LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND AND WALES

HL Deb 05 May 1976 vol 370 cc538-52

Lord BANKSrose to call attention to the present state of local government in England and Wales; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I rise to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, and I do so because it seemed to us on these Benches that now that two years have passed since the Local Government Act 1972 came into force, we ought to have a look at the way in which local government in England and Wales, in its reorganised structure, is working out. It is perhaps not inappropriate to do so when attention is focused on local government in view of the district elections taking place throughout the country tomorrow.

The first factor we have to grasp is the size and the scope of local government today. Local authority expenditure on goods and services, including staff, has taken an increasing share of the gross domestic product over the past 25 years, rising from about 8½ per cent. in 1949 to about 9½ per cent. in 1964, to over 12 per cent. in 1974, and to about 13 per cent. last year. Over 2 million people are employed in local government, if we include teachers, school meals staff, and other people working in education. The total expenditure of local government is around £13, 000 million, or about one quarter of total Government expenditure, both central and local. Education takes nearly half of all current local government expenditure, and just over half the number of employees in local government are involved in education.

As the Minister for Planning and Local Government pointed out in another place on 9th April, there has been a particularly rapid growth in local government overall current expenditure in recent years. In the decade to 1963 the average annual growth rate in volume terms was just under 5 per cent. However, in the two years 1973–74 and 1974–75 the rate of growth was 9 per cent. and 10 per cent. respectively. In 1975–76 the rate has been reduced to about 5 per cent., and in 1976–77, as part of the general economy measures, a complete standstill is being sought. As the right honourable gentleman the Foreign Secretary remarked when he was still the Secretary of State for the Environment, "the party is over."

So we see that local government is now big business, but it is Parliament that has made it so. In the post-war period very considerable responsibilities have been placed on local government in the fields of education, housing, and the social services. In recent years of course extra duties have been laid on local authorities in respect of, for example, chronically sick and disabled persons legislation, safety and health at work legislation, consumer credit legislation and, most recently, the Community Land Bill.

The first conclusion I come to is that we have to give much greater thought to the potential further development of local government responsibility. There is much to be said for the maximum degree of decentralisation and, providing we get value for money, there is no reason why the local government share of total Government expenditure should not be higher than one quarter. But we need genuine decentralisation, not a duplication of activity. There would have to be a parallel decrease in central Government expenditure in real terms.

The flood of legislation placing new burdens on both central and local government must be abated; and we need to ensure that we preserve for local government an independent decision-making role. Local government must not be reduced to being nothing more than the local agent for central Government. And to the extent that they do have to act as the agents of the central Government, the local authorities must be fully consulted when policy is being formulated as to the impact on them and their resources which proposed legislation will have. It is no good leaving the consultation until legislation is before Parliament or on the Statute Book. Perhaps the machinery of the Consultative Committee on Local Government Finance could be used for this purpose.

Secondly, we must recognise that in many fields, but particularly perhaps in the field of the social services, the local authorities cannot provide the services they are already supposed to provide on their present budgets. There will inevitably be heavy pressure for increased expenditure as soon as circumstances permit. But if the expanding service which they are expected to provide is one reason for increased expenditure on the part of local authorities, then inflation of course is another and an obvious one. A third has undoubtedly been reorganisation itself which has involved the employment of 110, 000 extra staff and cost a great deal. The local Government Act 1972 was of course the product of the last Conservative Administration, and it is rather ironic to find the last Conservative Government cast in the role of encouraging the big spenders, and the present Labour Government forced today by economic circumstances to play the miser.

My Lords, we on the Liberal Benches rejected both the reorganisation proposals of the last Labour Government, following on the recommendations of the Redcliffe-Maud Commission, and the subsequent proposals of the Conservative Government. While we recognise the need for a degree of rationalisation and amalgamation, we felt the district councils in the Conservative proposals were too large and would take local government further from the people rather than nearer. We felt that the county councils were too large to be local and too small to be regional. We would have preferred rather smaller district councils, with neighbourhood councils below, operating under a regional umbrella. We called for 12 such regions in England.

