ConservativeHome's Local Government Blog

DCLG spurn offer to save money

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance welcomes a shift from the Local Government Association to asking central Government to cut costs - despite it being spurned by the DCLG

Ten days ago, the Local Government Association produced a great report that was both radical and realistic. Instead of just harping on about how they must be given more money, as some of their spokesmen have been wont to do to excess, the LGA actually explored how to make the sector more cost effective by scrapping central regulation and sacking central regulators in Whitehall, as well as abolishing and hacking back quangos.

If anyone should be localists, of course, it’s the Local Government Association, but they haven’t always been willing to take the plunge and properly explore the practical implications of localism. Essentially, they have wanted to have their cake and eat it – demanding greater local freedom and power but at the same time insisting that Central Government (i.e. the national taxpayer) should shell out more and more money to balance shaky Town Hall budgets.

This latest release, though, went into great detail on which bundles of red tape should be scrapped, which Whitehall Departments should be cut back, specifiying quangos to cull and exactly how and why local government should be entrusted with more freedom.

As well as being philosophically worthwhile, it was politically savvy too – the LGA were making a break from the mournful Oliver Twist approach to public finance of simply demanding “Can I have some more?”, apparently in direct response to the fact that the Treasury’s cupboards are bare.

After the flood: Who should pay the bill?

Dr Andy Johnston, Head of the Centre for Local Sustainability at the Local Government Information Unit, says either stricter insurance requirements are needed or Councils could issue disaster bonds.

Last week’s terrible floods in Cumbria catapulted flood management to the top of the political agenda.  Speaking at this week's LGiU conference on flooding, Allerdale Council Leader Tim Heslop discussed the “massive recovery effort” that local government will be required to lead.

With 90 percent of businesses lost and disruption to services such as doctor’s surgeries and schools, getting people’s lives back to normal – and ensuring the survival of already hard-pressed small businesses – will not be cheap.  One estimate reckoned that the cost of repairing the damage could hit £200 million.

Who will foot the bill?  Gordon Brown visited Cockermouth and committed his Government to supporting the recovery effort.  But the state of the public finances – with a record October rate for UK public sector borrowing reported last week – means that communities may not be able to count on a blank check in future.

Tory leader of Hammersmith & Fullham says shadow cabinet "haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery"

PublicFinance has this story about H&F leader Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh:

""My mates are all in the shadow Cabinet, waiting to get those [ministerial] boxes, being terribly excited. I went to university with them, they haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery,’ he said. "They’re going to get a department of state, in one case running the finances of the nation."

Greenhalgh pointed to other countries, such as France and the US, where members of the government had typically served at a regional level earlier in their careers. ‘If you’re going to fail, fail running Alabama, fail running Texas, fail running the city of Paris – don’t just take over the country.’"

Q. A gaffe or a little bit of truth-telling?

A. A little bit of truth-telling.

The lack of experience is why I strongly back David Cameron's support for more city mayors.

Tim Montgomerie

Hat tip to the FT Westminster blog.

Liberal Democrats gain three council seats from the Conservatives

Although the Liberal Democrats lost one seat to Labour they gained seats from us in St Austell & Newquay, Stratford-on-Avon and High Peak. I don't know the local circumstances in these setbacks but we always have to remember that such is our current dominance in local government across England, in particular, that further gains are always going to be much tougher to secure now.

