Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Pic: Okko Pyykkö - click for attribution.

Anthony has beat me to a response to the new Green Paper today, so I thought I’d develop his scepticism about the appetite for ‘scrutiny’.

For me, the interesting question is – as ever – around the whole notion of representation.

Town Hall Matters has lighted on this question and that post returns to a theme that Jenni Russell picked up on a few weeks ago (covered here at the time, and subsequently as the subject for a session at Reboot Britain) albeit with a focus on local rather than Westminster politics.

THM asks:

“…is a desire to scrutinise really what motivates people to become councillors?”

The post then goes on to recount that John Denham wants to…

“…make council leaders ensure scrutiny is a core function and that it is adequately resourced.”

This raises a significant question – one where I suspect common sense would conflict with the current public mood.

If one were to take Denham at his word, this would justify his claim that the ‘Strengthening Local Democracy‘ consultation proposes “the biggest shift in power in a generation.”

Labour has something of a credibility problem when it demands more emphasis on scrutiny from it’s elected members. It’s hard to know where to start describing the damage that Nick Brown did to Labour’s claim to promote the role of scrutiny when he promised to refuse positions on select committees to MPs that had voted against the government.

This all has an odd resonance with David Cameron’s view that parliament needs to sieze back some powers from our bloated Quangocracy. In the same way that John Denham is right to ask Councillors to take on the role of scrutiny with more vigour, Cameron is right to demand these powers to be returned to parliament.

But do either party really mean this? It brings us back to Town Hall Matters‘ original question:

“… is a desire to scrutinise really what motivates people to become councillors?”

The answer to that question (it’s “no” by the way) shows the challenge that any serious proposer of a stronger, more scrutinising body of MPs and politicians will have to address:

Politicians are political people. They behave in a political ways and their scrutiny will involve political research, political judgment and political deliberation. Their decisions will be based upon their politics and will have political consequences. They will need more researchers and a larger secretariat to help them with this political work.

It will require political resources that will have to be provided by the taxpayer or by political parties. It will also require political parties that are prepared to recruit candidates that exhibit independent thought, as opposed to the compliant outlook that is currently the key virtue.

I’ve just read through the new Strengthening Local Democracy Green Paper, and I can’t sum it up better than Talking Heads did in their 1977 hit, Psycho Killer. Not the refrain “better run, run, run, run away”, but the verse:

You start a conversation you can’t even finish.
You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.
Say something once, why say it again?

The first line is doubly apt – it’s optimistic (at best) to publish a consultation document ten months before a general election. It’s optimistic and unproductive when the document itself contains reams of prose on the benefits of democracy, without taking any of its thinking through to a logical conclusion.

The document treats strengthening local democracy as equivalent to strengthening local councils. That’s part of it, but a long way from being all of it. There is also, for starters, increasing the awareness of local political issues in the public, increasing turnout at local elections, making councillors more representative and more ambitious for their role, and promoting better debate and discussion at local and national level.

To be fair and balanced in my brutality, Conservative thinking on the issue is no better – as evidenced by the ragbag of populism and councillorism in their Control Shift paper. Both parties seem to be unable to think up sustainable and coherent initiatives to strengthen the political environment within which local councils work.

Back to the condoc. What little novelty it contains is around scrutiny. John Denham (or Hazel Blears, who knows?) obviously thinks scrutiny is just the thing to revive local democracy and make councils meaningful again. The Total Place initiative will tell councils how much public money is being spent by local bodies in their area, and scrutiny committees will have new powers to oversee local public services, including the utility companies, and scrutinise their budgets (p.18).

I suppose this might be good material for a green paper called “Strengthening local councils a bit” but it seems to be asking scrutiny committees to sprint before they can walk, whatever warm words there might be about duties to fund them sufficiently (p.21).

Let’s admit that good scrutiny can make a difference to local delivery, and refocus Whitehall-minded bureaucrats on the pressing local issues. It’s a promising area. But in how many authorities is good scrutiny being practised right now? How many councillors would rather be on scrutiny than in the administration? Not many, I bet, in answer to both questions. So why load scrutiny down with new powers and responsibilities, until it’s shown that it’s ready for them?

Another area where the green paper makes some new suggestions is around the entitlements (p.29) set out in an earlier, more wide-ranging document called Building Britain’s Future. The idea here is that the Government will legislate, as it has on climate change, to fix policy priorities in legislation, and then allow councils greater discretion in the ways they choose to provide the entitlements.

There’s a separate post to be written on how democratic it is to attempt to entrench your governing philosophy while staring a general election defeat in the face (“not very” is the two-word summary).

From a practical perspective, though, it doesn’t feel like this a great step forward for democracy at local level. As set out in the condoc, the Government decrees the entitlement, the citizen receives it, and the local council is forced to cash Whitehall’s blank cheque. I foresee enormous legal and political rows about the exact meaning of particular entitlements, and innumerable “postcode lottery” campaigns started by interest groups looking enviously across local government boundaries. A prostitute famously has power without responsibility – now councils get to have responsibility without power (as usual, some might say).

Chapter three of the condoc pitches a few ideas on how councils might respond to climate change. Some might want to do lots of different things, some might want to do one or two big things. Hey man, that’s cool, no pressure, says the condoc. Let us know how it goes, we might delegate you some powers. (p.37)

There’s a fair bit in the document (p.39 onwards), and in John Denham’s launch event speech, about sub-regional working through city regions and multi-area agreements. These have the potential – particularly if RDAs are abolished – to become important hubs for economic and social development, as well as conduits of Government funding. It’s important that they are set up right and governed sensibly. The condoc rightly proposes some ways of democratising the governance arrangements through greater openness and scrutiny.

Amazingly, in a throwaway remark half way down page 44, the condoc also suggests “creating new sub-regional local authorities with a much wider range of powers” and possibly direct elections. You would have thought that a proposal for a third tier of directly-elected local government might merit a bit more prominence than that.

The final chapter (p.46) proposes putting the relationship between central and local government on a more formal footing. What could be more formal than a long series of Local Government Acts, you might ask? Well, the idea is that the Government would create a set of achingly bland and obvious principles (examples in the condoc) that it could then say it was adhering to, and set up a joint Parliamentary Committee to check up on them. Pretty much pointless, I’d say.

Overall, then, the consultation is, unfortunately, a damp squib. Andy Sawford at LGIU has a rather more positive take on it, though I regret the abandonment of empowerment rhetoric which he celebrates. Elsewhere, Town Hall Matters considers the scrutiny issue in more detail.