To meet the huge challenges faced by local government, we need to go back to basics and rethink what we want from municipalism in the 21st century
Local government stands at a crossroads. In one direction lies the spectre of reduced influence, minimal service provision and public disengagement. In the other the promise of reinvigorated civic economies, public services genuinely built around the needs of citizens and engaged, resilient communities.
To build the future we aspire to, we need to find a new way of thinking and talking about what local government is and does. We need to redefine muncipalism for the 20th century.
LGiU’s new collection of essays, Municipal Futures is an attempt to begin that conversation.
The challenges facing local government are both familiar and daunting.
The most obvious is the immediate fiscal outlook.
We all know that local authorities are less than halfway through the total spending cuts they need to make. But climbing this fiscal mountain needs to be seen in the context of the profound questions raised by longer term challenges such as an ageing population, a fluid global economy, population movement, climate change, urbanisation and technological development.
We all know that this means doing public services differently: thinking both about service transformation and demand reduction.
So we all talk about things we know we need to do: such as shared services; prevention; smarter commissioning; re-organisation; sub-regional growth agendas; greater financial freedoms; City Deals and pooled budgets.
All of these things are important, all of them are part of the answer to the question of where local services go next - and all of them are a demonstration of the fact that it is local innovation rather than one size fits all national solutions that will drive real change in response to complex problems.
But do any of these ‘solutions’ actually meet the real challenges we have? How will our older people be cared for when there’s a hundred times more of them? Will our children have the right skills for jobs that don’t yet exist? How do we rebuild local economies in a changing global context? How do we manage local resources? How do we do all of this whilst spending less money?
Do they even lay a foundation for meeting this scale of challenge?
I would suggest that they do not and can not as long as we see them as ways of refining what local government currently does. Instead we need a new, more fundamental, discussion about what a council does and what it is.
To begin that conversation, we suggest four key characteristics that might define successful local government in the future.
• The powerful council: we need to stop thinking about decentralisation as a political project in which power must be demanded from the centre. Power is not a zero-sum game, rather it can be much more dynamic and inclusive. We need to recognise and develop the power that already exists in communities across the country.
• The learning council: councils need to become centres of adaptive leadership that are continually learning both from their own practice and also from that of other sectors. This sets the scene for new and deeper forms of partnership.
• The social council: councils need to focus more on building relationships. Both the relationships within communities that create wellbeing and allow mutual support and the relationships between people in the council that enable employees to feel secure innovating.
• The global council: we need to broaden our perspective and to think about localism in a global context. Issues like migration, climate change and economic growth are better managed between cities and localities than mediated by national governments.
These ideas are not offered as definitive solutions or even as confident predictions of what is going to happen, but they do attempt to describe a direction of travel and to offer a fresh, defamiliarised way of thinking about local government.
And they are unashamedly utopian. They describe a world in which councils are really at the heart of global municipal networks, in which they are not dependent on powers and budgets delegated from central government but are able to develop and share power with their own citizens and to raise and spend money locally.
A world in which the relationship between local government and local citizens is mediated not by a set of public service transactions but by a genuine dialogue about how they might support each other. A world in which councils are focused on building strong resilient communities rather than just on picking up the pieces when things go wrong.
That feels like the sort of municipal future we could all aspire to.
Dr Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit
