Essex leader Lord Hanningfield’s call for the power to set local benefits is just one of the radical ideas local government is throwing up
Radical Toryism, we are now learning, can sometimes unite neo-cons and the Conservative centre. When the veteran leader of Essex County Council, Lord Hanningfield, suggested this week that councils could be given powers to set benefit levels, it seemed to chime with Right-wing Tory plans for a US-style welfare revolution, where social support was shifted from the federal government to states in the 1990s.
Hanningfield prides himself on being a ‘one-nation’ Tory in the tradition of Birmingham’s legendary nineteenth-century mayor, Joseph Chamberlain. He has already laid the foundations for a full-blown municipal bank in Essex, saved a string of threatened post offices and considered a range of financial services.
So his suggestion that councils should be given a lump sum from Whitehall to spend as they wish on welfare and employment programmes should not be dismissed as pre-election posturing. (However, it is true that pace-setting Tory councils are keen to hold Conservative leader David Cameron to his promise to devolve substantial powers from Whitehall to town halls.)
Put aside, for a moment, the argument against welfare devolution – the threat to a national safety net, for instance, and the potential to use it as cover for substantial cuts – and consider the bigger picture. Most radical, innovative councils these days tend to be some of the larger Tory authorities: Essex with its emerging bank and neighbouring Kent with a full-blown commercial services division.
Sure, others – the odd London borough, for instance – might be accused by critics of taking innovation and cost-cutting to extremes, but those municipal laggards from elsewhere who snipe from the sidelines have precious few new ideas to reinvigorate local government.
While many councils are classed by the Audit Commission, on extremely narrow indicators, as good performers – ie, they provide conventional services fairly efficiently – most seem incapable of seizing the higher economic and social ground by moving into new areas.
Where are the municipal pioneers who recognise that local government has to radically change direction to address the new realities of the recession and reduced income as the Treasury reins in spending?
Let me offer a new mantra: ‘less means more’. At the first level, councils need to examine every aspect of services – and ask whether in-house provision is the most efficient means of delivery. That doesn’t mean mindless outsourcing. It does mean the council acting as commissioner, devolving some control to communities and neighbourhoods where necessary, while insisting on the highest standards.
At a second level, it means challenging the centre and making the case to become a super-commissioner for many public services currently undertaken by quangos and government: learning and skills, welfare-to-work programmes, economic development, joint control of primary care trusts, wider scrutiny of the NHS, and so on.
And at a third level, it means radical innovation in the mould of those nineteenth-century pioneers who provided clean water, gas, electricity, public housing and health services. Now, with countless communities reeling under the weight of recession, you could argue that an equivalent twenty-first century challenge for councils is tackling poverty, personal debt and insecurity with hands-on financial advice and – yes – mutual financial products as part of a new, localist, economic deal.
The cue here, dare one say, is Cameron’s commitment to give councils a ‘general power of competence’. Put simply, as he told this summer’s Local Government Association conference, that means: ‘Councils can do what they like as long as it is legal.’
Sure, it’s easy to mock the commitment on the grounds that opposition parties tend to ditch their ‘localist’ credentials on taking power. Didn’t New Labour promise a ‘bonfire of quangos’ and to return the centralised business rate to local control? But Cameron must be given some benefit of the doubt when he says councils will be ‘empowered to exercise their own judgement’.
Of course, there are still concerns – principally a fear that some will see Cameron-style localism as a means of driving through deep social and welfare cuts by the back door.
But recession can become the mother of invention. And local government certainly needs the latter if it is to survive the looming Treasury sledgehammer.
Peter Hetherington writes on community affairs and regeneration
