17 October 2003
Former top Treasury mandarin Lucy de Groot, who until last month was Gordon Brown's director of public services, has said the government is confused about its own philosophy of 'new localism'.
De Groot, who left Whitehall three weeks ago to become executive director of the Improvement and Development Agency, told Public Finance that the discussion of new localism needs greater clarity about what the phrase really means.
De Groot drew a distinction between devolving the power to set policy and the ability to make operational decisions, but said that, even within government, the difference between the two was not always appreciated.
'I think there's quite a lot of confusion between devolution to the front line, as it's described, and devolved decision-making,' she told PF. 'At the moment the government hasn't settled on one view.'
She said there was now widespread recognition within the Treasury, which has become the champion of new localism, that the command-and-control model of public services could not work.
De Groot indicated that Chancellor Gordon Brown was personally concerned whether the balance between central and local decision-making was right, and she hinted that there could be further change as a result. 'The very posing of the question, coming from that source, is very interesting,' she said. 'We are in a transitional phase.'
But de Groot warned that clarity about the concept of localism was needed to ensure that having a series of democratically accountable local bodies did not cause services to fragment. 'If we end up with a massively atomised series of relationships… then we end up with a very fractured local society,' she said.
'A multiplicity of electorates and a multiplicity of representatives, whose interrelationships are unclear, could be very problematic.'
PFoct2003
