27 October 2006
'The LGA's 'root and branch' review of its work needs to urge the association away from its comfort zone in the Whitehall village, argue George Jones and John Stewart. Instead it should prioritise the issues that really matter to councils
The Local Government Association has achieved much since it was established ten years ago – but the 'root-and-branch review' it announced in September is certainly needed. This will have to confront complex issues about the role and working of the association, particularly the dilemmas caused by its varied purposes and its position at the interface between central government and local authorities. These are two very different worlds, each with its own requirements, and each pulling the LGA in a different direction. We highlight four main issues.
The first arises because a national association is almost a contradiction in terms. It is expected to express a national view, yet the local authorities it represents exist to express local voices and make local choices. They constitute the 'government of difference', responding to local needs and aspirations in a variety of ways. The danger of a national view is that it reduces the diversity of local government to a single voice that may ignore differences between authorities or reduce those differences to bland uniformity.
Players on the national scene, both the LGA and central government, develop a national view, arising from their shared national perspective, but that might not represent the reality of local government and its disparate localities.
To represent councils, the association must both be aware of their differences and defend those distinctive features as essential to the role of local government. Sir Michael Lyons has put strongly the case for councils matching both resources and policy to local choice as a means of achieving greater public value and national prosperity. He has shown the fallacy of those who criticise differences between local authorities as a postcode lottery rather than celebrate these as expressions of local choice. The LGA should be cautious in adopting central government's national objectives for local authorities if these reduce the scope for local choice.
In that way, the LGA can avoid being pulled in different directions by accepting its main role as the advocate of the government of difference.
The second, closely related, issue arises because the association operates in the village of Whitehall. Over time, LGA staff and leading members can become almost residents of the village, knowing and even following its folkways. Indeed, to be effective in influencing central government they must understand the culture and habits of the village. They will participate in its gossip, understand and even use its language, and almost unconsciously share its assumptions. They can come to regard some authorities as over-spending, even though those councils are merely making their own choices on levels of taxation and expenditure, which happen to differ from central government's view. Such a choice by a local authority is surely the point of having local taxation.
The danger is that the LGA can come to accept a viewpoint from the centre that sees a local authority as an agent of central government. Although that assumption is not spelt out explicitly, it is often implicit in its policy. It can even leave unchallenged some myths that are part of the culture of central government, particularly about the roles and ways of working of the general body of councillors or about the competence of officers.
The solution lies in the LGA recognising the need to learn from local government and not merely from councils seen to be on the inside track favoured by central government. Good communication between the LGA and local authorities is the answer, provided the association recognises it has more to learn than the councils, thus avoiding any feeling of superiority because it operates at the centre.
Only in the development of learning from local authorities can the LGA give expression to local choices and voices rather than be another national voice addressing councils.
The third issue arises because much of the LGA's work focuses on the immediate agenda, most of which is set by central government. It has to attend to government proposals, such as this week's white papers or consultation papers, Bills and policy statements. To all of these central-government initiatives, LGA responses have to be worked out and discussions held, involving much time and effort. The association has to decide its position and what to press for. It will tend to concentrate on those points on which it judges there is a realistic possibility of central government modifying its position. There is little point in fighting hopeless battles: much better to maintain good relationships and be seen by central government as a responsible body.
Thus it will press central government for a duty to be placed on other public bodies to co-operate in community strategies at local level – because that possibility has been put forward in the consultation paper. But it will not press for powers over such bodies. This approach is understandable, but on some occasions the association's position could be strengthened by outright opposition to central government's proposals, showing it has to be taken into account and that its acceptance cannot be assumed.
The fourth issue, arising from the tendency to focus on the immediate, means that the association does not have the time to mould opinion, to change the unacceptable into the acceptable, and to bring items of political concern on to the agenda. Many of the most important issues facing the governance of local areas cannot be adequately dealt with in the short term, dominated as it is by a series of assumptions that limit local possibilities and on which the association will not be able to change opinion in the short term.
There are ways to avoid this danger. The first is to recognise that some issues demand a long-term strategy. Local government finance has always been such an issue. A new constitutional settlement between local and central government is another. The extension of local government's responsibility over health is yet another.
Such issues require work over time, drawing on outside bodies, undertaking research, developing new ideas, cultivating informed opinion and dealing with the media. It might require five years or more, but nothing will be achieved if all the effort of the association is concentrated on immediate matters.
The LGA needs to develop a strategic approach to ensure that these issues are pursued over the long term. It needs to protect them from the pressures of immediacy by a strategy that highlights them and ensures that work on them is maintained. Probably no more than two or three such issues should be identified if the necessary effort is to be concentrated on them. At the heart of strategic management in the association should be the need to make strategic choices on long-term issues.
Many of these issues have been foreshadowed in recent developments at the LGA. The association is almost, but not wholly, a contradiction in terms. It should avoid becoming so much entangled with central government and the Whitehall village that it has neither time nor staff to express the diversity of local government and local choice, and to pursue the fundamental issues facing the government of local communities.
The test for the new review is how it deals with these four main issues, in both its analysis and recommendations, since they underlie all the specific matters that the review will be considering. If it succeeds, there will be lessons to be learnt by many other national bodies.
George Jones is emeritus professor of government at the London School of Economics and John Stewart is emeritus professor of local government at the University of Birmingham
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