• St Austell Bay, Cornwall (Truro & St Austell moving to St Austell & Newquay) a LD gain from CON. Con vote was 47% -12, Lab 5% -2, LD 48% +14.
• Blackbrook, High Peak (High Peak) a LD gain from Con. Con vote was 39% -22, Lab 4% from nowhere, LD 57% +18
• Stratford Alveston, Stratford-on-Avon (Stratford-on-Avon) a LD gain from Con. Con vote was 44% -5, Lab 6% from nowhere, LD 47% +8, Green 3% -2, UKIP did not stand losing 8%.
• Halewood South, Knowsley (Knowsley South moving to Garston & Halewood) a Lab gain from LD. Con vote was 2% -3, Lab 46% +5, LD 37% -4, Ind 2% from nowhere, BNP 9% from nowhere, The United Socialist Party 4% -9.
• Moreton West and Saughall Massie, Wirral (Wallasey) a Con hold. Con vote was 70% +10, Lab 19% -5, LD 4% -4, Ind 4% from nowhere, Green 3% -1, UKIP did not stand losing 3%.
• Clifton, Fylde (Fylde) a Con hold. Con vote was 35% -9, Lab 7% -7, LD 22% from nowhere, Ind 34% -8, Green 1% from nowhere.
• Bushey Heath, Hertsmere (Hertsmere) a Con hold. Con vote was 75% +8, Lab 10% -12, LD 16% +5.
• Northop, Flintshire (Delyn) an Ind hold. Con vote was 23% from nowhere, Lab 16% -15, LD 15% from nowhere, Ind 28% -41, 2nd Ind 18% from nowhere.

There'll be better days for us.

Tim Montgomerie

Local solutions for family breakdown

Conservative MP Mark Field on Westminster Council's Family Recovery Programme

We live in a fractured society. Amongst other developments the rise of the internet, multiple media outlets and global travel, on a scale unimaginable a couple of decades ago, have wrenched apart the traditional guises of community and common experience. The rise of anti-social behaviour, sickening media reports of child abuse, the increase in violent crime and the trappings of a woefully inadequate benefit system all reflect utter social transformation in many of our communities.

This sense that society is, in some part at least, broken has attracted many newspaper headlines and, in response, some tough-sounding policies from central government. Yet, these problems persist and social breakdown on such a mass scale is not an exaggeration nor a political football - it is a sad reality. The issues involved are serious and it is time to realise that they can be countered best not at the national level but locally where the nature and scale of such problems can differ enormously.

I strongly believe that local breakdown requires local solutions. As such I was delighted to welcome to the House of Commons on Wednesday a team highlighting Westminster City Council's Family Recovery Programme (FRP). The FRP is an encouraging example of a Conservative run local authority taking a pioneering lead in tackling social deprivation in all of its forms.

Should there be less secrecy in child protection?

The Conservative MP Tim Yeo gave an interesting speechin the House of Commons on Wednesday denouncing the social work practices of Suffolk County Council. Often social workers are criticised for being too slow to remove children from their birth parents where this is necessary (and then often to slow to place the children for adoption, keeping them in temporary foster placements for years on the off-chance that their birth parents may get their act together.) Yeo feels that in Suffolk there is the opposite problem of children being seized without justification.

Some might therefore shrug off such complaints and conclude: "Poor social workers get criticised either way." I think the link between such terrible errors is that social workers can put their ideology ahead of common sense. Yeo feels greater accountability is the answer. Unfortunately the trade off would mean less secrecy which of course one can understand the value of. Yeo agrees with the journalist Camilla Cavendish that: "The privacy of the child has become synonymous with the privacy of the professionals." He says: "The secrecy surrounding the process, together with the appalling lack of scrutiny and accountability in the social care and family court system, is made worse by the fact that Members of Parliament are prevented from having proper information in relation to 'child protection' cases.

Haringey Council placed two-year-old with blind 82-year-old foster carer

Haringey Council alarming failure to protect the borough's children have again been making headlines. The latest story concerns a two-year-old boy, Baby K, being placed in foster care with an 82-year-old blind widow. She died earlier this month at home where she lived alone with the boy. What an extraordinary placement. No doubt a risk assessment was carried out and all the health and safety boxes ticked.

This case also indicates a biase against adoption. Couples in their 50s coming forward offering to adopt are routinely turned down as too old. While the choice of foster carer may be exceptional another aspect of the scandal is more familiar. Baby K had spent 18 months in the care system amidst delay and muddle. Why had no arrangements been made for adoption? That would have given him the chance to thrive in a permanent, loving home as a member of a family.

One hopes that Haringey will now get on with it. Keeping children in care should be a last resort. Denying Baby K a permanent loving home would mean paying perhaps £50,000 a year for the next 16 years to keep him in foster placements. It would mean Baby K having social worker visits ever six weeks, having six monthly reviews. It would mean him growing up with a carer who couldn't agree sleep overs or school trips because she doesn't have parental responsibility. This is not something we should be contemplating for a two-year-old.

