Local Government: Reinvigorating Local Democracy

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I put down my name to speak in this debate because I care a lot about local government and have spent 20 years of my life as a member of three local authorities—Oxford when I was very young, Lambeth in early middle age and Cumbria as a retirement job, as it were, until the authority was abolished at the end of March this year.

I have great respect for what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley—Councillor John Shipley—said in his introduction. He has been a very distinguished person in local government. I also have great respect for the many Conservatives who have shown great commitment to local government over the years; I think that was shown in the speech we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton.

When I was a 23 year-old member of Oxford City Council, the leader was a lady called Janet Young. She was so effective and so brilliant that she was put in the House of Lords and Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet. The only trouble she had was that Mrs Thatcher discovered that she was exceptionally strong woman and therefore she was dismissed. But she was great as an introduction in my apprenticeship in local government.

Reflecting on Oxford, when Labour became the majority party, I became chair of the further education committee. I was in charge of a rapidly expanding polytechnic and a college of further education. Neither of those things is run by local government today. I sometimes wonder when people complain, particularly about our education system for children who are less academic, whether the removal of local involvement has had a detrimental effect on the way these institutions have behaved. If you had had local involvement, they would have been more aligned with local labour market needs, future job needs and future local economic strategies. I just make that point. I do not know whether it is right, but it is worth thinking about.

The other thing about Oxford was that we were able to get things done. Labour’s pledge when we got in in 1972 was to increase council house building from 300 to 400 a year and we did it. We had the freedom to do it and that has now largely been taken away, although I take the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, about the Government loosening some of the controls. My main concern about local government in Oxford in the early 1970s was how we made ourselves more effective at getting things done and how we got rid of the rather traditional local government structure which was a collection of chief officers with their own independent departments—the independence of which they fiercely defended—to have a more corporate arrangement that would be better and more efficient at getting things done.

My next experience was Lambeth, and I am not going to dwell on this for very long. I was an SDP councillor in Lambeth, elected in 1982. It brought tears to my eyes to see how the party to which I had committed my life had got to in Lambeth with Ted Knight as its leader. It told me how very badly things can go wrong when people see local government as a platform for their transformational political change rather than simply trying to make life better for their residents by providing decent services efficiently delivered. It was a terrible experience, to be quite honest, and it had a profound personal effect on me. Apart from its effect on me, it has had a long-term effect on local government.

When I re-joined the Labour Party and started working closely with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair—in that order, actually—what struck me was how frightened they were of local government and of what political damage they felt it could do to Labour. They were determined that this would not happen under a Labour Government, which explains why Labour’s policy in government was cautious about granting local government more freedom. It was because of that historical experience.

In keeping with the philosophy of the times, we of course had more emphasis on the purchaser/provider split and on academies, rather than local government running schools. All those experiments were well worth while. In particular, I was a supporter of the concept of elected mayors, which seemed to me to be a way of invigorating local government. That has been a success; in London, one of the reasons why we have the Elizabeth line is that we have had an elected mayor. We have had someone to speak for London. My views about mayors are not shared by many members of my party. I have the greatest respect for my leader in Cumbria, who thought that mayors were an abomination. I am not sure what to think of that; they have actually been quite a good development.

I was privileged in 2013 to become a member of Cumbria County Council, my home area—having been brought up in Carlisle. I was elected for Wigton, a small town 10 miles from Carlisle where my grandfather, who was a miner in the Cumbrian coalfield, had been a councillor, a justice of the peace, a Poor Law guardian and God knows what else for the Wigton rural district, and a county councillor in the 1920s. I felt very proud of that; it is one of the things that I have felt proudest about in politics.

It was a bad time because we were facing austerity. Each year, we were taking lumps out of the management tiers of each service, in the hope of trying to protect the front line. We did that as a joint Labour-Liberal Democrat administration, which worked extremely well. I felt that we managed to protect essential services reasonably effectively, but it was a period of withdrawal of local government, when we could not do any of the ambitious things that in the past a council would want to do. What we had instead was greater emphasis on things such as the local enterprise partnership doing economic growth, and a health and well-being board looking at the future of health and social care in the county. We had Transport for the North trying to create a plan for the north. Those bodies were all set up, but they gave council representatives some responsibility with very little power to make change.

Indeed, the funding model of local government in these years shifted as the Government cut the general grant—rate support grant, council tax or whatever it was called then. Funding depended more and more on central grants for specific projects which had to be approved by the government department and—I hope the next Labour Government will change this—the Treasury. So we have a situation where any scheme, be it £5 million or £10 million, has to go right up to the Treasury. That has made us one of the most centralised systems in Europe. I think it is very unhealthy. The other aspect of it which I thought was very wrong was that, because it was centralised on government, and we had a very political Government, our local MPs started to pick and choose which project should go ahead, not the elected members of the council. I think that is very undesirable indeed.

What changes would I like to see? I would like to see a comprehensive scheme of local devolution for England. Lisa Nandy has promised that and I look forward to seeing its detail when we see the next Labour manifesto. It involves a broadening of the tax base of local government, council tax reform to make it fairer and other tax things. For instance, in Cumbria we should have the power to levy a tourist tax. This is the foundation of the very interesting report of the commission that Gordon Brown chaired on the future of devolution in the United Kingdom. If we do not have a comprehensive scheme for local devolution in England, how do we propose to reform the House of Lords and create a council or senate of the regions and nations? I just do not know how we will do that. It seems to me that we have to find a coherent solution and get away from the model of central government funding. I agree that if we are going to have more diversity and more freedom for local authorities, we also need stronger audit requirements to expose inefficiency.

I have enjoyed my 20 years in local government. I do not regret it at all. I have learned a lot. I think it has kept me in touch, in a way that very few other things can, with local opinion and the real needs of people. I only hope that in future we can make local government more of a success.