By Vivienne Russell | 27 September 2011
Local government needs to ‘get off its knees’ and demand independence from Whitehall, a leading Labour MP said last night.
Speaking at the Public Finance/CIPFA fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference, Graham Allen called for a new constitutional settlement between central government and councils. Local bodies should be free from ministerial control, he said.
Allen chairs the Commons’ political and constitutional reform committee, which is conducting an inquiry into whether the relationship between central and local government should be codified.
He told the meeting in Liverpool that, with independence, ‘never again would we [local government] be the victim of what central government wants to do to us… We would live or die by our own efforts.
‘It’s time that local government got off its knees and stopped holding out the begging bowl for bits and pieces.’
Responding to a question about what councils could do to revive economic growth, Allen said a centralised executive had ‘stifled’ local innovation. He stressed that locally elected councillors were best placed to know what was needed and what would work in their communities.
‘If they [central government] let us [local government] do it, we can make a very serious impact on growth and prosperity,’ he said.
Clive Betts, chair of the Commons communities and local government select committee, agreed that proper constitutional arrangements between Whitehall and town hall were needed.
He drew attention to what he said were contradictions at the heart of the government’s approach to public services and uncertainty over the role local government should play.
‘The government talks about the importance of local government on the one hand, but then has a free schools policy on the other, which seems to be part of the dismemberment of local education authorities,’ he said.
Betts said the progress made by the previous government towards a joined-up approach to public services had been ‘put on the back burner’. The Total Place pooled budgets programme ‘had started to pull things together’, he said, but had been replaced with Community Budgets, which lack cross-Whitehall support.
‘Other central government departments are not signed up to joined-up thinking at local level – they’re certainly not signed up to pooling resources at the local level,’ he said. He singled out ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions who he said had ‘no idea about a localist agenda’.
Heather Wakefield, local government secretary at public sector union Unison, observed that the cuts programme was provoking some new thinking about public services.
While greater emphasis on citizen and user engagement was welcome and the move towards mutuals and co-operatives was, in some cases, a good idea, these positives were balanced against a long list of negatives. These included a reduction in the range of services available to people, loss of ancillary staff such as police community support officers and teaching assistants, and a crisis in industrial relations in local government.
Wakefield said basic employment rights, such as maternity pay, were being eroded, while in some authorities, unions were being derecognised altogether.
‘There is a mood out there, especially among Tory authorities, about undermining public sector trade unionism,’ she said, adding that other authorities were using the financial crisis as a ‘cover’ to reduce their staffing costs.
Responding to a comment from the floor, Wakefield agreed
that the public service ethos as well as the public sector itself was ‘under
attack’.
The fringe meeting was also addressed by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council. It was chaired by Steve Freer, chief executive of CIPFA.
