million to pump prime Big Society. With a 28% cut in grant, how are you going to be able to pump prime citizenship without simply creating the vacuum that Steve mentioned that the market would simply fill, rather than citizens?

Colin Barrow: It's an unpleasant truth, but I think what we have to do is to move, in some cases, from provision by local government officers to provision by citizens commissioning services. Local government officers commission services upwards on behalf of communities. If we were to save some of those front­line people, who are working in communities doing this community development work, and replace them with volunteers and councillors and do it that way, we would spend a good deal less money. You might argue it would be less good, and that's an open question, but some might argue it's better. It is an open question, but it would certainly be cheaper.

Steve Reed: I think "volunteering" is slightly the wrong word for me. This is more about participation. The word "volunteering" implies somebody's doing it in their spare time, whereas "participation" makes it much more integral to how the service is developed. In the example I was giving before the Division bells went off, I was trying to explain how that community group delivered, for a fraction of the sum of the council's own service, better outcomes. If we can place more of our resources at the disposal of communities in that way and appropriately support the communities to be able to analyse their needs and then procure for them, you will get value­for­money savings. It will differ from service area to service area, and place to place, because the level of capacity will differ, but you will see that happen.

Q10   Bob Blackman: Moving along to look at the role that local authority plays in this whole localist agenda, traditionally local government is a delivery arm of central Government for a lot of the services delivered. How do you think the localism agenda is going to change that relationship, if at all?

Richard Kemp: I think it will make it fundamentally different. First of all, it hasn't always been that way. I first became a councillor in 1975, and then we ran all the housing; we ran all higher education. I'm not saying that's a good idea and I want to go back to it, but the fact is that Liverpool City Council was a mini­parliament. I think the most important thing is that central Government has to let go. Perhaps you could play a part in that. Every time a Minister answers a question from an MP about street cleaning and so and so, you weaken localism, because that MP should be raising the question with the leader of the council or through the local councillor. Central Government has to become much better at setting a range of outcomes that it wants, and making sure that its own delivery arms, and there will always be some delivery arms of central Government, are empowered to work at the lowest possible level with us to make sure that those outcomes are delivered with projects and programmes and partnerships that are relevant, not what some Whitehall warrior thinks are relevant.

Colin Barrow: I would agree with 90% of that. If we are to be a delivery arm of central Government, then install civil servants to do the job. You don't need us. We're messy; we're complicated; we're political. You don't need us. If you want delivery agents, hire them, because they are more effective. If you want local democracy, you have to do something different. You have to find the discretion, and then we'll go and play in that space and respond to local need. That's why you want the messy nonsense of local democracy.

Steve Reed: I think you should look at what is termed 'postcode lottery' as 'postcode opportunity'. This urge to try to make uniform everything everywhere prevents localism from happening. You need to carry a high level of risk within localism because, if you want to find out new ways of doing things that will work, you have to allow for new ways of doing things that will fail. As long as the failure isn't repeated but is learned from, you're creating by managing risk differently a broader space for innovation, and innovation is what we need if we are going to make resources work better for the communities that use them.

Q11   Bob Blackman: What are the risks associated with local authorities being bypassed down to community organisations directly by central Government?

Richard Kemp: A massive waste of money. A place like Liverpool has to function as a city for some things, as districts for some, and as neighbourhoods for others. If you simply had a whole series of people in the neighbourhoods they want to talk about, competing for resources without strategy, without direction, you would be chucking money away, in my opinion, and you wouldn't be giving people the service they want. Because a whole series of services that you or I might think are vital wouldn't feature at all. One of the most important things I do as a councillor is to be a corporate parent to children in care. I don't think in 30 years as a councillor anyone's asked me how well I perform that service. Some services just aren't in public understanding, and would drop out and have their resources cut.

Q12   Bob Blackman: Could I move that on a bit further? Steve, you've mentioned moving things down to community­based organisations. Clearly there's a risk over probity, accountability and making sure there's efficiency and all the rest of the great things we've talked about for local government for years. Do you see risks in that?

Steve Reed: I think there are risks in doing it and risks in not doing it. The example I gave you was about violent gang activity on estates, and we have had primarily the state or public services locally trying to find ways to prevent that, and it clearly hasn't worked, because the incidence of that kind of activity is increasing and not decreasing. What you really need is a partnership between the public services and the community that equalises power more. It's not taking the public services away and it's not disempowering the community. It's trying to get the two to work together. There are risks of the kind that you described, and I think we all need to be clear about, if we are handing more power and control to local communities and local services, what reserve powers we need for appropriate intervention and at what point. How will the contracting happen? There will need to be covenants around some of the contracting that enables communities to take control of assets or run services so that, if things go wrong, if groups are excluded, if services are failing, we can still intervene. I think if you allow for that to happen, you create the space for innovation. Innovation doesn't happen without allowing for some risk and, I would say, higher levels of risk than we currently carry.

Colin Barrow: Open control is not risk­free either. Giving £7,000 to a dance troupe and requiring them to have a hard rules policy, a health and safety policy, a community engagement policy, this, that and the other, and report on the same matters, will cost that group the very precious voluntary hours — it's not going to cost any money — in complying with all of that. It doesn't advance their dance one bit. It makes us feel better. Secondly, when we were spending some ward budget money, we wanted to buy a playground. We would go to the sports department, which says, "Ah yes, step into my office. That will be 30 grand. The people locally said, "Are you kidding? We must be able to get it cheaper than that." They go off, fiddle about and try to work something out. Sure enough, it comes back and is delivered to spec and to time for £10,000. Now, where's the waste of public money - the control or the freedom?

Steve Reed: We sometimes spend more monitoring groups than the grant funding that they receive.

Q13   George Hollingbery: It's actually a development of where we've been. I've been a councillor for far too long frankly, for 11 years, and I think I know what backbench councillors can do, I know what some of them can't do and I think I know what they're doing in five years' time if this agenda goes through, but I'm interested to know what you think they're doing. In a world where we're pushing services downwards, I'd quite like to know what you think you're doing in five years' time, what the whole shape of this looks like.

