They won't let us, so we'll find another way

As local authorities set their budgets in the next few days, many will be mulling over the Government’s offer to provide a temporary grant to cover two years worth of a 1% Council Tax increase, the latest manifestation of the Council Tax Freeze Grant which I have written about on this blog before.

If the Council Tax Freeze grant is the carrot, the stick is the legislative blunt instrument that requires any authority pondering a Council Tax increase of 2% or more to put the matter to local referendum.  There is a wealth of legislation and guidance setting out how the figures need to be calculated, how the ballot should be conducted, the question to be asked and so on.

It should not come as a surprise that Governments like to keep control over matters for which ultimately they will be held responsible. For all the localist rhetoric, it is interesting the extent to which our current Government’s relationship with the doctrine of localism harks back to the Victorian era.  Localists also need to learn lessons from the Nineteenth Century.

It was the Victorians, remember, who invented modern local government, from the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act (OK, pedants, that was two years before Victoria came to the throne)  to the Local Government Act 1894.  All the features of modern local government and the way it is governed from the centre came into being in that sixty year period, which was typified by ongoing debate about the extent to which local government should be independent of Government.

Even the simple idea of local decision making by centrally imposed ballot has its parallels.  Take the Public Libraries Act of 1850, the first piece of legislation that empowered local authorities to set up public libraries in the UK.  To those who live with the idea that the Victorian era was a golden age of localism, a look at the details of this particular piece of legislation provides a palliative.

The legislation was restricted to places of ten thousand inhabitants or more, limited expenditure to the product of a ha’penny rate and, bizarrely, forbade spending on the provision of books, which consequently had to be donated.   Moreover, a public library could only be provided in an area if a two-thirds majority of ratepayers agreed to it at a public meeting.  Despite this desperate attempt by some Parliamentarians to prevent the rise of the public library, twenty five towns subsequently set up libraries under the Act until it was replaced with a more enabling piece of legislation in 1855, testament to local government’s capacity for getting things done irrespective of the hurdles.

The main debate in 1850, as it always should be in matters of public expenditure, was about the balance between cost and utility.  As Colonel Chatterton, MP for Cork put it in the debate for the Third Reading;  “Though professedly for the amusement and instruction of the working classes of the people, (the Bill’s) real object now turns out to be actual, permanent, and forced taxation. …. I object to it, as it would not be of the slightest benefit in the city I have the honour to represent; for it cannot be imagined that a peasant, fatigued after his daily toil, could be so impressed with the love of literature, or the study of the antique, as to set off, even under the influence of a bright summer evening, to walk six or seven miles to improve his mind, and then walk back to ponder over and digest what he had seen and heard”.

Colonel Chatterton lost out, and in due course local authorities gained the right to set up libraries without strings, even to buy books, with the all the benefits that subsequently brought to the peasantry during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

The degree to which Parliament and government will be prepared to enable local authorities will always be severely curtailed.  The power of general competence enacted last year only provides for local authorities to do things that are not otherwise prohibited, and central government through Parliament retains final control over what local authorities can and cannot do.    We live with the legacy of the way local government was formally established in this country during the Victorian age, arguably with the aftermath of a thousand years of growing central control, and continue to have the same debate.

The response in the Victorian era was often for civic leaders to take the limited powers they had been given and put them to good use, by degrees convincing Parliament that it was in its interests to allow local authorities to invest in localities and provide services for citizens.  The lesson should be learned by our local government leaders today, even in these seriously curtailed circumstances. It isn’t just Parliament that stands in the way at the moment, but the reality of economic circumstances.   A constitutional settlement for local government is a laudable aim, but it is not about to happen;  responsible, innovative and creative local  leadership may just convince central government that more trust in local democracy may be just what is needed.