Education Secretary Michael Gove's humiliating apologies last week and the tough questions he faced today over the botched Building Schools for the Future announcements should make him reconsider his hostile attitude to elected local authorities.
Gove is the victim of centralisation, being blamed for matters about which he cannot expect to be well-informed. A central department or quango may cope with generalities and strategy, and allocating big chunks of expenditure, but it cannot know local conditions as well as elected local authorities.
Councils know their localities' circumstances and needs better than can any remote national bureaucracy. They are less likely to make mistakes over specific details than are national officials on whom ministers depend. Gove surely never sought to be a minister responsible for particular schools.
His Health Secretary colleague, Andrew Lansley's, health proposals represent a similar centralisation and contempt for elected local government. The health white paper published today will make Lansley accountable for each GP’s allocation of funds, which means he too will soon be apologising for errors.
Lansley’s proposals bypass local government and will frustrate attempts to further the notion of Total Place and place-based budgeting. They will enhance the power of professional groups promoting their sectional interests, and give an advantage to the persistent middle-class able to elbow their way through the system's complexities.
The way ahead is to simplify processes and clarify accountability. The public interest will be better served by decentralising to elected local authorities decision-making powers both over education and health, and over taxation to help finance these services.
What is needed is to reduce the dependence of health and education on financial handouts from central government, and replace most of them with money from local taxation levied by elected local authorities. This change would make local government and its voters behave more responsibly, so that if they wanted higher standards they would face the consequences of higher local taxation, and if they wanted lower taxation they would have to decide where to cut.
A revitalised local government is the true fourth way between centralisation, professionalisation and marketisation.
George Jones is emeritus professor of government at the London School of Economics