Richard Kemp: We've written a book about it called Cabinet Member for your Ward, which is actually designed for Lib Dems, but actually should be good for any councillor. We've left some copies with your clerk. We're thinking of doing one called Cabinet Member for your Constituency, because there are lessons here for Members of Parliament. Basically what we're saying is that traditionally councillors would go to the town hall, they'd go to the committee. They would raise questions, send emails, write letters. We're asking them to be local community leaders in a much more refined way. If there's a problem with antisocial behaviour in my ward, yes, of course there are some things in which I'd raise the issue higher. But the first thing I'd do is get together in my front room the local police sergeant, the youth officer, the parks officer, the person from the school - whoever is relevant to solving that problem. We've all been empowered to get on with delivering it, and so we become proactive in our community in a very different way. Some councillors have always done that. Many haven't, so it's a question of bringing people up to that level. Localism means that you can't just do things at the town hall, so that means we have to get involved and show community leadership at a lower level.

Q14   George Hollingbery: Steve came up with a lot of great examples about the fantastic things happening in Lambeth, but they were nearly all fantastic because local people had sorted them out, not the councillor.

Steve Reed: No, partnership.

Clive Efford: Can you just explain more of that to me?

Steve Reed: Yes. It doesn't work if the community is simply left to do it on its own. It's too exhausting for the community. The model I was giving you, I'll stick with that one since we already started on it. The work that was happening in both of those cases was because there were people who were very worried, scared, about the impact for their young people, their children, getting involved in gangs. They wanted to participate and do things to prevent that happening. Now, when they were left to their own devices to do it the impact was not as big as it became when the council partnered them and put more resources at their disposal, so they had more things to call on. If you went to visit them and speak to them, they would say, "Why do you have all of these detached youth workers over there, doing those things, when we know that this kind of activity works?" We're trying to find ways to give them more control over those detached youth workers, so that what they're doing lines up with the community's own understanding of its own needs. You could leave the community to do it itself, and just take the council's youth services away, but that's like pulling the rug from underneath them, because there aren't always going to be enough people with the appropriate skills to do all the things that need doing, but they will profoundly understand what needs to happen in the place where they live, because they live there and they see their children getting involved in these kind of gangs. What we're talking about here is a partnership, not de­professionalising.

Q15   George Hollingbery: I'm slightly confused about where the councillors are sitting in this though. It seems to me like there's going to be a lot of extra work for councillors. Are you going to get better councillors? Are you going to get worse councillors?

Steve Reed: That's not necessarily councillors. The question you asked is what we would become, what would councils become. If you pursue this model all the way through, the council becomes a big set of tools that supports the community doing the things it needs to do. There will be platforms; there will be compliance that groups need to meet to meet legal requirements, procurement rules that need to be gone through. Recruitment support potentially needs to be given, and IT platforms that they could link into. If you turn the council into platforms of that type, which you want communities to link into, then we need people who are more community facilitators and enablers to link communities in to the support systems they need and also, to some extent, to link the different groups in communities up together. Over time, you develop a different set of competencies that councils will need in order to facilitate the community doing the things it needs, and to facilitate them accessing the resources they need to access to make it happen.

Q16   George Hollingbery: Colin, what does the leadership do?

Colin Barrow: I must say, I find it very difficult to generalise about councillors in my own authority, let alone councillors up and down the country. I think that the ward chooses the councillors it wants. Those people are successful or not over time, depending on their ability to respond to local needs. Equally, those people choose the leaders they want, and those people are successful or not over time, depending on their ability to do the whole­area bit, which I don't want to repeat, which we were talking about earlier on. Hopefully, those of us who get into the centre of what the council does bring something strategic, in terms of marshalling that sort of localism for the city or area as a whole. Hopefully, the local councillor brings something local. They are very different from one another, and I don't think either is an endangered species, because they're both volunteers and, after all, that is what we're trying to help.

Q17   George Freeman: I'm very interested in your answers to the last two or three questions, because there seems to be a tension between, on the one hand, a localism which is a sort of benign local government interventionalism—"This neighbourhood has a problem. We need to put together a partnership"—and the other approach, which is: "We send a message out that what we are a tool box, and we're here for communities to reach out and use us to make things happen." It seems to me they are quite different models. They can coexist possibly, but I'm intrigued by the latter and the extent to which you send the message out that the old way of doing things, where you waited for your good local councillor, possibly all too rare, to hold a community meeting and make it happen. Those days are passing, and now it is "We want you, the community, to go out and hold those meetings. When you contact us, you'll find those resources there. You'll find those devolved budgets." Is that what you want to see more of, you intend to do more of, under this model?

Richard Kemp: I love to think that lots and lots of people want to get involved in lots and lots of things, and many of them do. My guesstimate is that about 5% of the population regularly volunteer. They do all sorts of things within the community, but they don't want to serve on a committee. They don't necessarily want to take responsibility; they want to do. Empowerment isn't just serving on a committee. Empowerment is saying, "I have a problem. I know who to go to and those people will respond to that, or they'll explain why." I'd love to think that there will be lots of people on committees but, actually, we know just from school governors, for example, there are very few schools that have elections for school governors. More people have elections for the chair of the parent/teacher association than the school governing body. A lot more people want to be involved in that practical, get­on­with­things activity than be a committee and take responsibility.

Steve Reed: I will try to be quick. Can I give you a couple of examples? I think the key to this is participation: why people would participate and what they expect when they participate. Two examples: we run a scheme called Community Freshview, which is about clearing up derelict spaces and land in a particular street or on an estate. It's too expensive for the council to come in and do it itself. Also, it's not a sustainable solution because what was derelict and then is flattened soon becomes derelict again, because people come back and dump on it. What we do now is ask communities to clear it up for themselves but with support that we will give them.

I went on Saturday to a pretty rundown playground on a street in Tulse Hill in Lambeth, and the community was there, painting it, building new things for the kids to play on, changing some of the slabs, but they had with them community payback offenders and people from the council's Street Care service to make sure they had the tools. There was a load of skips; they had brought spades, forks, fertiliser and plants. The community did it for themselves. In that case, it was a one­off. They all came out one sunny Saturday afternoon and they cleared it up, sorted it out, but they all now look after it because they feel a sense of ownership over that space, which previously they didn't have. The community gets a better facility as a result. That is a one­off instance.