Windsor and Maidenhead has nothing to hide

Councillor Liam Maxwell, the Lead Member for  Policy and Performance, on the next stage of the transparency agenda at Windsor and Maidenhead Council.

We believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant and we have shown that it works. Our transparency initiative goes straight to the bottom line – and it will help us reduce council tax year on year.

Transparency can make a huge difference in government because it is not just about rooting out wild overspends or endless confrontation about costs, although of course the obvious excesses must be dealt with; rather, it is about giving people an easy ability to see how Government is operating.

But once you have gone through the obvious and straightforward, many of the sustainable cost savings we need to generate come through changing peoples' behaviour: to become more cost effective, to continually recognise and eliminate even small amounts of waste.

That requires personal responsibility and that requires visibility of the problem – hence our push for transparency.

The Transparency Initiative

The Royal Borough Windsor & Maidenhead council has embarked on a process of continuing, increasing transparency and openness.

Listed status vetoed for Birmingham monstrosity

A victory for Birmingham Council's redevelopment plans after a proposal from English Heritage that the City's central library in Chamberlain Square should be listed have been rejected. This was the 1974 building described by Prince Charles as looking like "a place where books are incinerated not kept… an ill-mannered essay in concrete ‘brutalism’ intended to shock…An insult to the grand civic buildings amongst which it squats.”

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge rejected the recommendation. Good for her. But how bonkers of English Heritage to make it in the first place. There are still concerns about the cost and appearance of the planned replacement however.

The DCSF should come clean over Graham McAvoy's fees

Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, believes that paying consultants exorbitant fees is the wrong way to involve the private sector.

A major article in the The Mail on Sunday makes disturbing reading for those of us who are free-marketeers. Based on leaked documents, it describes how Graham McAvoy, who not long ago was a key government adviser on promoting and setting up academy schools, has now become a private-sector consultant doing the same thing.

The difference is that his company can now make millions of pounds by charging exorbitant fees for its work  It would help to be able to quote from the article's list of fees charged for routine tasks. But by Monday evening, the link to the main article no longer worked.

As the leader says:

'Our once-simple government, local and national, has vanished behind a bewildering smog of agencies, consultancies and authorities, inaccessible and unaccountable. It is also far more expensive and much less efficient than what went before.'

A Conservative Government should scrap the £3 billion annual subsidy to Transport for London

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson says the recently announced fare rises in the capital are required "having cut costs to the bone" at Transport for London after being "ruthless in finding savings." It is true that the target for efficiency savings for the nine years from this year to 2017-18 has been raised from the £2.4 billion that Boris initially demanded to an extra £2.6 billion - this makes a total of £5 billion or £555 million a year.

But the spending total remains vast. The Transport for London budget this year is £7.7 billion with nearly £3 billion a year in subsidy from central government. The point is not that saving half a billion a year is an unimportant achievement. It is whether more, an awful lot more, could be done.

TfL doesn't even cover its operating costs from its own revenue. Last year its operating revenue (mostly fares) was £3.45 billion. Even this figure is artificially high as it includes the Freedom Pass costs paid by the Borough Councils ("revenue in respect of free travel for elderly and disabled people", £227 million) and this year the income figure is expected to be very slightly lower - £3.44 billion.

Councillors should be the final arbiters of complaints

Cllr Mark Bowen, the Deputy Leader of Conservative run Hounslow Council, on how they have made the complaints procedure in Hounslow quicker, cheaper and more effective.

Save money and improve Complaints Management at the same time?  This is what has been achieved in Hounslow.

In addition to being Deputy Leader of the London Borough of Hounslow since 2006, I also have Lead Member responsibility for Customer Services.  As soon as I took on my portfolio, Complaints Management was the area which I immediately identified as the one in need of most attention.  It had become an Achilles Heel and I wanted to see Hounslow turns things around in this area and build a record of resolving substantially more complaints quicker than before.

As with any other Council, Hounslow has a Complaints Procedure.  Most Councils have a three stage procedure, though some have one that is only two stages.  The general rule of thumb is that the later the stage, the higher the seniority of those responding.

