Local Government
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Local Government

Policy and Management in Local Authorities

Howard Elcock

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eBook - ePub

Local Government

Policy and Management in Local Authorities

Howard Elcock

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About This Book

Since first publication in 1982, Howard Elcock's Local Government has established a reputation as a comprehensive and unbiased account of how British local government really works. This respected textbook has been completely revised and rewritten for its third edition, to take account of changes in local government and in the circumstances in which it operates. The third edition examines new management structures and accountabilities that follow the policy initiatives of the central Conservative administration. It appraises the impact of the three-pronged reform of the Thatcher years: impact on local authorities' financial resources, new structures of local government and new pressure to contract services out to the private and voluntary sectors.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134853618
Part I
The world of local government
Chapter 1
Local government in the British political system
The place of local government in the British Constitution is both ambiguous and ambivalent. Britain is a small, densely populated island with a powerful central government. Little recognition is given to regional or national variations in culture, language or economic structure, yet systems of local government have existed since the Norman Conquest. They have long been regarded as bulwarks protecting us from centralised tyranny. The local control of the police, for example, has traditionally been valued as protecting us from the control of the state’s entire machinery of coercion by a single minister. Again, local autonomy has ensured that educational structures and methods can be developed in a wide variety of different ways, in terms of the school curriculum, patterns of school organisation and teaching methods. Above all, local government provides a means whereby citizens can exercise control over their local affairs and express their will, through their votes as well as by lobbying their local authority, especially when they are disaffected from the policies of the central government (Stewart, 1983).
To develop these arguments in a little more detail, first, the varied political composition of local authorities reflects the differences in the party balance in the different nations and regions of Britain. Second, local authorities also provide the only fora in which public officials can be held accountable to elected representatives, apart from the House of Commons. Third, their varied policies and management practices permit experimentation, hence allowing local authorities and others to learn from their varied practices and experiences. The Audit Commission, established in 1982, encourages such learning processes by publishing reports which give examples of innovations or good management practice from individual authorities, both in general and in the context of particular services. Fourth, the Town or County Hall is closer to members of the public than Whitehall, hence service providers and officers can be more aware of local problems and desires and be more responsive to them. Last, the over-concentration of power at the centre is inhibited by the existence of local authorities with significant functions and responsibilities.
However, the power of the centre is formally absolute. Parliament is sovereign and hence has complete command over local government. It can grant or withhold powers from local authorities. It can create or abolish local authorities as it thinks fit. The doctrine of ultra vires reinforces that control because it states that a local authority can only do those things for which it is specifically granted power by legislation; local authorities are given no general competence as their French counterparts have. If local authorities exceed the powers vested in them by statute, thus acting ultra vires, the councillors who supported the illegal expenditure can be surcharged with its costs. If, as is almost inevitable, they cannot afford to pay the surcharge, they will be declared bankrupt and hence disqualified from holding public office as councillors. This power has resulted in several causes celebres in central-local conflict, including the surcharging of councillors in Clay Cross in the early 1970s for refusing to raise council house rents as required by the Housing Finance Act of 1972. It happened again to the majority Labour councillors in Liverpool and Lambeth when in 1985 they set their budgets late in an attempt to resist central government spending restraints. They were surcharged with the consequent lost revenue.
The relationship between central and local government is chronically tense because the central government constantly seeks to intervene in local affairs, for three main reasons. The first is to implement its main policy commitments, often by legislation. The second is to prevent local authorities from pursuing financial and expenditure policies that are contrary to those of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Finally, the central government needs to ensure, especially as the population becomes increasingly mobile, that local services are provided to at least a minimum acceptable level throughout the country (see Widdicombe, 1986; Elcock, 1987). It is not always realised that local authority expenditures vary considerably: the highest-spending local authority will often spend between half and twice as much again as the lowest spender, so the central government needs to secure the provision of an acceptable level of service. This is frequently done through the deployment of central government inspectorates, such as Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary and until recently the Inspectors of Schools and Colleges. An unsatisfactory inspector’s report may result in financial penalties being imposed on a local authority.
In sum, as Beloff and Peele have put it:
the prominence of the ultra vires doctrine has been combined with a fierce concern for local values and a belief that local self-government was an ideal at least as important as either economic administration or equality of provision.
(Beloff and Peele, 1980, p. 246)
In consequence, local government has long been regarded by ministers, civil servants and MPs with a mixture of enthusiasm and suspicion. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill and James Stephens argued for local government as an essential part of representative democracy but, in contrast, such social reformers as Edwin Chadwick saw local authorities as corrupt vestries whose dilatory and venal failures needed to be countered by central government intervention (Chandler, 1991; Kingdom, 1991). Today, local authorities are seen both as defenders of local opinions and values against the remote dictatorship of Whitehall and as incompetent, arrogant temples of bumbledom—extravagant, tyrannical and inefficient. In recent years local government has become highly controversial, from the House of Commons to the local saloon bar. We need to tease out some of these controversies to see what the major issues are and examine the major points of view that have emerged on each of them. In this initial survey, we shall consider central-local government relations, the efficacy or otherwise of structural reform, attempts to improve local authority management and changing the relationship between local authorities and their citizens.