We also have in Lambeth the country's only parent­promoted secondary school. That was a model that was enabled by the Education Act of 2000, which set up academies. No other borough took it up, because you had a significant funding disadvantage if you followed it. The way that it worked is a group of parents got together, wanting a new school for their children, because there wasn't one in the local area that they wanted to send them to. They set up the Parent Promoter Foundation in partnership and with support from the council. They then led a consultation in the local community. They helped appoint the governing body. They helped appoint the headteacher. They agreed the ethos. They agreed the physical design for the school, and built such credibility for the school that, despite not existing at the point where parents wanted to apply for which school they wanted their primary school children to go on to, it was already one of the most popular schools in the borough, because of the level of support that level of parental involvement had brought. You all know that high levels of parental involvement in schools are a significant determinant of the success of that school and its standards.

That was a much more extended type of involvement; it wasn't just one sunny Saturday afternoon. This took several years, and many of them are still intimately involved in that way. Participation is based on reciprocity, what you get out of it. It's not just altruism; it's because you perceive a need and, because that need directly affects you, your family or your household, you will get involved in finding the solution, because it matters to you that much. Those parents didn't become involved in a Parent Promoter Foundation because they fancied doing a bit of volunteering. They did it because they cared passionately about the education of their children, and they feared there wasn't a good enough place for their children to go and they wanted to be part of that solution. The council offered them the resources they needed to meet that problem.

Q18   Heidi Alexander: Richard touched on this, when you spoke about the political culture that exists and the fact that every time that an MP asks a question of a Minister about street cleaning, we take something away from localism. I just wondered, as a new Member of Parliament who sits in their surgery and probably has half the people coming to see them about housing cases, the need for rehousing, to what extent do you think the political culture in this country needs to change in order for the public to embrace localism and what you as local authorities can do to start changing that political culture?

Richard Kemp: As a councillor, I'm always delighted when people go to the Member of Parliament's surgeries, because it makes my life a lot easier. I come back to when I first became a councillor. People would come to us and we could make decisions. They might not like those decisions, but they know we made those decisions. People stopped coming, because we can't. I'll give you two very simple areas: licensing and planning, which I hope will be dealt with in the decentralisation and localism Bill. Half of my case work in my ward is planning and licensing around one particular street. We will have a petition; we'll go to the planning committee, which will say, "You're absolutely right. We don't want to pass this," but they then pass it because they know that the Planning Inspectorate will make a decision.

People say, "It's your bloody committee. Why don't you make these decisions?" and then they stop coming, and they stop coming for everything. The only way you can get involvement back at the local level is to make us visibly responsible, and then we have to account. At the moment, I can say, "Don't blame me; it's those people in Bristol. It's the Government." If you take away and really become localists, I have nowhere to hide, so people can vote me out on my merits.

Colin Barrow: We could do a lot by diminishing the notion of partnership, which is the confusion of responsibility for outcomes. The concept of partnership has muddied the waters of public administration, and I think it would be much clearer if we said, "The Government does this. The local council does that." They have complete discretion as to what they do in doing that but, if we want to take responsibility for it by guidance and so on and so forth, we take it back to the centre and we make up our mind what sort of arrangements we want. Then we can create a partnership locally between individuals who sit in a room, as Steve has eloquently described - or somebody's front room, if you will. They say, "You're going to do that, and you'll come back to me next week. You're going to do that, and you'll come back to me." That's partnership, but the sort of partnership that involves a lot of people sitting in committee rooms, passing the blame around and suggesting they coordinate something from somewhere, blah, blah, blah, fishcakes, doesn't work.

Q19   Chair: Isn't it that some of these things are black and white? Things are either at the centre, and central government does it and says, "Right, we going to give the guidance, that's it," or it gives complete responsibility. Are there no services where a halfway position might be more appropriate?

Colin Barrow: The more we can put into very clear boxes the better people will understand what's going on in their name. There will be some things that have to be done jointly. For example, if I'm going to try to get the Department for Work and Pensions to do the right thing with benefits in my area for some reason, I have to do that with their consent, and so we have to do that together. That's something that's helpful. Although it muddies the water a little bit, they can at least see what we're arguing for, because we'll make it clear, because we'll lobby them for it. That's not the sort of thing that I think responds to your question. How can you make clear who's responsible for what? If you make a decision, you're accountable for it. You gave approval for that 99­storey building in the centre of town and that's down to you. Back me or sack me.

Steve Reed: Colin makes a very important point there. Housing benefit is a good example. You have all of these different services like Jobcentre Plus, housing benefit and housing policy all doing slightly different things and going slightly different places. We're working up a model that we'll call "contract for place" that we can come back to Ministers with, which would allow us, within the outcomes that the Government wishes to achieve, to have more influence over those other public services in our locality, so that we can guide them, direct them, towards meeting the local priorities that we may have. That is a very important point you make.

Your point, Heidi, was about the political culture. I think it makes no sense to say you want localism, and then for the Secretary of State for Communities to say you must stick with the weekly waste collection, for instance. What if we want to go to community budgeting, and a particular community would rather have fortnightly waste collection in order to spend some of that money on some other service that is more important to them? That might be youth services; it might be filling in potholes because the roads are substandard. Why is the Secretary of State telling that community they can't do it, if they want to do it? That kind of knee­jerk making of pronouncements on TV, off-the-cuff, is very unhelpful towards achieving a localism agenda.

The other point I wanted to make is that we need to allow more innovation and that means a different approach when things go wrong. We shouldn't see things going wrong as a problem, unless it is repeated, because that shows a failure to learn. If something goes wrong, for most organisations, that is a very good way to learn how to do it better in the future. All of us as politicians, locally and nationally, have a tendency to jump on error, particularly when it is committed by our political opponents, in a way that prevents the people who work for us — council officers, civil servants — from wanting to experiment or innovate for fear that it might go wrong. By stifling innovation in that way, we fail to find new ways to deliver better services more efficiently.

Q20   Heidi Alexander: What do you think your role is in tackling the fear of the public about postcode lotteries? Steve's example earlier was a great example - clearly a very driven community­minded person has made something happen. To what extent is that replicable and what happens when there isn't that driven community activist in that area? What happens then? I just worry about the dependence on those initiatives coming from the bottom up and not having the more universal vision.

