By David Williams
8 November 2010
Details of the forthcoming Localism Bill have been
revealed in the government’s business plan for the Department for Communities
and Local Government, published today.
Prime Minister David Cameron launched the first annual
programmes of action for each department this morning, claiming the documents
would help shift power from Whitehall into the hands of ordinary people across
the country.
According to the DCLG’s plan, the Localism Bill, due
to be published later this month, will enable citizens to veto ‘excessive’
council tax rises. Residents will also have the right to: instigate local
referendums on ‘any local issue’; ‘save local facilities threatened with
closure’; and ‘bid to take over local state-run services’.
In addition, the department intends the Bill to
include provisions to ‘increase… local democratic accountability over decisions
on local government senior pay’, and to scrap ‘bin taxes’.
As widely expected, the Bill will introduce a General
Power of Competence for councils and reform the housing revenue account.
However, the plan acknowledges that the department has missed its July 2010
deadline for publishing the results of consultation on HRA reforms.
The Bill will also set in motion plans to hold
referendums on elected mayors in each of England’s 12 largest cities. Residents
will be allowed to vote on whether to adopt a mayoral system in May 2012.
The DCLG plan also gives a clear
indication that ministers plan to introduce pooled cross-public sector budgets
nationally by 2013.
According to the department’s
timetable, it will ‘create conditions for all places to pool and align locally controlled
public budgets’ from April 2011, as the first 16 community budgets are
introduced.
The first 16 will be evaluated in
November 2012. If they prove successful, the department plans to ‘implement
community budgets across the country’ from January 2013.
Cameron said the business plans were not top-down Whitehall
targets, but instead were about ‘running Whitehall effectively so public
services are steered by the people who work in them responding to the people
who use them’.
He added: ‘It is not about controlling everything from the
centre – but running the centre effectively so it does what the coalition
agreement says: put more power in people’s hands.’
