Loss of civility will hit the public hardest

March 10, 2011

The friction has been building up for a long time, but for most of last year local government held its tongue and tried to build a constructive relationship with the new coalition.

No longer. Over the past month there has been an eruption of claim and counter-claim over who is to blame for the impending cuts to local services.

The phony war is over and the shooting match has begun. It is no longer important who shot first; the reality is that the debate over the future of localism and public services is now defined by acrimony, not engagement. It is not clear that anyone will emerge from the current impasse with much credit. At a time when we need the public engaged in a debate about reshaping local public services, most people are busy trying to work out whose fault all of this is. This is going to hold back innovation and make the impact of the cuts even worse.

The tone of debate has soured as we hit budget-setting season. The government’s very effective strategy is to convince the public that the cuts are largely due to inefficient councils. It helps that, in a sector as diverse as local government, some councils probably have made decisions on pay or accommodation that can easily be taken out of context and portrayed as self-indulgent.

It is certainly true that local government can and should make significant efficiencies. There are jobs within councils that we could do without. However, it is a big leap from conceding those points to central government’s assertions that all every council needs to do to solve its budget deficit is give up its alleged vanity projects, share its services and cut senior pay.

Look at some of the claims in detail and this becomes clear. The prime minister has argued that Labour councils are cutting staff and front-line services faster than they need to for political gain. But the best available figures suggest that Labour and Conservative councils are actually cutting at remarkably similar rates.

Shared services can indeed save a lot of money, but our research shows that back offices only account for about 9% of local government expenditure, and the best possible saving is probably well under 4% of the total budget. To save money on the scale required to make a real dent in the funding gap, you have to look at the kind of radical proposals to share everything being promoted by Westminster and its two west London partners.

Attacking councils’ “bloated bureaucracies” on the one hand and the Secretary of State for “talking rubbish” on the other makes for excellent knockabout copy, but it does nothing to improve the quality of debate or advance the localism agenda. In fact, the opposite is true. The longer the debate is framed in these black and white terms, the more entrenched both sides become.

What’s been lost is a sense of the scale of the challenge facing local government and the communities it serves. Simply maintaining opposing positions will only serve to confuse, alienate and ultimately fail the citizens that government on every level is there to serve.

Instead, both levels of government need to start shifting attention to the real long-term challenge – renegotiating the public services settlement with citizens. The recent debate about libraries shows how difficult this will be. Many libraries are very expensive indeed – running them as digital book depositories or even book swapping clubs would be a far more cost-effective way to achieve the basic goal of lending out free texts.

But it is incredibly tough to persuade the public that this kind of change might be a good thing, and it does not help if local residents believe the council is full of overpaid executives. At the moment, ministers too often act as if the goal is simply to cut back bureaucracy and leave services untouched. The government should be more honest – it wants a different kind of state and it should want councils as partners in that endeavour.

This political scrapping is bound to continue well into the new financial year, but both sides need to be aware of what they and the public stand to lose. The sooner we take the heat out of this debate, the sooner we can fully engage the public in building the next generation of public services.

Simon Parker & James Mole, NLGN


Explore More