Here we are again: Spring 2023. And while the flora and fauna of the UK are getting on with the rhythms of life, councils in England are thinking of the local government elections on 4 May. Not all councils. London for example, is not staging elections.
A carousel of debt, delay, and dysfunction
This year it is the turn of District councils, or where you have them, Unitary Authorities, and of course, Town and Parish Councils.
The elections
The political parties are running attack ads, and as always, promising to cut council tax and increase spending. This will be an act of prestidigitation of a high order, if it can be achieved, because like alchemy, it has never been achieved in living memory.
Those elected will face the same iron rules as their predecessors, which is a higher demand for expenditure, especially in social care and roads maintenance, and only a very limited means to fulfil those demands.
Rusted and busted
We have seen some Councils go bankrupt (Northants) in recent years, others are in special measures (Slough, Croyden and Thurrock), and yet others (Woking) have started to face unsupportable debt payments on land transactions designed to deliver an income stream that would enable them to meet those expenditure aspirations. Others are threatened or in special measures because of their ‘slow decision making’ on planning. Generally the outlook is grim.
In 2020 the Institute for Government pointed out that local government was being starved of funds. Since that time, Covid, an energy crisis, a growing housing crisis, and an inflation rate worthy of the Weimar Republic in 1923, is crippling local government. It is difficult to see why the Central Government is prepared to see councils, including those run by the party in government, as in Northamptonshire, Thurrock and Woking, go down, yet this is the case.
Even Kent, which is screaming bankruptcy to all and sundry, Kent County Council, is not being heard in the corridors of Whitehall. Why?
I would suggest the reasons are:
- Having been thoroughly spooked by the markets because of the now infamous mini budget in October 2022, the treasury has embarked upon Austerity 2.0, on a system that had not recovered from the previous decade of retrenchment, and is also tone deaf to what it sees as councils calling wolf on their finances.
- The English local government system is a giant fudge of competing social and political interests that is increasingly unable to deliver on pledges made at Westminster.
- Unless there is substantial reorganisation and something of a sea change in how elections can deliver change, the tendency is to continue on the same old failing policy formats, and not to innovate or respond to growing voter dissatisfaction, especially in the realms of planning, council tax, adult social care, and yes, potholes.
- The South East has a number of electoral districts which could swing or face no overall party in charge.
What about the troops out in the field?
The Local Government Association has carried research into the workload, opinions and characteristics of councillors, which makes interesting reading. Councillors’ Census 2022
The LGA found that:
59% of Councillors were male and 41% were female, but the trend is moving towards a gender balance.
The average age of Councillors is 60. 40% of councillors will be retired:
Other findings refer to the experiences as councillors:
Intimidation and abuse:
This is startling. Nearly 40% of councillors have experienced abuse or intimidation. 73% at some time in their career. The LGA doesn’t say whether these results are experienced equally by both male and female councillors in the same ratio, but experience tells me that women MPs receive far more abuse than their male colleagues, and therefore this probably applies here. It could.
Are councillors ethnically diverse? Not quite.According to the LGA 91.7% of councillors were white, yet according to the 2021 census only 87.1% of England’s population was white.
Looking at decision-making, only 53.5% held some kind of position in their council, and most of those were party positions (22.8%).
Decision-making is heavily restricted to an elite of 18.4% of all councillors, which is why sometimes inexplicable decisions are made, such as the massacre of trees in Sheffield and Plymouth.
How does democracy make change happen?
The Council elections in May will be by first past the post methods, which often means that its winner takes all with a minority of votes cast. Kent is a major pillar in the so called blue wall, yet many councillors will be elected with less than 50% of the vote, on turnouts of around 30%. The rural vote also over-represents rural interests (28% of the population of Kent) against (72% ) urban stakeholders.
Kent County Council for example, has had very little regime change in its 140 year history, which means that there is little incentive for decision makers to innovate or change course. As a one party statelet, KCC has been more successful in maintaining the status quo than many authoritarian, police states.
The structure of local government in England
While great efforts have been made to secure the union, by devolving more powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the approach in England has been based on expediency ( localised pressure of public opinion, such as ‘levelling up’ etc, or failures (Northamptonshire CC) and abstruse calculations which favour the ‘right sort of administrations’( Unitary status in Cornwall, Wiltshire, Plymouth and Torbay etc) but not others (Exeter), leaving the rest of England under the barnacle-infested 3 tier system set out under the 1972 Local Government Act. Even in these areas, change has been expedient.
If we take the example of Kent once more, Medway is a Unitary Council, but the rest of Kent is two- or three-tier depending on whether an area is parished (Town/Parish Councils) or not. It’s all a patchwork quilt of divided responsibilities. For example, the District Councils pick up your rubbish, but the County councils process the rubbish. County tries to game the system by restricting use of the local Household waste sites and hence recycling rates are down or static, and fly tipping is on the increase.
Then, of course, there is planning
Communities all over England are concerned about ‘overdevelopment’ and being swamped by urban sprawl, and when you visit some neighbourhoods, you do wonder if planning was something that was done elsewhere, because in some localities, the built environment consists of poorly designed and constructed buildings, lacking adequate infrastructure. Again, expediency is the mother of dysfunction. It is a constant staple of local newspapers that local residents are up in arms against a planning proposal, and democracy is often overruled by unelected planning inspectors and /or the courts.
So what can we conclude from all this?
- That the cold clammy hand of the treasury is damaging local democracy by imposing yet more austerity on an under-resourced and overloaded local government system.
- While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved assemblies and powers, England, the largest of nations in the United Kingdom, is heavily centralised, and the centre based in Westminster appears unwilling to devolve powers in a meaningful way.
- The structure of English local government is dysfunctional, with multi-tiered government in some areas, mayoralities in others, and significant functions carried out by unelected quangos or officials, controlled by Whitehall.
- The electoral system favours unrepresentative fiefdoms, controlled by ageing elites who dispense executive power via cabinet government.
On the morning of Friday 5 May, the headlines will not be about how the issues and concerns mentioned here are going to be tackled, but about which political party is on the up and which is on the downward trajectory. The file marked local government reform, will be put back in its sleeve and will be taken back to the archive from whence it came.
