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This article first appeared in the July 2002 issue of Red Pepper magazine. For further information, or to subscribe to Red Pepper, contact: Red
Pepper,
Alan Whitehead
doesn't bemoan being sacked from his job When Alan Whitehead was last month sacked as junior minister for local government and the regions, local authorities lost a critical friend in the independent-minded former council leader. His replacements, Tony McNaulty, and Chris Leslie, are unlikely to be so alert to the centralising sub-texts hidden in detailed regulations. Whitehead describes how, 'there has always been a centralising default mechanism. As soon as you take your eyes off government, it centralises'. He should know - as leader of Southampton Council in the 1980s he was at the receiving end of Margaret Thatcher's centralising mission. So how strong is the centralising tendency under Labour? 'There is still the assumption that if there's a problem, and acres of newsprint about it, central government must fix it. This is a tremendous centralising impulse, leading central government to seek permanent powers and means of control on the grounds that "we need to be able to second guess local government - just in case the Daily Mail says we must fix this, we must be able to do so". So at the bottom of every piece of legislation, if you look carefully, there's a phrase which enables the government to wipe out everything and start again, and do what it wants.' Whitehead thinks the recent local government white paper has the makings of a new settlement between local government and national government. 'It begins to set out a boundary that creates a definite sphere for local government.' The new funding regime will be important. He acknowledges that the white paper has accepted some of the 'earned autonomy' approach but he says, 'there are also some general freedoms being given, getting rid of various prohibitions on what local councils can do, re-introducing the freedom to trade, introducing the power for community well-being.' (Although without adequate resources this power can be of limited value.) He goes on
to argue that the change in capital finances, although not ideal, at least
means 'capital allocation isn't on the whim of a minister. It could make
it easier for local councils to plan ahead rather than having to wait
for government decisions each year.' Well, the straight jacket has loosened, argues Whitehead, proudly adding that the number of centrally imposed targets on local council services has been cut from 147 to 100. And there is also a commitment to cut down on ring-fenced funding. There is more emphasis on joint targets and on negotiation between central and local government, each respecting their own spheres, through the Central Local Government Partnership. 'Against this background' he says, 'the CPA should be about guiding on quality as opposed to enforcement on the basis of compulsive number crunching. In the past, the Audit Commission has tended to judge by speed dial indicators - how many, how much, how quickly, how fast, how soon. The methods the Audit Commission has developed for the CPA are intended to be much more qualitative and subjective.' But if the CPA is more subjective, who decides how quality is to be judged? Unison members across the country tell Red Pepper that the CPA treats the outsourcing of services to the private sector as a key indicator of quality. Whitehead
agreed that this was a danger. 'The idea that quality equals out-sourcing
has been a lietmotif of government's attitude to local government. It
goes back to the ideological assumption that private is better than public,
and that you can improve the quality of your service to the public by
going back to the Ridley doctrine - of the 'enabling' local authority
with two meetings a year to award contracts to the private sector - at
its extreme.' Contracts can never be flexible enough to cope with the interdependencies of the different services, the need to respond to users and changing circumstances - and they don't make best use of the creativity and commitment of staff. He believes the CPA should 'basically be about minimum standards of local services.' He sees a connection between the strength of local democracy and the centralised setting of standards. In his view a reform of the electoral system would strengthen the case for greater local autonomy. At present, he argues, local councils cannot convincingly argue that the electorate will kick them out if they fail to deliver. In a farcical way, national government can always top the local government's mandate of 20-30 per cent of the electorate with its own mandate of 60 per cent or so of the electorate. But he does not think England will see electoral reform before the next election: 'It'll come in Scotland and Wales, and England will just look silly.' Whitehead's ideal system of implementing minimum standards without undermining local democracy would involve a greater input from local people. He suggests that: 'A local council should agree the minimum standards by which they should be judged through involving local people and their organisations - not just through elections but through more direct kinds of participation. This would be negotiated with government. Then there would be a process by which local people check whether their standards have been met, with government acting as a final check.' This led to a discussion of the relationship between representative and participative democracy. I put to Whitehead that government policies on neighbourhood renewal, for example, had sought, often unsuccessfully, to use appeals to 'the community' to bypass local government. 'Fair comment,' he said. He described how 'an undifferentiated communitarianism' existed and to some degree still exists in the Labour Party. 'It was a view that communities are good things; give them a means of participation and they will tell you what they want and administrators will go and do it and these intermediate political layers aren't necessary.' It became clear as he talked that the government's anti-political approach to community connects with it's reliance on managerial tools to assess council performance. The other side of the anti-political communitarianism is the reduction of democracy to consumerism. Throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s, the Tories did their best to reduce democratic
accountability to customer redress, with no power over the choices that
face you, over how the shop is stocked. 'Unfortunately the same tendency
is at work today. You have to have an independent elected council with
a compact with national government. Participative democracy is a further
development of representative democracy: getting elected every few years
doesn't give you the legitimacy to do what you do on behalf of the community
in between elections. So you need a way of local councils making themselves
accountable on a daily basis.' Hilary Wainwright is working on a book on participatory democracy and political power, to be published by Verso in February 2003. page updated
24-May-2004
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