One of the first decisions of the current administration was to reduce the timescales for dealing with complaints:

An even more important way forward was in reconfiguring the Complaints Procedure because I was hugely confident that the introduction of a Cross Party Members Panel at the final stage of the Complaints Procedure would make a significant difference. It would raise the profile of Complaints Management in an unprecedented way and it would also assist in making sure that those who complain get direct answers to their questions (even if, at times, those answers are not what they would like to hear).

Lambeth Council's housing scandals continue

The saga of fraud, waste and mismanagement of housing at Lambeth Council was chronicled by Inside Housing magazine earlier this year. Not all the problems took place under the current Labour administration which has been in charge since 2006. (In 2005 when the Lib Dems were in charge there was fraud amounting to £2.9 million in payments to a bogus heating company.)

But the problems have certainly continued. Last year it overspent its £11 million homelessness budget by £7.5 million. The Council leased too much private housing stock for temporary accommodation for the homeless with 42% of it sitting empty.

Now we discover that Patricia Hoad, who as Chairman of Lambeth's tenants management organisation should have been keeping a grip of such matters, was convicted of benefit fraud last week amounting to £40,000.

What does Sir Hugh Orde have to worry about?

Chief Constables should trust the people - and welcome accountability to directly elected police commissioners - says Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance.

This week the police have launched a new crackdown. It’s not on guns, or knives or drugs – it’s not even on the petty offences that many forces love to go after to boost their success statistics. It’s a crackdown on the concept of accountable policing.

Sir Hugh Orde, the President of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), laid into the concept of elected Police Authorities this week with all the enthusiasm that one would rather have focused on fighting crime.

His criticisms were the usual, tired generalisations. Elected oversight for the police would “politicise” the service. Voters don’t have the right priorities for such an important service. The police should be operationally independent.

These arguments have been addressed and dismissed in this column and elsewhere many times. Policing is already “politicised”, but the relationship is purely between the police and the Home Office, rather than local residents. Ordinary voters more than anyone have the incentive to get policing right – if they don’t, then it is them who suffer the consequences of rising crime. Elected authorities would maintain the operational independence of the police but increase their accountability and their legitimacy.

Pointless bureaucracy imposed on Town Halls costs £4.5 billion a year.

I am warming a little to the Local Government Association. I still think its membership subs are the most staggering rip off and for Councils to pull out is a sensible way to save money. I also think its role as the Councils trade union leads it to defend bad as well as good Councils (most despicably defending Haringey over Baby P.)

But there have been a couple of recent reports from the LGA that would provide a lot of useful material for a new Conservative Government. First they had one on Quangos pointing out the cost and unaccountability of some of the worst offenders.

Now they have produced a report Delivering more for Less which offers an estimate of the costs of unnecessary bureaucracy imposed on local councils from Central Government. Collecting endless data imposes a cost on central government, who collect it, as well as councils, who supply it. In 2007 the Government announced that it had introduced a "National Indicator Set" of performance indicators for Councils to report on which was to amount to 198 indicators. The Government themselves estimate that the actual figure is 261. Furthermore the number of datasets, reports and evaluations for collection amounts to 3,000 a year. In 2006 the accountants Price Waterhouse Cooper estimated the cost of all this compliance at £2 billion - or £1.8 million to average Council. In my Council £1.8 million in savings funds a 3% Council Tax cut. The LGA reckon the bill is now £2.3 billion.

Mystery shopping the Tower Hamlets way

The recent post strike means that magazine deliveries have pretty erratic but Private Eye has now started arriving again. The latest issue includes an intriguing item about Tower Hamlets Council in its Rotten Boroughs section. The following internal email to Tower Hamlets staff has been leaked:

"From Wednesday 11 November to Friday 20 November, the Care Quality Commission...will undertake an inspection of Tower Hamlets Council delivery of adult social care services...During this period, the inspectors will be meetings with people who use care services, their carers and frontline staff. The will also be "mystery shopping" for social care information across a variety of council locations throughout the borough..."

