By Richard Johnstone | 28 October 2011
Local government minister Andrew Stunell has rejected claims that the localism plans are merely a mask for cuts.
Speaking at a conference yesterday on localism and austerity, Stunell said that the government wouldn’t ‘apologise, or postpone or divert’ its plans because they were happening at a time of council spending reductions.His speech followed shadow local government secretary Hilary Benn comment to Public Finance that localism was simply a ‘cover for the cuts’ that the government is imposing.
Stunell said: ‘There are plenty of critics of the government who say “this localism is just a blind to what you are doing on the austerity front”. I want to say, no it isn’t, and I want to be very clear about that.
‘This is real and we intend it to be a permanent change in how power is exercised and where it is distributed in the country.’
The plans, which are included in the Localism Bill currently before Parliament, are an attempt to ‘reverse a period of 40 years when power has been accumulated or sometimes snatched by central government’, he said.
Stunell also told the Local Government Information Unit conference that ‘maybe central government doesn’t get the [localism] message’, admitting that ‘there’s a serious cross-government job to be done to make sure that this is actually implemented’.
He also told delegates that there were ‘plenty of councils that don’t get’ the government’s plans. ‘[There are] those that think we should be transferring power from us to them, whereas we think we should be passing it to communities.’
Benn also addressed the event and called for greater political consensus around the plans for localism.
He said efforts should be made to establish ‘the relationship between the levels of the local and the national’ in public service delivery.
‘The point of reaching some measure of agreement about the balance is that we need some sort of political buy-in and consensus to progress,’ he added.
However, he also warned that the government’s decision to abolish the Audit Commission could lead to a lack of information on how well localised services were working. He warned that this was particularly likely as the use of Community Budgets increased.
He said: ‘I worry that the abolition of the Audit Commission means we may lose some of the data that allows local constituents to have some information on how things are doing, and allows us nationally to see what councils are doing.’
