The commissioners sent in by Eric Pickles to run Rotherham council must make themselves primarily accountable to local people, not to Whitehall
The serial failings in Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, set out in such painful detail by Louise Casey’s report and the tragic impact of those failings on so many vulnerable people, have appalled people across the country.
There will be a lot of sympathy, therefore, with Communities Secretary Eric Pickles' view that: ‘These are exceptional circumstances that justify Whitehall’s intervention so we can make the council address its failings and prevent this ever happening again.’
His intention is to appoint five commissioners to take over the functions of the council’s cabinet ahead of all-out elections in 2016.
But while these circumstances are undoubtedly exceptional, Pickles’ intervention is not.
In November, the secretary of state appointed three commissioners to oversee grant giving, appointments, property deals and the administration of elections in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. And following a damning report by Sir Bob Kerslake into performance at Birmingham City Council, he made it clear that he would also look to intervene there if there was no improvement within the year.
In Tower Hamlets and in Rotherham, just as in Doncaster in 2010, there are clear and specific failures that need to be addressed.
But it is worth asking what is the best way to address these failures? Is this type of intervention from the secretary of state compatible with his commitment to localism? When is it acceptable for the government to step in and ‘rescue’ communities from their own councils? Why does Westminster’s democratic mandate trump that of a local authority? What is the relationship between performance management and local democracy? How do we know if central government’s interventions are successful?
These questions are only likely to become more pressing as devolution becomes a more entrenched feature of the political landscape. The coalition government is committed to devolving powers to combined authorities and shadow chancellor Ed Balls, a man who once responded to service failure by sacking the responsible officer on live television, has pledged that a Labour government will devolve £30bn to city and county regions.
These commitments are welcome, though many would argue they do not go far or fast enough. Britain remains one of the most centralised countries in the world – with 98% of taxation and 80% of public spending controlled by the centre.
Current policies loosen the fiscal and statutory apron strings between central and local government but do not cut them. Yet there are compelling reasons to believe that the responsive, preventive, people-centred public realm we need to cope with the challenges of the 21st century requires a level of integration and adaptability that can only be delivered locally.
Nonetheless, even the most ardent localist cannot pretend that there will be no failures within local government. Post-Audit Commission, there is work to be done about how we define failure locally and how we establish local frameworks that help identify and mitigate it. But failure in itself is not an argument against localism. Indeed the failures we have seen in Rotherham illustrate exactly why we need public services that are accountable to local people and responsive to their needs.
Such failures are rarely failures of local government alone, but also involve failure by the police, the health service and a range of other agencies (most of them controlled by central government). Where those failures are complete and catastrophic, however, it is appropriate for local leadership to take full responsibility, as the leader and cabinet have done in Rotherham by resigning, and for central government to support swift democratic renewal.
Addressing the Commons about his plans for Rotherham, Pickles carefully framed his intervention in these terms: ‘The action I am proposing … is to restore good local governance to Rotherham, where all can have confidence again in their council and they can take great pride in their borough.’
The commissioners he appointed would be charged with progressively returning functions to council control as quickly as possible, he told MPs.
It is vital that they do so, but the commissioners also need to make sure that in their day-to-day operations they are making themselves accountable to local people. Given the scale of the challenge facing them, it will be hard to find the time, energy and means to do so, but it will be crucial to the success of their intervention.
Many of the local structures that might help hold the commissioners to account, such as overview and scrutiny committees, will be discredited by the failure of the previous regime. It is important that the commissioners engage with them anyway, so that they can begin to restore the trust of local people.
The commissioners also need to engage directly with local people. The ballot box is the foundation of our democracy but not its entirety. There are a host of more direct forms of participative democracy, from town hall meetings to participatory budgeting and a range of new digital democracy tools. The commissioners must make full use of these to ensure that they are responding to the needs of the community, communicating clearly, giving clear criteria to judge the success of their intervention and clear channels to feed back upon it. The commissioners may report to the secretary of state but they can still be primarily accountable to local people and not to Whitehall.
This goes to the heart of the question. If we believe in local democracy – the right of local people to shape the places they live in, the services they use and the lives they lead – then we should always want local government to be in the driving seat. If this becomes impossible the question is not whether central government intervenes but how.
Does it look to take control for itself or to restore control to local people? That is the true test of localism.
Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit
This opinion piece was first published in the March issue of Public Finance magazine
