Scotland’s local government minister outlines his vision for people power

6 Jan 15
Scotland’s new local government minister has mapped out ambitious plans for a broad-based assault on inequality, as well as a range of measures to strengthen public participation in policy making.

By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 7 January 2015

Scotland’s new local government minister has mapped out ambitious plans for a broad-based assault on inequality, as well as a range of measures to strengthen public participation in policy making.

Alex Neil took up the role of Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights at the end of November last year, appointed in a reshuffle by newly installed First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. In one of his first media interviews in his new post, Neil told Public Finance that social justice will be an ‘over-arching’ policy theme going forward.

A major shift in Sturgeon’s reshuffle was to decouple local government from Deputy First Minister John Swinney’s finance remit, passing responsibility to Neil, while Swinney retained responsibility for the National Performance Framework, budgetary monitoring, public service reform, efficiency, and public sector pay and pensions.

‘John’s got finance and the wider public sector performance issues. But all the other issues are now transferred to me,’ Neil said. ‘The coherence is in the title. What it’s doing is bringing together the key areas that determine the quality of social justice in Scotland.’

Neil added: ‘To have a socially just Scotland, you’ve got to have people not living in fuel poverty, you’ve got to have people living in decent housing, you’ve got to have an equalities policy that gives women a far bigger role than they’ve had.’

Neil also made clear that he sees both local authorities and the third sector as primary partners in the drive to reduce inequality. He also said he is eager to devolve more powers from Holyrood to councils and beyond, to the communities they serve, wherever doing so advances the cause of social justice.

‘Fifty years ago, the attitude to social justice – and it was right at the time – was about introducing universal child benefit, nationalising the coal industry, creating the National Health Service,’ Neil said.

‘They had to start from scratch in all of that. But in today’s society, although it’s very important to make sure that we provide a range of benefits, it’s not enough. People won’t accept things being done to them. They want things done for them, but they want to determine themselves what those are.’

Scotland’s councils have been pressing, through the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy, for greater autonomy. Neil said he supports their push, but also wants powers further decentralised through community empowerment and self-directed support services, giving ‘more power to tenants, not to local authorities’.

‘Community empowerment is extremely important, because we now know from 50 years of different anti-poverty programmes that if the programmes are not engineered by, created by and run by the people we’re trying to take out of poverty, they fail automatically,’ Neil said.

Similarly, broader consultation is needed on bigger issues, according to Neil. ‘Obviously, I want to see all the reserved powers eventually come to the Scottish Parliament. But, concomitant and parallel with that, there’s now got to be a big debate in Scotland about how we govern Scotland internally, how we strengthen our internal democracy, how we improve the management of our own resources.’

Neil added that the independence referendum, with its high turnout, has led to democratic renewal in Scotland: ‘We’re now the most politicised nation, probably, in the world. You’ve got people who previously would never have watched a TV programme on politics who can now tell you all about the public sector borrowing requirement! That’s a great thing.’

The challenge is now to build on that level of engagement, Neil argued. ‘What we’ve got to try to do is get people much more involved in running resident associations, or involved in running their local schools, or in more participation in the health service. And how do we, as part of that, strengthen all aspects of local government, to make it more local? A lot of the power we need to push down through subsidiarity is [to] below local government level.’

The SNP government, he said, remains committed to subsidiarity, and more powers for councils form part of that: ‘We want to push power down to individuals and to communities as far as it will go. It has to be appropriate – there are some things that have to be done at a national level, and there are some things that have to be done by local authorities. But there are a lot of things that are better done by the third sector, by housing associations, by school boards.’

Neil made clear that he sees the third sector as ‘absolutely vital’ in shaping and delivering policy, though he added: ‘The challenge for the third sector – and this is why I’m very keen that we develop the third sector interfaces approach – is that very often they don’t speak with one voice, particularly at local level. I think the sector itself needs to look at how it can speak with a more unified voice.’

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