27 February 2009
By Tash Shifrin
The sharp swish of a brisk new broom has raised a bit of dust at the august Westminster headquarters of the Local Government Association in the past few months. Margaret Eaton’s unexpected arrival as the LGA’s new chair in September appears to have led to a significant shake-up.
Eaton, a Conservative councillor since 1986 and leader of City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council from 2000 to 2006, replaced Sir Simon Milton, who became deputy to London Mayor Boris Johnson.
She had barely got her feet under the desk when the Icelandic banking crisis broke. This was swiftly followed by the Baby P scandal and controversy over councils’ ability to grit the roads – and all against the backdrop of the emerging and deepening recession. Eaton has been thrown in at the deep end.
But despite external pressure on so many fronts, Eaton’s short reign has also been marked by internal upheaval.
Chief executive Paul Coen departed, after a period of gardening leave, and has been replaced by his former deputy, John Ransford. Coen’s statement when he went on leave in December did not mention Eaton directly. But he did pinpoint the month of her arrival. ‘Since September, it has become increasingly difficult to have confidence that the political leadership and the managerial leadership of the LGA are at one on both the direction of travel and the day-to-day leadership of the association,’ he said.
Since then, the LGA’s development strategy, which previously centred on plans for a complex merger of the association’s subsidiary companies, has been revamped.
It will now focus on closer liaison with member councils and thematic working across the LGA Group. Plans to create a single service body from the subsidiaries – including the Improvement and Development Agency – are on ice. It is a sudden, sharp change of direction.
Eaton seems to have given things quite a kick-start. ‘Is that a criticism or an observation?’ she asks, laughing. But she says the new direction was supported by the LGA’s cross-party political leadership. ‘Anything that’s major, we discuss. In this particular instance we were all working together and of one mind,’ she says. There was ‘a very strong consensus’.
She adds: ‘It was my job to see that the wishes of the members were fulfilled. It was certainly something that I feel that I should do.’ Eaton had no personal problem with Coen, she says.
Perhaps both careful diplomacy and occasional bust-ups are only to be expected in the LGA. In Tony Travers’ analysis in Public Finance, the director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics pointed to ‘internal stresses and strains that have been a feature of the organisation since it was created’ (‘Divided we fall, February 13–19).
He argued: ‘It is a club – a voluntary membership organisation. It is also a non-political political body in a country where politics is highly adversarial. ‘Moreover, it represents councils from every part of England in a top-down governmental system where each area is competing with all others for a slice of the Exchequer pie. It is hard to think of a more difficult challenge.’
The new chair feels her experience of cross-party working in Bradford’s hung administrations gives her ‘a different take on managing relationships’ – a factor others have also highlighted. One senior LGA politician has suggested that Coen might not have been ‘used to politicians, where they all work very closely together’ across parties.
Eaton is keen on such close working. ‘The relationship is such that the other leaders will pop into my office because there’s something on their minds.’
She adds that she is ‘not naive to the extent that I think we won’t have our moments’ with a general election looming, but says: ‘It doesn’t need to be an aggressive disagreement, it can be an intellectual disagreement.’
But she is not all sweetness and light, she admits. ‘I’m not very good at suffering fools gladly, which is something I try and manage. And I think I’m quite demanding of people,’ she says.
How demanding she will be with government remains to be seen. The new LGA chair came to office promising to be ‘aggressively forthright’ if necessary. Since then, however, the economy has nose-dived and the outlook for public sector funding is bleaker.
‘The recession is hitting councils very badly,’ she says. The LGA has already said very firmly: ‘No new burdens without funding’. That has been the organisation’s ‘mantra’ for a long time. Now she concedes: ‘We’re in a different climate. It’s inevitable that councils will be making very difficult decisions.’
She adds: ‘Councils will do their utmost to manage it, they always do.’ But she reaffirms her commitment to be ‘aggressively vocal where it’s needed’.
There will be ‘explanations to government about the reality of what’s going to happen’ as services to the public are squeezed, she says. ‘But whether there’s any more money in government is another matter.’
The LGA chair was set to meet Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears to discuss the recession. But Eaton has also been knocking at other Whitehall doors in an attempt to secure more cash. She has spoken to Health Secretary Alan Johnson about how much more money health has had than local government and ways of addressing that, she says.
Why should the Department of Health cough up for councils? Eaton offers road and pavement gritting as ‘a small example’. This is a sensitive topic on which the LGA has had to take some flak, amid allegations that councils failed to get in enough salt. Eaton argues that this is an area where the DoH has an interest: safer streets means fewer elderly people being hospitalised after falls, and a smaller bill for the NHS.
The response from the DoH was not instant enthusiasm, however. ‘His officials thought it was a little bit practical,’ Eaton says dryly. ‘I think they lacked the big strategic picture.’ Whitehall is much more stuck in ‘silo thinking’ than local government ‘is ever allowed to be’.
But Eaton feels Johnson will consider her message, although there are no promises. ‘The Treasury is always the dictator of events, I fear.’ She has also met Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and a chat with Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is booked in.
Eaton constantly emphasises the realities of policy and the practicalities of providing services. This is why she remains an active Bradford councillor, she says. That base outside the capital is important to her – and perhaps to the LGA’s drive to get closer to its members.
‘I’m a Northerner. My experience is in the North,’ she says, stressing the word. She adds that sometimes people think that all the policy-thinking in the LGA, Whitehall and government is based on London ‘and that’s not my background’.
She is keen for councils to make the most of their role ‘as the leaders of a place’ – and stresses that local priorities should vary to meet the differing needs of their populations.
The LGA is also doing ‘a lot of work’ investigating the new roles councils might play in the economic crisis, including setting up banks or offering mortgages.
Eaton is cautious, however. ‘The fact is that banking is highly complicated,’ she says. The association is getting ‘sound advice on what will fly and what won’t’.
But she adds: ‘There will be some creative things to come out of it. No-one’s saying we can’t do it. We’re saying: what can we do?’
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