Astonishingly the email then provided two links so staff could "see what the inspectors look like." Photos of the supposed "mystery shoppers" Laurie James, Jacqueline Corbett and Melvyn Sequeria were provided. It speaks volumes for the mentality of Tower Hamlets Council that, rather than welcome a chance to identify how they could improve their services, they treat an inspection as a challenge to erect a Potemkin facade of good practice especially for the benefit of the inspectors to ensure they are protected from the reality.

Calderdale councillor defects to the Conservatives

Cllr Zafar Iqbal-Din has joined the Conservative Group on Calderdale Council. A former Labour councillor, he became an independent when accused of money laundering - an allegation of which he has been cleared.

Given the presumption of innocence, those past allegations should not be held against him. If the Labour Group did not want him back despite this, then it does suggest some wider falling out. But what is the political basis for the switching to the Conservatives? I will drop him an email inviting him to write a piece for us outlining his views.

Yesterday's council by-election results

Here are yesterday's local government by-election results:

Cholmondeley ward, Cheshire East
Con - 1,764 (78%, +8)
LD - 508 (22%, +4)
Con hold
 
Bo'ness and Blackness ward, Falkirk
SNP - 1,604 (58%, +11)
Lab - 823 (30%, -2)
Con - 283 (10%, -2)
Lib Dem - 79 (3%, +3)
SNP hold

Coleford East ward, Forest of Dean
Ind - 267 (30%, no change)
Lib Dem - 230 (26% +26)
Con - 210 (23%, -16)
Lab - 188 (21%, -10)
Ind hold

Rossington ward, Doncaster
Lab - 637 (27%, -10)
Eng Dem - 551 (23%, +23)
Ind - 506 (21%, -22)
Ind - 420 (18%, +18)
BNP  - 101 (4%, +4)
Lib Dem - 78 (3%, +3)
Ind - 76 (3%, +3)
Lab gain from Ind

Jonathan Isaby

Caroline Spelman explains the party's new community ownership policy

The Conservatives have outlined plans to boost community ownership. The idea is that when a community asset closes - a village hall, post office, pub, swimming pool, library - that it should be easier for the local community to rescue it. The "Community Right to Buy" will give community groups first refusal to buy such assets. It will apply to those assets owned by Quangos and central Government as well as local councils. The same principle will apply to commercial owned assets.

Naturally we will all be waiting for more details. The community groups will have to pay a "fair price" but who will determine what that is? I would expect planning rules have a lot to do with it. Supposing someone owns a building that is used as a pub and is worth £0.5 million but would be worth £1 million if he could persuade the Council that it wasn't viable as a pub any more and should be allowed to convert into flats. He might deliberately let it get run down as a pub hoping for it to fail.

Officially the Government also wants to help community ownership but the Conservatives point out this has not been the reality. In the last decade we've seen nearly 5,500 post offices shut and 3,500 pubs call time for the last time. The local government watchdog, the Audit Commission's recent report which looked at local authority asset management found that "the extent or impact of transferring council property to local communities has yet to meet government aspirations".

Southwark as the cultural heart of London

Southwark Council are holding an Arts Conference today sponsored by Tate Modern with speakers including the Shadow Arts Minister Edward Vaizey and Munira Murza, the City Hall Culture supremo. Here Cllr Lewis Robinson, Executive Member for Culture Leisure and Sport on Southwark, gives his views.

One of the current fashionable buzzwords on the lips of every politician is “localism”.  I thought in opening this event today I would reflect on what this means for arts and culture and Southwark.

The Arts to date have weathered the current economic downturn better than feared.  A mixture of “staycations” and a weaker currency have seen visits and ticket revenue remain relatively buoyant at national institutions.  But we should all recognise that after the next General Election, the next challenge will be what impact restoring the public finances has on the arts.

And this is where “localism” will come into play.  It would be too easy for Government and local authorities, facing straightened circumstances to say “we don’t do culture” without thinking through the consequences.

However, in Southwark, like Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, we have a unique combination of local, national and international institutions providing a cultural backbone to the Borough, running from the Dulwich Picture Gallery, South London Gallery, to the Tate Modern and the raft of other organisations
along the Southbank represented here today.