CENTRAL-LOCAL RELATIONS
The proper role of local government in a unitary (as opposed to a federal) state has exercised both academics and practitioners in public administration for many years. Since 1979, it has been at the centre of some of the most bitter political confrontations of what we must still call the Thatcher era (Savage and Robins (eds), 1990). Tension between central and local government is endemic because, as we saw earlier, the values of local government conflict with the central government’s need to ensure that its policies are carried out throughout the land. Above all, it is assumed that local government must entail significant local choice: that local electors should be able to perceive real differences between the various candidates and parties who offer themselves for election to the local council. Without such local choice, the democratic structures of elections and council meetings have no point (Stewart, 1983; Jones and Stewart, 1984). However, local choice is nowhere enshrined in a written constitution, whereas Parliament is sovereign: the Queen in Parliament can do anything. In consequence, central-local relations are nowhere defined and are hence a perennial subject of controversy. Hence, the balance between the centre and localities varies from time to time, either generally or in relation to particular policies or services.
Traditionally, the debate about central-local relations has been conducted between two poles. On the one hand, there are those who argue that local authorities are the agents of the central government, responsible for carrying out the instructions of ministers and Parliament. Thus highway authorities often act as agents for the Department of Transport in the construction and maintenance of motorways and other trunk roads. The Department determines that a new road is needed; the local highway authority (usually a county council) lets the contracts for the work and supervises the road’s construction. Again, it is often said that education is a national service locally administered. Efficient schooling must be provided by the local education authority (LEA) for all children of between 5 and 16 years of age residing in its area. Only administrative details were left to LEAs to work out but these included the school curriculum and the organisational structure of the local schooling system, including methods of selection and the ages at which pupils transfer from primary to secondary schools. Hence, LEAs had real discretion over major aspects of school education, (see Jennings, 1977; Kogan and van der Eycken, 1973).
However, under the 1988 Education Reform Act, the Government has assumed increasing control over the school curriculum through the development of the national curriculum and the introduction of national attainment tests for pupils of various ages. Schools are also being encouraged to ‘opt out’ of LEA control altogether, in favour of central government funding, from 1993 through a schools funding council financed and appointed by the Secretary of State for Education. Thus LEAs are arguably both increasingly becoming agents of the central government and losing large parts of their functions as schools ‘opt out’ and as other institutions, such as further education colleges and previously the former polytechnics, have been removed from their control. LEAs are thus both increasingly being forced into the agent role and seeing their role diminished. In J.A.G Griffith’s (1966) terms, the Department of Education’s role is increasingly a promotional one, in which it seeks to secure the implementation of government policies and leaves the local authorities relatively little room for manoeuvre. The same can be said of highways policy, at least where trunk roads and motorways are concerned (Griffith, 1966, pp. 521–522).
The second suggested role for local authorities is that of partnership with the central government in providing services for the public. J.A.Chandler (1991) offers a modification of this analysis. He argues that local authorities act as stewards of the central government, who are left to discharge their responsibilities, with the central government intervening only if the steward’s conduct is found to have been unsatisfactory. The broad outlines of policy are determined nationally; local authorities play a substantial part in interpreting those policies and mobilising the resources needed to bring them to fruition. Here, central government departments should restrict themselves to Griffith’s regulatory or laissez-faire relationships with local authorities. In the first, central governments ensure that adequate standards of services are maintained, often through the deployment of departmental inspectorates. They also enforce national policies on local authorities from time to time. However, local authorities for their part have formed representative associations to present the case for local authorities to the central government and argue against the imposition of unwelcome central policies upon them. In England there are three main local authority associations: the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA), the Association of County Councils (ACC) and the Association of District Councils (ADC.) In Scotland there is only one representative organisation: the Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), although tensions between the regional and district councils develop within it. Moves are afoot to unite the English local government associations into a single body. The example of Scotland is cited as an argument that if local authorities can speak to the central government with a single voice, this will strengthen their negotiating position. These associations negotiate with the major Government departments responsible for local government in a ‘centre-centre’ dialogue conducted largely in London between departmental civil servants and the local authority associations (Isaac-Henry, 1980; Rhodes, 1987).
Sometimes such interference has led to major confrontations between central and local government. For example, when Labour Governments in the 1960s and 1970s tried to compel all LEAs to abolish selection for secondary education (Jennings, 1977) and when the Heath Conservative Government tried to compel all local housing authorities to increase their council house rents to market levels in the early 1970s, local government services moved to the centre of national as well as local political controversy.
