IDS promises shift from central control

11 Jul 02
Relations between central and local government need to be radically transformed and much of Whitehall's power relinquished to town halls, Iain Duncan Smith has told local government leaders.

12 July 2002

Addressing the conference on July 4, the Conservative party leader argued that public services could be only improved if the culture of centralisation were reversed. This tendency had created a situation where every local authority, school and hospital was under the ultimate control of ministers rather than councillors.

'We are still trying to run all our public services from the centre,' Duncan Smith said.

'It's the twenty-first century but our public services are being run like they were in 1945. No other major country runs their schools or their hospitals the way we do. That is why the quality of our public services is failing to keep pace with rising expectations and living standards.'

He told delegates it was time to challenge the status quo, and argued that uniformity of services across the country was no longer the most important principle underpinning provision.

'We should challenge the idea… that nobody minds receiving a poor service as long as nobody else is getting a better one,' he said. 'At the beginning of the new century, equality of mediocrity no longer unites our country, it merely emphasises existing divisions.'

Acknowledging that in the past opposition parties had pledged decentralisation and then failed to deliver, Duncan Smith said a future Tory government would make a 'genuine and decisive' shift away from central control towards 'community government'.

This would involve handing power to local politicians and communities so that priorities such as health, education and law and order could be tackled at the grassroots level.

'These are local problems requiring local solutions and it is local government and local communities who are leading the way in tackling them.'

Duncan Smith reaffirmed his party's opposition to the government's proposals to strip county councils of their planning powers, which he said would disenfranchise communities.

And he also pledged to fight Labour's plans for elected regional assemblies, claiming they would take powers from local authorities rather than from quangos and Whitehall departments.

'They are nothing to do with devolution and everything to do with centralisation,' he said.


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