The case for central government

Next week the Chancellor George Osborne will stand once again before the House of Commons and tell us our national fortune.   For local government folk, it is rarely any use listening to the actual speech; the message will be buried in the thousands of pages of accompanying material which, fortunately, is readily available these days on the internet.   If the Chancellor follows recent practice, then deep amongst the numbers will be more bad news for local government – we will be asked once again to find more than our fair share of the deficit reduction.

Of course central government always behaves as if local government is a tool that is at its disposal.  Constitutionally that is indeed the position; local authorities exist at the behest of Parliament and the party that controls Parliament therefore controls local government. Constitutionally, local government people have been arguing for a long time, the UK hasn’t got it quite right. 

Draw back from the question of governmental structure and think about what local government is about.   Walk to the railway station or drive to the shops and the public services you encounter are almost all provided by local government.   On my fifteen minute walk to the shops I see roads, street lighting, traffic signage,  a library, a fire station, a civic theatre and what used to be called a bottle bank.   I also pass a GP’s surgery, which is nominally a service provided by central government, but only through carefully constructed local arrangements, and a few bus stops, which belong to a service ostensibly privatised in my part of the country but in fact quite generously subsidised by local government. 

The point is that, when it comes down to the services that affect people’s everyday lives, all government is local. In fact the existence of national and global regional government comes from a recognition that there are some things communities cannot readily do locally rather than the other way around.  Back in the days when nation states were being founded, we needed a bunch of rich guys on horses to defend us from attack.  The one in charge- the guy with the biggest horse and the shiniest helmet-  had the money to pay lots of soldiers and raise an army, and what he couldn’t pay for himself he bullied others into paying for instead.   We called him king.

In the meantime, most of us peasants went about our lives without ever clapping eyes on the king, unless it was as a vague shiny presence that day he turned up and told us all to take our pitchfork off down the road and stick it into the first Scotsman or Frenchman we came across.  We were familiar with the courts leet and the hundred, which sorted out little local difficulties and we met amongst ourselves to deal with issues concerning the commons. We got on with it, as we continue to do to this day. 

All government began local, and at the end of the time, when George Osborne’s successors have finished with us, the last vestiges of government will also be local.  In the meantime, we let central government live on in that hazy misconception that somehow they are in charge.

Nevertheless, I think we can let central government carry on for a bit; there are still useful things it can do. 

Central government is in a good place to put frameworks in place to tackle wicked issues across a range of different interventions and involving a lot of agencies. Local government, however, is vital because it can hold the ring at local level for a great deal of the actually delivery and it can oversee how agencies work together in localities to make a difference to individuals, families and local communities.

There is no need for central government to try and reach down into every local detail in order to deliver policy, because local government is already in place to do that.   Central government needs to see local government as partners in delivering outcomes and as a valuable resource in the battle for public service reform and service improvement.

If central government is accountable to populations in a ‘top-down’ way, local government is accountable ‘bottom-up’.  The trick, which we have never quite mastered is to make sure these two forms of accountability mesh satisfactorily in the middle.

It remains to be seen whether the government continues its renovation of the economy next week by continuing to hack away at its local foundations.  If it does, it will be because central government does not understand what it would lose if it lost strong, accountable, innovative local government.  It's up to us, local government people, to make the case.