In the Dissenting Memorandum to the Kilbrandon Commission Report, the noble Lord, Lord Crowther-Hunt, and Professor Peacock suggest five regional Assemblies for England and I think we have been sufficiently impressed by the case they present to feel that that number may well be right. All that has happened in the past two years has confirmed us in our views. The introduction of regional government has unfortunately been made more difficult because of the multiplication of the tiers of local government and a natural desire not to have another upheaval too soon after the last. Yet the noble Lord, Lord Crowther-Hunt, and Professor Peacock have shown very clearly that there is a regional tier of government in operation at the moment but it is not subject to democratic control. However, we are shortly, I understand, to have a White Paper on Regionalism in England and I will say no more about that subject today.

My Lords, it has been impressed upon me by councillors throughout the country whom I have consulted prior to this debate that local government since reorganisation has become more remote from the people; that constituents' problems now take longer to sort out than they did; that there is wasteful duplication between the county and district, particularly in the field of planning; and that the amount of paper in use has vastly increased. It is significant that while the number of staff has increased the number of elected councillors has decreased under reorganisation from 37, 510 to 23, 950 through the replacing of 1, 390 old authorities by 422 new ones.

If local government, albeit with a structure which is far from perfect, is to carry out the tasks already allotted to it, and perhaps to take on others, there will, as I said a few minutes ago, be pressures for increased spending. When we take this into account, and bear in mind the financial stringency of the moment, the need to get value for money and to eliminate waste is very clear. We can all give examples of waste in local government which have come to our notice: expensive new civic centres, property bought by a council and standing empty month after month. In one authority £8, 250 was spent in postage to send pay packets to school meal ladies. Another authority spent £100, 000 on producing a glossy magazine three times a year. A local authority paid £125, 000 two years ago for extra office space" as a matter of urgency" and it is still empty. And so one could go on.

The Islington Gazette on 13th February asked its readers this question: Did you know that if the borough' s population continues falling as fast as Islington Council continues recruiting extra staff, then by 1984 everyone in Islington will work for the council?

I cannot vouch for the validity for that prediction but it would appear that 700 extra staff have been taken on in four years and, even allowing for the extra burdens placed on local government, one is bound to ask whether they are all really necessary. While it is important, if we are to get the right staff, that they should be well paid, nevertheless there are many misgivings today about the level of some of the salaries offered in local government in the wake of reorganisation. Manchester University appointments board recently drew attention to the fact that among its graduates last year it found that some local authorities were prepared to pay about double what the same type of graduate was getting for the same type of job in the private sector.

However, we not only need to eliminate waste, we need to reform the whole system of financing local government expenditure. Far too high a burden is placed on the rates, a system of raising revenue which takes no account of ability to pay. The protests about the size of rate increases in the past two years were fully justified. Even so, local government is being forced to rely more and more on central Government grant. New sources of local government revenue must be found. The rating system, with very much less revenue required from it, should be reformed so that the rate is levied on the site value alone, which, incidentally, would mean that those who improve their property would no longer be penalised. But the Layfield Report, which I understand is already in the hands of the Government, will deal with all this, and we must wait till it is published before we can tackle local government finance in depth.

One final word on finance. Careful attention should be given to the better promotion of council facilities. In one district council which I know one-third of the gross expenditure is covered by income from council facilities. If these were marketed better, an even higher proportion of the gross expenditure could be covered in this way.

My Lords, following the publication of the Bains Report on management structures for the new authorities many authorities have sought to implement the recommendations; and, as a result, most councils now have a policy and resources committee. The Bains Report envisaged such a committee aiding the authority in setting objectives and priorities, coordinating and controlling the implementation of those objectives and, through a special sub-committee, monitoring and reviewing performance. In some instances, however, the policy and resources committee, faced with the need to econo-mise, merely asks each departmental committee to cut its proposals by a given percentage. There is thus no real overall choice between options related to different subjects. There is merely choice within each departmental area and no overall determining of priorities. Also, there is often a reluctance to appoint the crucial performance review sub-committee, which should examine the unit cost of each service to help determine effectiveness and identify areas for further attention. The possibility of having committees of the council constituted on an area basis covering all services, instead of having committees on a departmental basis, is worth researching thoroughly.

For the successful running of the local authority it is essential to secure the co-operation of both staff and public. Staff should be encouraged to offer suggestions for the improvement of the services provided. The provision of suggestion boxes for the use of all grades, manual workers as well as office workers, can be a very fruitful source of new ideas. The first step towards gaining the confidence of the public is the reduction of secrecy in council affairs to the absolute minimum. In Liverpool, Liberals have made committees and sub-committees open to the Press, radio and public alike except for a few restricted areas where, for example, people's private affairs are involved. Then, again, Liberals, who form the largest group on the Newbury District Council, have ensured that all full council meetings, committee meetings and subcommittee meetings are open to the public and the Press; and, of course, similar steps have been taken elsewhere.