Both these policies resulted in major conflicts with individual local authorities. The Labour councillors of Clay Cross Urban District Council in Derbyshire were surcharged and disqualified from office for refusing to increase their council house rents in 1972. Here, the central government in the end enforced its policy successfully. However, in 1976, Tameside Metropolitan District Council successfully defended itself in court from an instruction by the Labour Secretary of State for Education and Science, Fred Mulley, not to retain selection for its grammar schools (Griffith, 1977).
In the laissez-faire case, the central department interferes as little as possible with local authorities in the belief that they are best left to learn from their own mistakes. In 1966 Griffith instanced the Ministry of Health’s relationship with local authority health services as an example, but the laissez-faire approach is probably almost extinct now, especially in the light of the way central-local relations have developed since 1979. Since that year, the place of local government in the British Constitution has been challenged more fundamentally than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. In consequence, the debate about whether local government is needed at all has resurfaced in a way reminiscent of the debates of that earlier period. (Chandler, 1988; Elcock, 1987; Jones and Stewart, 1984; Kingdom, 1991).
The Thatcher assault
This challenge to local government’s usefulness and sometimes its very existence has been mounted on three fronts, the development of each of which can be very roughly correlated with the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s three successive terms of office. The details will be discussed later; here we will briefly summarise them and note their significance for the constitutional place of local government.
The first front was to compel local authorities to conform to the Government’s stated intention from the beginning of its term of office, to reduce the proportion of the gross national product (GNP) which is absorbed by public spending. In addition, Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues took the view that people who lived in local authorities whose heavy, in their view excessive, spending caused them to levy high rates, needed to be protected from the activities of extravagent, ‘overspending’ councillors. This imposed an undue burden on householders who were responsible for paying rates, as well as on businesses which had to pay high commercial rates on their premises. These ratepayers, so the argument went, were being unfairly treated and should be protected from high-spending councils.
In consequence, whereas previous Administrations had relied on their ability to control the national totals of local authority spending—with a high degree of success because the outcome of each spending round almost invariably fell within 2 per cent of the Government’s expectations (Jones and Stewart, 1984), the Thatcher Administrations sought to control the spending decisions of individual councils. This new approach to controlling individual councils’ spending was begun with the 1980 Local Government, Planning and Land Act, which introduced a new system for the distribution of the Rate Support Grant. Instead of allocating grant on the basis of an authority’s past spending by regression analysis, it was henceforth allocated on the basis of a calculation of what each council needed to spend in order to provide a standard level of services. Financial penalties are imposed on local authorities which exceed this level of spending by more than a given amount, which is itself determined by the Secretary of State for the Environment.
This assessment, known initially as the grant related spending assessment (GREA) and now the standard spending assessment (SSA) has also been used as the main basis for further measures of control. Thus, in 1982 in Scotland and in 1984 in England and Wales, the Government took to itself the power to limit or ‘cap’ the expenditure of individual local authorities. This was seen as the removal of a discretion to set their own rate levels which local authorities had enjoyed for centuries and was widely attacked as an unwarranted restriction of local authorities’ autonomy, but to no avail. The Secretary of State for the Environment is also empowered to restrict the spending of all local authorities but only after a further resolution has been passed by Parliament. This ‘capping’ power has been retained through the introduction of the Community Charge and its replacement by the Council Tax.
The second front was opened after the Conservative General Election victory in 1983. The Conservative Party included in its manifesto for that election a commitment to abolish the Greater London Council (GLC) and the six metropolitan county councils. This commitment, which was by all accounts adopted only at the last minute, was implemented against a flood of opposition mobilised by the seven threatened local authorities and almost everyone else concerned with local government. The Government’s White Paper, Streamlining the Cities, (DoE, 1983) was published within a few months of the election. It argued that the councils whose abolition was proposed had few substantive functions (they were responsible for some 20 per cent of local government spending in their areas) and that they were creatures of ‘a fashion for strategic planning, whose time has passed’ (DoE, 1983). No-one was in any doubt that the real reason for their abolition was that the GLC in particular had become a major focus of opposition to Government policy, which was symbolised by the daily appearance of a banner on the riverside facade of County Hall (which faces the Palace of Westminster across the Thames) which announced London’s increasing total of unemployed workers (Forrester, Lansley and Pauley, 1985). The seven councils ceased to exist on 1 April 1986 and were replaced by a messy structure of joint boards composed of members of the district councils in each metropolitan county area (Leach and Game, 1991).
Since then, further structural change has occurred in the form of the establishment of urban development corporations (UDCs) with missions to bring about the redevelopment of decaying inner-city areas. They took over many planning functions and powers from local authorities. They were empowered to undertake redevelopment with a view to attracting private investment into their areas. The first two of these bodies, for the London Docklands and part of central Liverpool, were established in 1981. Further UDCs have since been established in other areas, including Tyne and Wear, Manchester and Sheffield (Butcher et al., 1990). Some, notably the London Docklands Development Corporation, have come into frequent conflict with the local authorities in their areas because the Corporation’s vision of the future of the area conflicted with those of the local authorities there (Batley, 1989). Other UDCs, such as Tyne and Wear, have by contrast been anxious to develop co-operation and collaboration with their local authorities. Nonetheless, all the UDCs have been given functions which were formerly enjoyed by local ...

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