Steve Reed: That is a very good point. A point I made earlier is that, in order to make this work, we need to understand what capacity and support different communities need to participate in shaping those services that matter most to them. Some communities will have more capacity than others. I don't mean by that just articulate middle classes versus poorer communities. There is an awful lot of capacity in poorer communities too, although less experience of shaping large organisations to do the things they want. That capacity issue is there, and that's a role local government can continue to play to help build that capacity.

Your point about replicability is important as well, because local government has a tendency to try to scale up everything that it sees working in one community. It thinks, "If it works there, excellent; we'll turn it into a universal council service, we'll build this huge edifice and we'll deliver it everywhere because, look, it works." That very often kills it, because we don't understand properly the difference between scalability and replicability. What we can do is take learning in one place and use that to show other communities how it might work, and allow them to adapt it to suit their own local needs. There's a very important difference there: we mustn't always seek to scale; we must sometimes seek to spread and share learning.

Colin Barrow: We must celebrate when it works and not worry about that. The idea of, "How did they get away with it, they have a brand spanking new parent­led school, so we must stop that, because otherwise everybody will want one," is a pity, because that's a thing to celebrate and broadcast from the rooftops. Then other people will say, "We'll have one of those as well. How do we get one of those?" You put in place the same informal incentives. You say, "Yes, we're up for that sort of thing. If you're prepared to get yourselves organised, we'll be backing you. We're behind you. We're behind people who are trying to do the right thing," and that's what's so terribly important. Historically, we haven't been. We've tended to knock down the tall poppies and we should be saying "No, no, that's fine. If the school's important to you, that's cool. If licensing policy is important for you, that's cool. I don't care. Just get engaged."

Q21   George Freeman: I want to ask about the costs of localism and community empowerment. We've heard a lot of evidence, some of it suggesting that good localism costs money, in terms of making resources available, monitoring and providing the structures. Others take a different view—you, Steve, have pointed out that good localism saves money, for all the reasons you've said. I want to ask you whether you think it costs or saves money and, to the extent that it can do both, how you as councils should be free to manage that tension in a period of reduced public expenditure.

Richard Kemp: The Local Government Association, in its place­based budgeting report, which it gave to the Government, which has been accepted — although it's now called community budgeting — estimates that we can save between 10% and 20% on the delivery of public services, by joining them up in a substantially different way, scrapping some of the organisations, scrapping some of the levels, working back from outcomes — from outcomes to projects, from projects to partnerships, from partnerships to delivery — instead of starting with a load of organisations saying, "How can we spend £1 million?" We believe that money can be saved. It should be saved in good times, because the other problem is we don't believe that spending that money necessarily gives you the outputs and outcomes that you want anyway. The Total Place reports are littered, almost literally, with places where we spend a shedload of money and the outputs and outcomes are still poor. My view is we shouldn't waste a good financial crisis. Let's use the lack of availability of money to really power change in a way that we haven't been able to for the last 10, 15, 20 years.

Colin Barrow: There's nothing like a big organisation for wasting money. A vast organisation may have some economies of scale, but will also have some massive inefficiencies in the way it procures things. I'm not an expert on aircraft carriers, but I bet you that there are better ways of buying aircraft carriers than having the Ministry of Defence doing it. I don't know. What I'm saying is that big organisations do try to systematise things in ways that mean that they don't respond to local difference, so therefore you'll get one solution that will be very efficient to procure. As long as you know that the solution's the right one, it's the best thing to do it centrally. If the solution may be different in different parts of the country, city or area, it's much better to make that decision locally with a group of people who are sitting around in somebody's front room, as you put it, trying to work out how best to do it. They will know how best to do it. They will not want to do it by way of some vast centralised procurement department. They will want to do it local, and local will mean cheap.

Q22   George Freeman: You'd agree that local can be good and cheaper?

Colin Barrow: I do mean it can be, but it will be different in different parts. I would make the point that, if you're going to issue everybody with a biro once a month, the cheapest way to do that is central procurement, but you're not doing that in local government, because it's local and it's government.

Steve Reed: I'll add to that. I think we need to take a slightly broader view of value in this and take account also of social value. If we want a stronger civil society able to deliver some of these things, then we mustn't cut away some of the infrastructure, particularly in the third sector, which may help our communities to deliver the things that we want them to deliver. We also need to look at the longer­term value of what we're doing. I'll stick with the example I used, since I've already been developing it with you. If we invest more now in building our communities' capacity to deal with things like violent youth crime, it's an invest­to-save model, because we'll be putting the capacity in now that will enable them to reduce the levels of offending. We do not then hit, at some point in the future, the cost of dealing with the consequence of much higher levels of crime, and often very serious levels of crime, and we are more likely to get young people growing up into adults, who are productive members of the community contributing through the tax system, rather than taking through the benefit system.

Q23   George Freeman: I totally understand your argument that investing in communities can save long­term costs of community breakdown. Do you think those investments can be generated by localist savings and efficiencies in general service provision through the localist drive or do you think there's a net requirement for resources in order to unlock them?

Steve Reed: We're really talking about — extending it beyond that one example — councils being able to transform the way that they do their business, so transform the services that we deliver. I'm very worried about the frontloading of cuts in the way that it's happening through the Spending Review. We're getting nearly 50% of our cuts in year one, rather than having it equally spread over four years, as the Chancellor implied in his statement. That doesn't give us the space we need to invest to transform. It means that we're much more likely simply to withdraw from some areas of service provision. We'll still be taking choices locally, and I very much hope that we'll be able to find ways to build and support that kind of new capacity, where we need it, but our life has been made a lot harder by the way the Spending Review has been phased.

Q24   George Freeman: I think I'm hearing two on the left say localism can be done well on lower budgets, but I think I'm hearing you, Steve, say it requires more money to be spent to produce the savings.

Steve Reed: No, you could definitely save money and get better value for that money by localising those services. I don't think you'll necessarily have all of those savings by next April. It will take time.

Q25   James Morris: Am I detecting something that seems to be saying decentralisation equals the transformation of local government, in the way that local government is organised at the level of delivery? There seems to be some commonality that says, if we're going to decentralise power, what that means is we'll have a completely reshaped idea of what local government does. That might mean slimmer bureaucracy and a kind of satellite delivery. Is there commonality on that?