We are all concerned with the problem of apathy about local government, and one way to combat it is through the promotion of greater participation by the public in the work of the council. In Liverpool, the education committee tours the city, meeting in different schools, with a particular invitation to parents and teachers to attend. Ways and means of enrolling the public to help with particular projects should be explored, and I have in mind such projects as clearing up footpaths, looking after grass verges, cleaning up children' s play areas and maintaining open spaces. Another important avenue to participation is through housing co-operatives for tenants of local authority houses. By this means tenants are enabled to participate collectively in decisions which affect them. I very much welcome the circular on this subject issued by the Department of the Environment and the Welsh Office in January of this year, and the encouragement which it gave.

With regard to participation in the meetings of the council, some councils are experimenting with a question-time at the beginning of their meeting when members of the public may put questions to councillors. The Liberals at Newbury have written into the standing orders of the council the right of members of the public to speak to the council when a resolution to suspend standing orders to enable them to do so is moved by a councillor and passed. A deputation of any seven ratepayers can request a meeting with any committee, and if the committee refuse the meeting they must state their reasons to the next full council meeting. A deputation of any 20 ratepayers can request a meeting with the full council, subject to the approval of the policy and resources committee.

Finally, may I say a brief word about standards of conduct in local government —a subject which has given rise to some anxiety in recent years? I believe that, in addition to the oral disclosure of an interest at the time the subject concerned is discussed, there should be a statutory register of councillors' pecuniary interests, as recommended by the Prime Minister' s Committee on Local Government Rules of Conduct in 1974; and this register should be open to inspection by any elector for that particular authority. I further believe that one of the best safeguards against corruption and the possibility of corruption is a vigorous opposition to the ruling Party. When opposition is weak because the electoral system grossly under-represents the opposition, or does not represent it at all, as sometimes happens, temptation is greatest. This is, of course, a strong argument for proportional representation to be used in the election of local authorities.

To sum up, local government is big business. With genuine decentralisation, as I was saying earlier, it may become even bigger business, although for the moment, due to the economic situation, a curb must be placed on its growth. In these circumstances, we need to get value for money, to eliminate waste and to overhaul the traditional committee approach. The whole method of local government financing must be reformed, and in this connection we wait for Layfield. To operate satisfactorily, the fullest co-operation must be obtained from the staff and the public. A whole new range of ways to invite the public to participate in the work of the council must be explored. We must take further steps to safeguard the standards of conduct, and we must also safeguard the independence of local government from central Government control and dictation. Finally, may I say how much we all owe, though we may criticise them from time to time—and criticise them sometimes vigorously—to the hard-working councillors of all Parties and of none, and to the staff, who keep our local government functioning. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.28 p.m.

Lord SANDFORD

My Lords, this is the time of year, the season of the rate demand, when everybody is agreed that local government costs too much. It is usually quite a short season of a few weeks, and for the rest of the year we are all, in turn, calling on local government to do more: to implement the health and safety legislation, to step up the reorganisation of secondary education and to get busy and busier with the Community Land Act. Even this afternoon we have been urging them to do more for the disabled. Can any of your Lordships recall anyone, after May, asking Her Majesty' s Government why the county councils are not doing less? Or moving a Motion that the districts should slow down or cut back their services? Of course, it never happens. But perhaps this year it will be different, because certainly the ratepayers' feelings are exceptional in their intensity, and, as they can be analysed correctly, it might enable some positive and permanent remedies to be introduced.

I should like to say straight away that I do not think there is any truth in the suspicion that the present higher costs of local government are due to reorgan-isation. Local government in Greater London was not reorganised two years ago; but were the London ratepayers spared the rate rises? —not a hit of it! They went up marginally more in Greater London than elsewhere. All local government costs were pushed up over the country by high inflation on top of steadily expanding and extending services. Is the cost of local government services really all that unreasonable? What do our average weekly bills look like? When John Citizen and his household spend £3.40 a week on drinking and smoking, £5.50 on travelling around and £3 on the HP of their consumer durables, what does he pay in rates for his schools, social services and all the other city services put together? —£1.50. I do not believe that that is unreasonable. I believe that that is very good value for money; but the demand conies in one nasty dollop and it hurts.

