Blink, and you might have missed it. This week the Conservatives launched Control shift, their long-trailed green paper on returning power to local communities. It generated only a minimal amount of interest – which is odd.
If implemented, the proposals would give voters a veto on council tax rises, abolish many regional development agency powers, scrap Comprehensive Area Assessments, create directly elected police commissioners, and allow 12 major cities to simultaneously vote for a Boris, a Ken – or a monkey – as their fancy took them. Introducing the policy paper, Tory leader David Cameron declared himself ‘a confirmed localist’.
Perhaps the lack of excitement was down to what the green paper didn’t do. Only a few months ago, the then shadow local government secretary, Eric Pickles, was briefing Public Finance about funding allocations for councils being set by an independent committee, and fresh post-Lyons thinking on local government finance.
What has finally emerged from his successor, Caroline Spelman, is some tinkering with formula grant and the business rate, and a proposal for the Audit Commission to keep an eye on the funding settlement. A solution to councils’ funding constraints it is not.
In fact, many of the ‘post-bureaucratic’ proposals look like a rehash of old, semi-discredited ideas (mayoral referendums) – or ones that are questionable in terms of their impact on local accountability (elected police commissioners) or on recession-hit local authorities (council tax vetoes). The Tory-controlled Local Government Association has already expressed a number of ‘causes for concern’.
But perhaps something else is going on here too? Whatever the merits of community empowerment, the Opposition’s bid to grab the localist agenda is poorly timed.
In a week when Barack Obama signed off a $787bn economic stimulus package, and major infrastructure Private Finance Initiative projects are looking for a multibillion pound bail-out from the chancellor (see cover feature, pages 18–21), big rather than small government is what interests most policy makers.
Deep down, the Conservatives know as much – hence the deliberate wriggle room on RDAs, and the likelihood that many of the green paper proposals will never see the light of day. Pity, though, that no-one thought to press the delete button, along with control shift.