Colin Barrow: I suspect there is. I think it's shooting the notion of the delivery agent in the head. If we can get that idea killed and have the idea that we're in a local environment, trying to create local services for local people, different ward by ward, never mind across the country, but with some overarching community strategy, that's the model. If there is no vestige of the reporting up to central Government left, all those people who follow Audit Commission guidelines — the umpteen pages of guidance and so on, which we all complain about all the time — if nobody's looking at that stuff but they're doing the right thing in their local community, in accordance with professional guidance from institutions, if it's health, perhaps a medical institution, you are in a different world. It will be a world where things are very different area by area, where Ministers won't be able to be held to account; there won't be a delivery agent but there will be local democracy and local engagement. That's when you get the cheapness that we're alluding to. The way I see it is you take out 100 and have to put back 20 into building the sort of structures that Steve is talking about.

Steve Reed: It's different from service to service as well. In some services, you'll be able to make efficiencies very quickly. For others, where you need to transform, you may need some upfront investment in order to allow that transformation to happen. I don't think we should see this as rolling back the state. It's more changing the role of the state, at the local level.

Q26   Clive Efford: You've all given good examples of what you're doing now to engage with local communities, so what's getting in the way of localism?

Richard Kemp: Central Government for one thing, so that's why we were very keen to come here and enlist your support today. Until recently, Liverpool City Council had 1,100 key performance indicators, and it had some additional ones, because we had European funding working to a different financial year. That very much constrained what we did. We were doing things to meet the report. We were doing things to meet the Audit Commission's visit. We weren't doing things that we knew our communities wanted, because we were too often constrained. Our plea over the years has been: if you believe that local government should exist, let us have the powers to do things in our own area in our own way, and be accountable to our electorate. If you don't think we should exist, just put in some more bureaucrats and put a commissioner into Liverpool, Westminster or Lambeth, and let them do it.

Q27   Clive Efford: Councillor Barrow and Councillor Reed have both given very good examples of where the council has had the flexibility and the wherewithal to respond to specific local needs, which has resulted in efficiencies and also the targeting of important service areas, like youth crime. If you can do that under the current system, where's the problem?

Colin Barrow: There are several things. They are trivial. They are small. The big stuff—we spend £250 million of net budget every year. I would have thought the amount of money committed to the sorts of thing that we've been talking about, what is actually spent on this area, might be £2 million­£5 million. The amount of money that's spent in Westminster is £2 billion by public servants. It's small, is the real answer to your question. We think it's scalable or replicable, to use your word, Steve. We think it can be made bigger. We think, for example, that by taking Family Recovery and capturing the costs that we're saving for the Department for Work and Pensions, for kids, the police, for the Home Secretary and for Justice, we think that there is a case for them to come and invest with us, and we will save them money. Then we will have more money in that pot of things that is doing good for the whole of the public sector. That is public service entrepreneurialism and it will save more money, and it will be different in Liverpool from what it will be in Westminster.

Q28   Clive Efford: You seem to be saying that the structures that are in place for local government working with local communities are fine, but that the problems lie in the people who sit on your back from central Government.

Colin Barrow: Telling 2,500 people how do to their job, yes, absolutely.

Steve Reed: I think it goes a bit beyond that. We've been for the last few months holding a cooperative council commission to try to work out how this might work for Lambeth. The biggest single hurdle that has come up is procurement rules. The third sector and the community sector are both saying, very loudly, that our procurement rules mean they can't compete on an equal footing with the big providers, because they simply don't have the capacity to do the things that are being required of them. Some of that will be EU procurement rules. Some of it will be the national rules and compliance that we're requiring. Some of it is competition rules. You can see the reason those are in there, but community groups can't participate if those hurdles are in the way, because they don't have the capacity to be able to get around them. We might need to look at procurement and models that will allow communities to participate.

Q29   Clive Efford: You've set out a proposal for providing local services through cooperatives.

Steve Reed: No, we use the term "cooperative council" in the sense of working together, not just setting up cooperatives, so it works differently in different service areas. I think there is a bigger role for cooperatives and mutuals in things like housing, cooperative housing for instance, but that Parent Promoter school was a different type of partnership; it wasn't a cooperative.

Q30   Clive Efford: Can I just go back to the example you used about responding to the local community on knife crime? Under your localism structure, as you envisage it, how do you guarantee that you respond to that particular person's ideas and initiatives in that structure — i.e. that somebody else's bright idea didn't get funded?

Steve Reed: What we're going to do, Clive, is set up a series of pilots in the new year across a broad range of different services to try to tease out exactly how the model can work. For that particular example I used for youth services, for none of this are we having to reinvent the wheel. There are generally examples elsewhere that we can draw on. The innovation is in trying to apply it across a much wider set of services in one place. For youth services, do you know Turning Point, the organisation led by Lord Victor Adebowale? They have a model for community­led commissioning, which I think we will be able to draw from. Srabani Sen heads Contact a Family, which is another organisation that operates a model of community­led commissioning; we can draw from that. It involves putting support into the community to help the community widely express what it sees as problems, and then how those problems can best be addressed.

Q31   Clive Efford: Last question: other service providers that work within your communities, how do you envisage them being part of this localist structure on health, etc?

Richard Kemp: I gave an example before to show that organisations have to empower to the lowest possible level. The trouble we have, whether it's a local strategic partnership across the whole of our council area or down in our districts, is that at the moment the quangos, the Government Departments, are still reporting to Whitehall. We will talk to the local manager of Jobcentre Plus, and they'll say, "I'd love to do that but…" We can talk to local health, "I'd love to do that but…" You have to release some of that power so that local people working together — this isn't a land grab by local government. We're not saying, "Give all the money to us and all the power to us." We're saying, "Let us create the partnership," in our case in Liverpool, "in which those people with local responsibility can get on with the job of meeting local priorities with local solutions." That doesn't mean to say you won't monitor it; it doesn't mean to say you won't set targets, but it will be local monitoring and local targets, which mean something to all of us.

Steve Reed: I can give you a health example, since you raised it, Clive: personalised budgets for adult care. Care is slightly under 50% of our total budget in Lambeth — children's care and adult care. We've got an expanding demographic and reducing resources. We're desperate nationally to try to find a solution to that problem. We have increasing numbers of people taking control of their care through having a personalised budget, so they receive the value of the care package they receive, then they choose for themselves the outcomes they want to achieve and how they are going to achieve them, and very often they chose completely different services from those that were being provided by the local authority.

