Local Government: Reinvigorating Local Democracy

Lord Razzall Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, rather like the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I was attracted to speak in this debate because of my lengthy experience in local government. I was a councillor on the London Borough of Richmond for 24 years and deputy leader for 15 years, although, unlike him, that is the only local authority I served on. There are three other former councillors of that London borough in your Lordships’ House: my noble friends Lady Doocey and Lady Hamwee and the current Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord True, who cut his teeth as a young member of Richmond Council when we had virtually a one-party Liberal Democrat state in Richmond. That explains why, before he became Leader of the House, he was always very critical about the Liberal Democrats on these Benches.

This has been a good opportunity to look over our history with a number of former councillors here. When I was first elected to Richmond Council in 1974, 80% of the council’s revenue came from taxes locally raised both from the rates, as we then called them, and the business rates. By the time I left in 1998, the percentages had completely reversed: only 20% of revenue was locally raised, and 80% came from central government. The result was that, by the end of my time there, and even more so now, the Government interfered, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. As my noble friend Lord Shipley indicated, if money is being paid by the Treasury, it wants to dictate what happens, in an Orwellian sense, in Room 101. Whitehall prevails.

A further effect of the Treasury impact is that, in the years, of which we have had a number recently, when the Government tried to introduce significant cuts in government spending, the easiest thing to do was to give a big slice of it to local authorities, because when you cut local government spending, the resulting cuts in services are blamed not on central government but on the local authority. The Governments of both persuasions spotted that.

In my submission, a generation of hollowing out of local government has had a dramatic effect on our society, in many ways. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to housing. One of the fundamental reasons why local authority housing has completely disappeared since the time that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to, is what happened when central government permitted people to buy their council property. The whole idea of that—and I was not against it; most people across the board were not against it—was that you allowed a tenant to buy the property, and that freed up a capital sum that would be used to build new properties. That, however, never happened, and the reason was that the Treasury gave with one hand and took away with the other: capital controls were imposed that meant that local authorities could not use the capital receipts to build new housing. That fundamentally and completely destroyed the programme of building new houses that we all thought the sale of council houses would enable.

The other factor, going into history, was what happened to care in the community. When a number of rather unsatisfactory places—what people used to refer to as lunatic asylums, which then became known as mental hospitals—all closed down, we had what was known as care in the community. People were going to be released into the community, and social services provided by local authorities were going to look after them. That often did not happen because, at the same time, the Government were cutting local government expenditure so local authorities could not properly afford to provide that care in the community. As a result, there were significant complaints to all of us in local authorities as to why X or Y—a drug addict—was sitting next door causing problems. The answer was that there was no money being provided by the local authority because of cuts in the government grant.

This, of course, as various speakers have mentioned, has now morphed into the inability of local authorities to provide day care. Because they cannot afford to provide adequate day care, we have bed-blocking in hospitals, which has a significant impact on the National Health Service.

Your Lordships would not expect me not to refer to the impact on our arts. If you endlessly cut local government, local government is going to endlessly cut the provision of its budget for artistic venues in their areas. I will give just one example. Let us look at a place like Stuttgart in Germany—let us forget about Berlin, which has so much art funded by its local government. The budget in Stuttgart for all the arts provided in Stuttgart, funded by local government in Stuttgart, is greater than the whole of the Arts Council budget in the UK. That tells you what the impact is of endless cuts in local government.

There is also another fundamental effect that has occurred since I first became a councillor, and then left in the late 1990s. That is the quality of people, very often, who are now elected as local authority members. This is not a party-political point: I think it is true across the board, because why would anybody want to be elected these days to sit on a local authority? Often your only job would be to provide cuts in services, damaging the interests of the people whom you were elected to serve. We have across the board, in this Chamber, a number of very talented people, all across the parties—apart from the DUP, possibly—who have served lengthy time very effectively in local government. I wonder, in 10 or 15 years’ time, whether that will be the case because of the quality of people who have been hollowed out in relation to the existing provision of local authorities. I will ask the Minister a fundamental question. We know that this Government, since 2019, have led a massive attack on a number of our key institutions. Let us pick the judiciary, the civil service or the BBC. Do this Tory Government want to add local government to that list?