We have now reached a point, nevertheless, where the citizen has been led to expect a higher scale of local government services either than he likes to afford or the country can afford. My hope is that this year the intensity of the mood of the rate demand season will last long enough for us to work out the implications henceforward of a low-growth or no-growth state of affairs for local government after a generation of continuous and sometimes very rapid expansion and increase in costs.

We in Parliament must restrain ourselves and restrain our Ministers—and this afternoon was a case in point—from urging yet further functions and expenses on local government; and local councils and their officers must turn from for ever asking for more resources to thinking much more carefully about how to get the best from the resources they already have. My belief is that manpower training is now probably the most fruitful field for attention, and it is already getting it, and, particularly, management training on how to adjust to a new era of little or no growth in resources, an era of the raising of quality from the expansion of paid professional staff to the involvement of community and voluntary effort, to get more things done and to provide more on a do-it-yourself basis. I repudiate the charge that the cost of local govern- ment services is unreasonably high or that the value we get for our money is low. But I am certain that the costs can go no higher and that better value can still be obtained; especially if we learn to do more for ourselves and our neighbours and expect less to be done for us.

I turn to the structure of local government. Whatever we may feel about the changes made two years ago, there are two points on which I hope we can all agree; namely, that the inherited pattern of no fewer than 1, 390 separate local authorities could continue no longer, that there had to be reform to reduce such fragmentation. The second point on which I hope we can all agree—and I am relieved to hear nothing of it in the moving of the Liberal Motion—is that, now reform has taken place, the existing structure of two main spheres, district and county, must remain unchanged for some years to come. I would suggest that it is far too early to come to a judgment of the new system, although there is no harm in our having a debate today about it, and far too early to contemplate any further fundamental changes.

The right approach at this stage is to give the new districts and the new counties time to settle down—for, after all, the climate in which they were asked to start their work could hardly have been more difficult—and, so far as possible, to use the counties and districts that have been elected, their members and their staff, to fulfil as many as possible of the local responsibilities that fall to be discharged. My belief is that the two basic types of authority, district and county, with adaptations and adjustments but not fundamental changes, can find patterns of co-operation in standing conferences, agency arrangements, joint committees which, however awkward they may seem to be, are preferable to the introduction and election of further authorities to carry out local functions and to take over responsibilities from central Government. I believe that the present weakness or fault, if there is one, is not that of the local authorities being unequal to the responsibilities that Whitehall would like to decentralise upon them, but rather that Ministers and their Departments are unwilling to give local authorities the wider responsibilities and freedoms that they should have and are now so much more capable of discharging.

This brings me to the relationship between central Government and local government which Ministers in another place were last week at pains to describe as a partnership. A partnership is certainly the right way to express the proper constitutional relationship between central Government and local government; but it was not the way in which it came across when, for example, Ministers were explaining how the Community Land Act would be made to work. The local authorities then were in many respects required to behave and to be treated as agents of central Government; and to a large extent they are still by many Whitehall Departments, particularly the DES and the DHSS who exercise far too much detailed control over their extensive programmes and their expenditures in the key sectors. Now that the reorganisation of local government is two years behind us, the most urgent and pressing item on the agenda is a critical overhaul of the way in which central Government controls local government and how the so-called partnership is working. In that connection I specially welcome a reference to the Joint Consultative Council on Local Government Finances. I believe that that is one of the most constructive developments affecting local government for many years, but is is only a first step in a process which must go much further and be more firmly established if the relationship is really to deserve the title of a partnership.

One pattern which deserves to be extended into other fields is that adopted by the DOE and local authorities for the administration of transport and highways; the allocation of finance by way of a supplementary block grant based on Ministerial broad approval of local plans stretching five years ahead, approval of a more precise programme for the year to come and a review of the achievements of the year past and a renunciation of further detailed approval and scrutiny of individual items for the year ahead. I should be glad to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, of anything more she can tell us of other proposals in this field of the relationship between central Government and local government which can indicate to us that the good start made with this Consultative Council and with the TPPs is to be continued so as to make the partnership with local government more realistic and their autonomy more real. Without this autonomy, local government cannot possibly be said to be democratic in any real sense.