We're starting to see groups of budget holders forming together in what you might term "micro­mutuals of purchasers", because they have something in common - a similar disability or vulnerability, or live in the same geographic place, or are from a similar faith or ethnic background. Whatever it is, they form micro­mutuals, and they use that enhanced purchasing power to obtain the services that they need, either from external providers or sometimes from within the community. If you're looking for some kind of day­care and you're a Muslim woman, you may prefer somebody from your community to come and deliver that service, rather than somebody who is sent by the care agency. That then forces a shift in the market, by pushing the creation of micro­mutuals of providers as well, within the community.

You completely change the care market, but we're seeing already that people are getting better outcomes in terms of what they want to achieve from their care package, at lower cost. Within care, it works in that way. What we need to do is find the mechanisms to support budget holders to be able to find the kind of care that they want, because very often the level of vulnerability makes that different for them. There is a cost to us in supporting them to be able to make those choices, but after that we may realise cost savings, and they may realise improvements in the quality of the service they receive.

Colin Barrow: Once the GPs commission care for their people locally, this whole deal, the cost, will come right down. It will go up if they commission possibly without regard to the total amount they have to spend in a particular year — that can happen. If they're smart, they'll hook up with local government, because we can reduce the cost of long­term conditions faster than they can. Therefore, that micro­local decision, the wisdom of crowds of clinical prescribers, will make the ring­fenced health service cheaper.

Q32   George Hollingbery: Chairman, just give me 60 seconds, very quickly. Going back to the constriction of central Government, you're going to get less ring­fencing, much less ring­fencing, which is coming down. Would you abolish duties for councils? 20 seconds each. In other words, you have completely free reign. You get a budget; you do what you like.

Richard Kemp: Yes. Our duty is to serve our people. Our people would decide whether we do that.

Q33   George Hollingbery: Would it work over the whole country, in all councils?

Richard Kemp: It takes time. We don't pretend that all local government is ready for all this now. There has to be a process of taking local government there. When I close, I'll be making an offer to help local government get there, which I've shared with the Chair.

Colin Barrow: I think the purest answer to that question is "yes". What you have to do is be very clear about what you're delegating local authorities to do: in other words, no duties, because you just say, "There's only that much money," but then you have absolute control over that much money. The bit of which you have shared control, you're clear about that too.

Steve Reed: The de­ring­fencing would be a lot better if the grants weren't being reduced so much before they were rolled in, but the point there is right. The broad duty we will need to meet is that the Government is entitled, of course, to set the outcomes they wish to see achieved but, through the general power of competence, will the Government really allow us to get on and deliver those outcomes in the way that we see will best meet those needs for our communities? Councils will do it differently if you don't dictate to them how it should be done.

George Hollingbery: That's three basic yeses. Thank you.

Q34   Mike Freer: I confess to being a Big Society sceptic. My worry is, what will stop those who shout loudest simply dominating the vacuum or the gap that's created, leaving behind the hard­to­reach groups or the less vocal groups?

Colin Barrow: Of course, we get that every day. You know perfectly well; you did it until last week. You do have to pay attention to that stuff; there is no substitute for actually doing the work. If you just sit and listen to the people who shout loudest, eventually you will get the wrong outcome. That's what we're for. There is a tendency to listen to the people who make a noise, but actually you can balance that out by paying attention to what's going on in your community, and that's our job.

Steve Reed: That's one of the real reasons why this agenda should not bypass local government, because local government is in the best place, of all tiers of government, to ensure that we can get to those people who otherwise would be excluded, because they can't shout loud enough, for whatever reason that might be. The example I gave you of those tough inner­city estates where communities were starting to take action for themselves over youth services, those weren't your usual attendees of committee meetings. They're certainly not the famous "sharp­elbowed middle classes". These are people who themselves are generally workless and generally deprived in all sorts of ways, but they still perceive the problem and, being part of the community that's suffering it, they can see more clearly, I would suggest, than we do, who are more remote, what needs to be done. The trick is how we give them the capacity and the support they need to achieve the outcome they want.

Q35   Mike Freer: As long as they come to the right conclusion.

Richard Kemp: Localism must include a democratic governance element. Just to give money and resources away isn't governance; it's anarchy.

Steve Reed: Those people living on those estates will probably see themselves as better placed to come up with solutions than any of us.

Q36   Clive Efford: What about if national Government wants to deliver social housing in an area where there are expensive local land values, and that is not in keeping with the views of local people?

Colin Barrow: The central Government that chooses to do that should simply purchase the land and provide the social housing.

Richard Kemp: And be accountable.

Q37   Clive Efford: Should it use local authorities as the vehicle for it?

Colin Barrow: If they want to do that, and the local authority doesn't, then they're free to go and buy land and make it happen.

Steve Reed: Do you know, I'm really relieved that we've finally found a point of difference. I think it's very important that Government should be able to set big objectives like the amount of social housing you want in an area. If you allow different borrowers in London, for instance, to set different levels for that, then you'll end up simply ghettoising poorer people in a smaller number of boroughs. We need to live, as a city, in a city that is cohesive, and where poor and rich people can live together. It's important that we do that.

There are other models of delivering housing as well. We don't in this country have enough cooperative housing. Shared equity models make up 0.6% of our housing in this country. In Sweden, it's something like 18%. They are a fantastic way to create mixed­income communities, to allow people from fixed or low incomes to meet their aspiration to own without being sucked into sub­prime lending and can elide that sometimes corrosive divide between tenants and leaseholders living on a single estate.

Q38   Clive Efford: It's a curious form of localism that national Government just comes straight in and does it direct.

Steve Reed: I think national Government should be entitled to set outcomes that it wants to be achieved, and then leave local government to deliver them.

Richard Kemp: It comes back to accountability, doesn't it? If you want to do something like that, central Government should come in and explain why. There are many arguments that you can make where people will accept more housing and more social housing, when it's clear for their children, when it will enhance their community. The trouble is, if it's imposed, it's different from it being negotiated by central Government.

Q39   Bob Blackman: In your evidence, I think all three of you have actually indicated that there may be a limit to the number of people who are willing and able to offer their service in the form of localism. What do you think the implications are, if government — central Government or local government — gets it wrong and overestimates the amount of effort people will put in, in terms of a localist agenda?

