The government’s localism drive came too late to help councils mitigate the impact of budget cuts, leading Big Society advocate Phillip Blond has told MPs.
Giving evidence to a Commons inquiry into ‘co-operative councils’, Blond said greater mutualism in local government services could ‘strip out bureaucracy’ and lead to savings.
‘There’s a medium-term outcome, which is actually that you can deliver, genuinely, more for less,’ he told the communities and local government select committee yesterday.
However, Blond, who is director of the ResPublica think-tank and widely credited with shaping the government’s thinking on the Big Society, said that setting up mutuals would ‘cost time and money’.
Faced with budget cuts, councils were ‘not in a situation to leverage the savings from the medium term or the long term’ to fund the cost of setting up mutuals, he added.
‘I think the great shame is that all the powers of the Localism Act were enacted after local budgets were slashed. A time of crisis is the time to innovate, and we actually denied the local state the possibility, the time and the space to innovate in delivering those outcomes.’
Blond also told MPs that ‘there’s no route to the future we want other than involving users or recipients’.However, he warned that there was a risk that mutuals could simply become ‘a wider form of consultation’ if communities were not given power over services. He highlighted examples of area-based budgeting, such as Community Budgets, which could be used to devolve power.
‘If it’s just a wider form of consultation, where councils still retain all the power I think that would be very sad. But if it allows people to actually start to genuinely transform their areas in a holistic fashion, then I think great good could come from it.’
The committee also heard from Labour peer and social theorist Maurice Glasman, who backed co-operatives that had a balance of power between users of a service, those working in it and those funding it.
However, he added that the government’s current plan, which includes the Mutual Support Programme in the Cabinet Office that made its first cash awards earlier this month, was ‘not a transformative model at the moment’.
He also warned that the use of mutuals could cost more than traditional public sector-run services if they were subject to ‘systematic failure’.
Glasman added: ‘The negatives would be that it would lead to the privatisation of services, a huge of transfer of assets out of the public realm into the private realm that will never come back. These have to be addressed full on.’
Blond agreed that there were ‘legitimate fears’ surrounding the fragmentation of the public services.
‘If this is done badly, we lose what’s right about local authorities – that they’re a centralising point of accountability,’ he said.
If authorities using mutuals don’t produce ‘a new form of local accountability that feels vivid and shared in’, it would feel ‘like another form of privatisation,’ Blond added. ‘That’s the greatest risk.’
