Tom Miller outlines a range of measures to improve local services and wellbeing while boosting local Labour
Central planks of the Labour government’s ambitions depend on efficacy in local government. Reducing NHS waiting times depends on volume and efficiency in social care. A huge escalation in house building, especially “affordable” and social in nature, depends on the local government’s ability to strategise, plan and oversee as quickly as possible.
Both areas are also key components in the Treasury’s attempts to overcome obstacles to economic growth and greater fairness. However, with limited attention to the local part of this journey, and with a fiscal approach that amounts to treading water, Labour remain stifled and frustrated in our efforts to aid these manifesto ambitions.
The ability of elected councillors to challenge these limitations locally and nationally comes with obstacles of its own. Councillors feel extremely distant from Whitehall, which barely takes council leaders seriously, let alone those of us in the stalls.
In areas where Labour does fall short in Westminster, the ability of local authorities and office holders to influence, persuade or simply oppose is politically limited in a way it was not under coalition or “pure” Tory administrations.
This politics does matter, but there are also real structural barriers to overcome. While we can complain about a lack of engagement and imagination from a fair perspective, some of the reasons we cannot fix the things we have been complaining about for a decade are genuine, relating to how much worse this country has become since 2010 and the 2008 crash before it.
At the start of the austerity years, we had already gone through the motions of repeating history, this time as farce. Local campaigns had focused on pushing councillors to set “illegal” deficit budgets. Financially and in terms of service delivery, the law governing how this works changed in the 1980s and resulting in the government automatically circumventing locally elected councillors and the officers we employ.
The result would look a lot like how Birmingham is run now. The authority sells its landmark buildings, slashes services and jobs, and ends up provoking its own workforce into strikes aimed at defending pay and conditions. We were supposed to expect that the public would be thankful for this, and that our voters would certainly not blame us.
Of course, many of our local campaigners were involved in similar campaigns in the 1980s and were perfectly aware of how things were changed to confound them following the original experiments, which initially took place under a much more friendly legal framework, and allowed escalating political battles over surcharges.
This lived experience did not stop us from spending several years arguing about the value of a repetition under a much harsher and effectively automatic arrangement. The campaigns knew that their path forward was not serious; we knew that they knew, council staff knew that we knew that the campaigners knew. God only knows what our local voters thought.
Instead, Labour councils across the country took a “dented shield” approach, which was also far from ideal – protecting services where we could, especially if they had an evidenced multiplier effect for us, or we could show them to be particularly effective in serving working-class objectives or vulnerable people in the community. Whilst doing this, we would innovate in those services to reduce cost and increase quality.
These services are now utterly depleted and stripped back to statutory minimums.
Fifteen years since the first austerity government, councillors’ ability to make positive changes on behalf of constituents is highly limited to an extent that many of us find mentally taxing on a personal level. This in turn demands resilient optimism and constant work.
On a road where there is clearly a problem with litter being dropped in a certain spot, a resident will ask me to get the council to install a bin. I can try this, but I know in advance that my chances of success are low. In previous rounds of cuts, we tried to reduce the cost of our waste contracts in order to avoid cutting social care for children and adults.
To achieve this, we classified roads into priority levels based largely on footfall. I know that the road my resident has asked about is low priority. To get their bin, I’d need to lobby for an exception to a rule I supported to protect spending for people who are vulnerable, disabled, or without adequate support. I won’t cover the outcome here, but this is an example of the dispiriting nature of how things are now.
Given the damage to the UK economy done by the austerity government and the subsequent foolhardiness of Brexit, Labour will find it hard to fix local government with financial levers – though it still needs to take a good look at financing local government adequately and fairly.
But power matters as much as money. Devolution of powers in the UK has often been about locally or regionally running services, without the necessary finance also being passed down. This is a valid criticism, but there are ways to empower local democracy that are not just about finance or who organises service delivery. By returning to the core socialist theme of public control, local government can start to meaningfully intervene again and tip things towards a politics rooted in the public good. There are some affordable and effective ideas that could help this to happen.
1. Increase and redistribute funding… and the means to get it. The government could consider nationalising social care and rolling the social care precept into general taxation. This would provide better coordination with NHS services.
Councils need greater funding for the rest of our budgets, and that must be achieved fairly. The government should consider land value tax in the long term, and in the medium term, a reassessment of banding for local taxation alongside a deprivation formula.
Labour could also require councils to set hypothetical “needs budgets” alongside “fact budgets” in order to illustrate the gap between need and reality, and involve panels of residents and council workers directly in budget processes to increase democratic oversight.
We should also consider a short-term and one-off raising of the cap on Council Tax rises to 10%. Council Tax does need to be controlled, but at present, rebuilding basic services should be a national priority.
Other new sources of revenue could be considered. Some areas would benefit from the right to set a modest Tourist Tax, and most high streets would benefit from a national levy on small online purchases for goods, which could then be recycled into the local public realm and business support spending.
2. Create a happier and more productive workforce. Labour councils should consider following the path laid out by South Cambridgeshire. A trial of 450 staff on a four-day work week reduced staff turnover by a whopping 39%, reducing stress and burnout, and helped the council save an estimated £370,000 on agency staff spending.
The central government could also improve local productivity by creating an academy for training and best practices for aspiring local government staff, using the structures already in place around apprentices.
The sector is facing national recruitment shortages in some of the smaller local government specialisms, including building control officers, trading standards operatives, and mortuary teams. These are high-quality jobs with good career paths and security, but are very difficult professions to enter.
3. Involve residents and workers in decision-making. Councils could be required to add citizen and worker assembly elements to their existing democratic procedure. Consultations can be parochial, are advisory, and often concentrate on very specific areas of policy. This would allow broader input from voters and employees.
4. Expand the general power of competence for democratic control. The government could expand the existing powers in the Localism Act to allow councils to take on some of the powers that mayors are taking on in devolved regions, which themselves need expanding.
Local authority partnerships should be able to regulate and take ownership of transport as Greater Manchester has successfully done with the Bee Network. But there is no reason why this should not apply to public utilities in general, and why cooperative options should not be on the table for direct involvement of the public in governance and oversight.
The government could also reform the governance of schools by mirroring the financial incentives provided by Michael Gove to turn schools into academies. Labour could use funding formulas to bring local authorities back into positions of influence, and this could also be used to support direct roles for parents in governance.
5. Public control versus the exploitative gambling industry. An impressive coalition of local authorities is currently forming to tackle the proliferation of adult gaming centres and betting shops on local high streets. Councils of all political stripes are involved and are demanding powers similar to those already used to restrict planning for establishments serving alcohol and ensure that licensing restrictions are put in place and met.
At present, the Blair government’s Gambling Act gives all councils an “aim to permit”, a measure which nakedly removes power from residents and those they elect, and hands it to the gambling industry. This could be reversed without financial or political cost, with positive effects for gambling addiction and the health of high streets.