Richard Kemp: I think we will correct the mistakes at a local level, because we're more practical and pragmatic. As I said before, I think lots of people want to be involved. Even more people want to be consulted and even more people want to know what's going on. It's our job to bring together that coalition of the willing in an area of those who want to take it further, but that must be tackled by pragmatism. At the end of the day, libraries will not be run by volunteers; they'll be run by librarians. We've got to make sure that volunteering and support is complementary to, and not replacing, basic services.

Colin Barrow: I think it's worth pushing this envelope. This has quite a long way to go before we run up against those buffers. I don't think we'll know until we try it. We must be allowed to move in that direction, as far as the capacity will allow, and then more capacity will arise. You're reforming. You're changing the world. The prize is that you get real civic society, where most people actually do feel they're responsible for their local area. When people don't even vote in local elections, when people don't feel that the society they live in is something they control, the country loses a lot, and it loses it indirectly. They say, "Antisocial behaviour is something I don't control." "The lights going out is something I don't control." "I don't control anything. They don't give us nothing. It's nothing to do with me." They're alienated from society and, if they're alienated from society, they're up to no good, eventually. That's not helpful. We have to start to go back and start to say we want to see people being members of a community, members of a society, and not mind too much if it's a bit messy, if it's a bit awkward, because the prize is enormous.

Steve Reed: We shouldn't just see this as volunteering - a point I tried to make earlier - but as participation. People will participate if they feel a big enough need that they want to be met, and that they see themselves as having a role in helping to meet. The example I've given, we're pushing at that. We don't have a lack of people who want personalised care budgets, so that they can have more choice over the services that they're being given. We're not offering it enough in my view. The block isn't coming from the lack of will in the community; it's coming from a lack of service providers ensuring that those personalised budgets are happening.

A smaller example: the community set up a programme in one neighbourhood. They got the neighbours together to bulk-buy insulation to cut household bills and reduce CO2 emissions. They expanded it into a community food­growing scheme. It had huge benefits, not only in the areas that they set out to achieve but also in creating a greater sense of community cohesion and lowering crime as well. We took one of the women who set that up and invited her to come and work for the council a day a week for a year to try to set up similar schemes elsewhere in the borough, and asked her to see if she could set up six in different communities. Within nine months, she had 50. There wasn't a lack of desire on the part of the community to participate. It's just that they weren't feeling empowered or enabled to do the things they wanted to do. We pushed that door slightly ajar, and it was thrown wide open by the community.

Q40   Bob Blackman: Can I just go to this very quickly? If you look at, for example, school governing bodies, which have been given more and more power, it's more and more difficult then to get people to take on the roles of school governors, across the country. As you empower people, often it can have a negative effect, because they say, "Wait a minute, I didn't sign up for all this." Is there not a problem in that respect?

Colin Barrow: I wonder how much power they have. I think they have a good deal of responsibility. I'm not sure they're necessarily free to depart from the admissions policies that have been given to them by other people, or free to depart from employment procedures. All that stuff that comes down in that tonne of paper that descends upon you, as soon as you become a school governor, does not encourage the view that you're free as a bird to design the sort of school that you want.

Q41   Chair: Would we want them to design their own admission policies? How could you run an education service in the city if every school had its own admission policy?

Colin Barrow: I'm not making that argument. I'm not making the argument necessarily. I'm not qualified to make that argument, but the argument I'm making is the empowerment argument. Since governors are so free, why aren't there more volunteers? They're not very free. That was really the point I was making.

Q42   James Morris: When we had the Secretary of State here, we were discussing the rationale for the abolition of the Audit Commission, and he said that he wanted to create a series of armchair auditors. What's driving the Government's thinking about accountability is transparency and the provision of information to the public. Do you buy into that?

Colin Barrow: Yes. We are about to go — it's taking a little while to get organised — but we will embrace that. It is going to be uncomfortable, I think, to have all our expenditure scrutinised. Local councillors are going to find themselves in a position of agreeing with the public and saying, "I wonder why we did do that." However, that's something that we have the power to straighten out, but it's a good thing. We're very much supportive of that.

Richard Kemp: We have found another area of disagreement, fortunately, as we come to the end. I don't believe that most members of the public, no matter how we bring them together, are interested in most of the services that we provide. You have a lot of services that are very well scrutinised, but no one will say, "Oh, good, I haven't been ill. That must mean that Environmental Health is working correctly." We have lots of hidden services that people don't even know they take advantage of, because we just do it. While I very much accept that people can be used a lot more, that we ought to capture their experiences more and do something with them, that's all very well for the services that people want to be engaged in, but perhaps not the other 80% of the services we provide.

Steve Reed: Information is key to accountability, but I think that scrapping the Audit Commission loses a pretty important set of information that residents were using before, which is how their council compares to others, in terms of the services it's providing. That information drove improvement over the last 10 or so years to a level it never achieved in local councils before, to the extent that we're now the most efficient part of government, and yet the Government is cutting local government more than any national Government Department. There needs to be information for residents. Another key point here is that localism is really about control of resources, and particularly money, and if we don't find means of handing that control to people through information, but also through being able to determine and choose how it's spent, localism won't work.

Q43   James Morris: Where we have exceptions — I think Councillor Barrow talked about children's services for example — how in this decentralised model do we deal with very, very serious service­level failure? Is that something where we're just talking about democratic accountability or do we still need to have some mechanism for ensuring that, where service failure occurs, there's ways of dealing with it, which are not just to do with providing information locally?

Richard Kemp: The Local Government Association has put together an offer, again to government but particularly to local government, about how we deal with that. Some councils do fail and will fail. Some departments do fail and will fail. Our approach is what we can do within the family, because the best way to deal with the problem is to get experts from within the sector to help. Our offer is to do that but, if a council clearly won't be helped, where services are still very poor by any stretch of the imagination, then the Government needs to have at minimum a step­in power of enforcement, and that's the proposal. That should be very much the exception, rather than the rule.

Steve Reed: The way that we dealt with the Baby P scandal actually made the problem across London, and I suspect elsewhere, worse, because it became impossible to recruit social workers, because they were so denigrated and pilloried because of failings in one council that we put a lot of other people at risk by having to increase the case workloads of existing social workers and being unable to recruit people to deal with that rise in caseload. We need to find ways as politicians to deal much more assertively, and confidently but sanely, with crises of that type, when they happen.