This brings me to my last point. Democracy is supposed to mean government by the people. The theory is that it is exercised by each of us casting each of our three votes every three or four years for our Member of Parliament, our county councillor and our district councillor and by paying taxes and rates for large numbers of paid hands to do various things for us under the control of our representatives. It is widely felt that this works out in practice very different from the theory, and indeed is getting further from the theory, and that the theory itself needs reviewing. I believe it is a total illusion to think that three more votes on top of the three we already have—one for representatives in Europe, another for representatives in the regions and another for representatives in the neighbourhood—will really do much to stem the tide of dissatisfaction. I believe that lower and lower polls in these six elections and greater and greater protest are more likely results.

Lord DAVIES of LEEK

My Lords, may I stop the noble Lord at this point in his interesting and constructive speech to say that this is the philosophical problem. The noble Lord spoke about the "hitherto fragmentation of local government". One of the things I see now in all this is the problem of remoteness. Of course, I do not know the answer to this, but it is certainly one of the problems. I am very interested in what the noble Lord is proposing, but can he give an answer to it?

Lord SANDFORD

My Lords, it is a difficult problem, but it is the one to which my few remaining remarks will be addressed. The fact is, as I was going on to say, that we have an electorate which is capable of and, I believe, desiring to do much more than cast three, four, five or six votes every three or four years. I believe the electors want positively and personally to participate not just in the statutory planning process but in all planning for their future and in taking many of their own decisions, setting up many of their own services and helping to keep them going.

Six tiers of Government—Europe, the United Kingdom, the region, the county, the district and the parish—trying to run our lives for us is, I believe, a burden of administration which is too great to be borne and so far from giving us more scope for real democracy it is in grave danger of imposing further constraints on personal freedom and responsibility too suffocating to be endured. I believe that our energies and, even more, our imagination should be turned elsewhere—to transform the swelling tide of negative protest at the system into a more positive contribution towards helping it, and away from fitting the real, live, local pressures and issues into the dull and insensitive moulds of statutory provision and party political dogma. Let us be like Ezekiel and see some new life breathed into these bare and barren bones.

Plenty of things can be done, Take, for example, public participation in planning and deciding things. With a few exceptions in the statutory planning field, the proper process of participation in local government is nowhere defined. The right time for the electorate to have their say is not specified. Everyone tries to participate all the time and no one knows when to give up participating. The present process is exhausting for the councillors, irritating for the citizens, time consuming for the officers, and it invites militancy.

Take another aspect of the proper democracy, that is to say, direct personal involvement in setting up and running things. There are large untapped resources in our communities today capable of meeting and managing many community needs. Good neighbour schemes, environmental clean up campaigns and voluntary play groups for children are just some of those with which we are already familiar. But there could be many more. By encouraging and fostering more of these, the level of many local government services could be raised and their range extended at no extra cost. But, of course, it is no good expecting the citizen and community involvement to happen unless the policies of Whitehall Departments and those of the political Parties are adaptable and adapted to the wishes of local people; and they are not so at present. I hope we are approaching the stage when the factor that most commends a councillor to the ward that elects him is his skill in stimulating and guiding of the communities he represents positively to influence and to provide for themselves more of the services they want and need. I hope we are also approaching the stage when proven skill in promoting and aiding community involvement is a qualification sought after by officers as an essential to advancement to the higher ranks in local government.

It has to be said that the traditional patterns of strong, hierarchical, centralised, professional departments in local government do not help this development in civic democracy. But area management is one recent development that does. This possibility has emerged from the inner area studies set up by the Department of the Environment three or four years ago under my right honourable friend the then Secretary of State, especially in Liverpool. I understand it has been adopted wholesale in Stockport and is being tested by the Department of the Environment and monitored by the Institute of Local Government in at least six other places.

Area management has four possible elements in it. There are area committees, made up of councillors of the area—a distinct and, in many areas, a novel political unit; area staff teams of officers exposed to local as well as departmental influences, and schemes for the decentra-lisation of various local government services nearer to the people for whom they are provided. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Banks, that that is desirable. Fourthly, there are the conduct of studies and surveys and the allocation of resources geared more specifically to the needs of an area. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, finds something there to bite on. I think we all need to give more attention to those last points and to add some flesh to the bare idea of local democracy.

I should therefore like to conclude by summarising four points. Let us commend rather than criticise local government for what they do for us, but henceforward let us be very wary of piling on to them many more jobs and adding to their costs and our own rates. Let us allow the basic structure to settle down; make central Government and local government partnership a reality and harness protest to positive purposes.