Q44   James Morris: What do you mean by politicians being more assertive? What kind of thing are you thinking about?

Steve Reed: The way that we all, as politicians, reacted to the Baby P scandal prevented us from being able to recruit social workers, and that can't be in anyone's interest. I think a more measured response to it, while recognising absolutely the scale of what had happened, would not have caused that problem and would have meant that other vulnerable people weren't put at risk by the lack of social workers.

Colin Barrow: The secret of intervening in that sort of incident is to have it done by peers rather than by superiors. If it's done by peers, both professional and political peers, they understand the pressures that the individuals are under, and they're able to make intelligent recommendations for the avoidance of such problems in the future, knowing the messiness of the circumstances in which these people work. That is something I'm sure that social workers and politicians alike would respect, as opposed to the slight tendency to encourage — I make no comment about the individuals; I'm talking about the principle. There is a tendency to say, "In an ideal world, it would be better if…" That translates into guidance, which translates into a different fault dynamic, which isn't getting the best outcome.

Q45   Chair: I suppose it goes back to the previous issue, doesn't it, about culture? The culture of the media and the culture of public opinion influences the culture in the House of Commons, which makes it impossible for any Secretary of State to actually allow that process to happen. They've got to stand up and make out they're actually accountable and responsible for all these individual happenings.

Colin Barrow: It comes back to the point, Chairman, about the clarity of responsibility. Is Haringey, in that case, empowered to act independently, and how did it exercise that judgment?

Richard Kemp: If you look at the councils that over the years, the last decade, have been the worst councils in the country - and I think of places like Hull, Walsall and my own council in Liverpool - they have all been improved from within the sector. Some help has been given by benchmarking — again, the Local Government Association will set up benchmarking. Being able to say, "Why do they do that better, what's the cost there?" is very useful, but you can't impose improvement. You can create improvement from within the sector, by working together.

Q46   Chair: We talked quite a bit about place­based budgeting, Total Place and how that can probably provide more savings, efficiencies and effectiveness than almost anything else, as part of this agenda. We've also discussed whether the Comprehensive Spending Review acts as a catalyst to force change or an impediment to change, but are you pleased or slightly disappointed that the Government's moved to community budgets. Do you think they're rather lacking in scope and lacking in numbers, given that only 16 councils actually have them?

Richard Kemp: There are 30 councils because, for example, the 10 Greater Manchester authorities are classed as one. We don't underestimate the difficulties in introducing localism. We can do all the right things within our councils, but you have to change whole systems within departments; you've got to change the culture of the way people operate. I am satisfied that those proposals are a good start. If I thought they were the end, I would be extremely disappointed. These are going to be actioned proposals. We will learn from the projects as they go on, and we will spread that learning quickly. Our challenge to central Government will be: this one is working, so why don't we do that service everywhere? Why don't we take the lessons we've learned to do another service, so we build it up? If it's just an end in itself, it's a poor one.

Colin Barrow: I think it will succeed or fail depending on the qualities of the individuals in central government Departments who are assigned to manage it. As long as these people are revolutionaries who are interested in seeing whether there is something new that can come out of this cooperative budget, and seeing whether you can get better outcomes with less expense — people who want to actually find out whether this works — it will work. I know it will work. We've demonstrated it will work. We've published papers on the subject: it will work. But if the people assigned to it are minded to keep all this under wraps and make it Yes Minister, then it won't.

Q47   Chair: That's as individuals, but how can you make it work when the Department of Health is ring­fenced and doesn't want to really engage with it, when the police commissioners are going to be doing their independent thing, when free schools can come in and take a chunk of education money and not be joined up into the process? We haven't moved much further than Total Place, have we?

Colin Barrow: I thought that the Government had specifically assigned money, £1 billion, if I remember rightly, to encourage local authorities and health commissioners to work together to get a good outcome from joint working. That is for them to decide, but that's what the Government intended to do, so the Government is actually requiring us to work together and putting some money behind it. That's a good thing. In terms of justice and policing, they are already on this page, knowing that local government can offer something to integrated offender management and police governance so, in a way, the door is already open a bit. What we now have to do is kick it open and say, let's try, with some good authorities and some good different examples, to see whether it can be done in a way that can be rolled out nationwide in a couple of years. That's quick for this sort of reform. A couple of years is ambitious, and I salute the Government for its imagination.

Steve Reed: I think you're right there and we should be pushing for this to happen harder and faster, not least because of the scale of the funding reductions that we're seeing coming through now. The part of government that is least playing ball on this is national Government Departments, I think. Very often, it's because they can't always do it because they don't always hold information about their spend for a particular locality, in a way that makes any sense to try to pool their budget in a Total Place or community budget model. We've had a number of Total Place pilots. Heidi will be familiar with the one in Lewisham. I think we could be a bit bolder and go faster with this now, and expect it to start to generate savings that we could learn from elsewhere. That would be a good one to push.

Q48   Chair: Richard, you just wanted to make a point.

Richard Kemp: I just want to make an offer to you from all three of us, which probably means the end of our political careers. We have circulated a statement that says we're happy to work together. There are some differences; we're not going to disguise that, but a lot of what we want is the same. We don't underestimate the difficulties that some councils will have in introducing localism. We certainly don't underestimate the difficulties that Ministers will have. I've worked with people like John Prescott and Nick Raynsford who wanted to really embed the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. It didn't get embedded. What we're prepared to do is to work together in councils, in central Government and in our own political parties to spread localism, and we suggest some things.

Finally, we've suggested 10 key questions. I think you've only answered five of them, so I think we'd better get out fairly quickly. We don't want to tell people what localism should be, but we do suggest that there are 10 things and, if they answer that, they should be able to do what they want to do. Our offer is: to be helpful to you; to give more evidence if you want it; to take you out, if you want, to see some of the things we've been talking about, because seeing is believing. I'll add on at the end we'll do a Cabinet Member for your Constituency book as well.

Chair: Thank you very much. Certainly in terms of visits, it's something we would want to do to get out there and have a look at examples. That does help inform us in our work. I thank the three of you very much indeed for coming and giving us your virtually unanimous views on most questions. We found one or two points of difference in the end. Thanks very much.

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Prepared 9 June 2011