Local Government: Reinvigorating Local Democracy

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others made comparisons between Britain and France. That reminds me that, when I first began to be interested in politics as an undergraduate student, people used to joke about how centralised France was, and that the Minister for Education in France could look at his watch and say exactly what was being taught in every French school at 11 am, whereas in Britain we had strong local authorities and a much greater sense of confidence in our democratic institutions than those poor, benighted French people. Things have changed now.

I realised just how much they have changed when I took the director of education of the musical education charity that I used to chair to see the Minister for Schools to discuss some of the innovative efforts we have been undertaking to bring music back to primary schools that have no one with any musical expertise. After nearly a minute, the Minister for Schools interrupted us and began to tell us, at considerable length, exactly how he thought music ought to be taught in all schools in England, and that was the end of it. That would not have happened 30 or 40 years ago—the Department for Education was very much smaller.

The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, may remember the West Riding Education Authority—a splendid local education authority that had a large staff and a range of experts, including on music, no doubt. This meant that, in the West Riding in those days, you could be proud of the way that education was provided by the local state, with the central state having very little to do with it. That is how far we have gone away from a lively multilevel democracy towards an overcentralised state—though one that does not supply many of the public services that it did then.

We talked about confidence in democracy. I looked at the Office for National Statistics analysis of the most recent OECD cross-country survey of trust in government, which shows that trust in central government in Britain is lower than in almost any other advanced democracy in the OECD. Trust in local government is considerably higher than in central government, in spite of everything that local government is no longer able to do, but it is also a good deal lower than trust in local government in our counterparts across the channel. Incidentally, for those in the Conservative Government who deeply mistrust the courts and the Civil Service, trust in the Civil Service is almost twice as high as it is in central government, and trust in the judiciary is way above that, so attacks on the Supreme Court, et cetera, seem to be out of whack with what the will of the people is alleged to be.

As an undergraduate, I was taught that all politics starts with the local, which is where most of our citizens learn about how politics affects them. National politics looks like a rather distant game, which is part of the problem of the loss of trust that we have in British politics. Sadly, declining turnout in local elections shows that the public do not see local government as central to their lives and recognise that central government calls the shots.

This Government do not trust local government, and we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that the Blair and Brown Governments did not trust it either. Successive Governments have tinkered with structures and reorganisation, imposing mayors on places that did not want them and forcing through single-tier structures in Somerset, Cumbria and North Yorkshire, while permitting two-tier structures to continue elsewhere, including across London, the only part of England that has, in effect, a regional government. Conditional funding by central government is used as a lever to strike what are called devolution deals, and recently even to require competitive bids for little pots of funding in what is supposed to be levelling up.

The structure of local government across England is an incoherent mess. London has two tiers, with a regional mayor and second-tier local councils. Metropolitan regions have metro mayors and metropolitan combined authorities, with large unitary authorities now sharing their authority. In the eastern counties, we have county councils and districts councils, although in the north and the south-west these are being dismantled and single-tier authorities are thought to be the only thing you can have. Michael Gove now wants to extend to county combined authorities, with semi-regional mayors imposed upon them.

I find what has happened recently in North Yorkshire the most appalling, and when I heard someone assure me that no councillor in North Yorkshire would need more than two hours to drive from the ward they represent to council meetings, it showed me just how far we have gone. Decent places such as Harrogate, Scarborough, Richmond and Craven, which had working district authorities and which represented real places, have been dismantled and they are now trying to set up very large town councils for them. We have the prospect of a mayor, somehow, for North Yorkshire and, incidentally, one for East Yorkshire. That is the effective destruction of local government and I really do not understand the rationale for it.

In West Yorkshire, we have the absurdity of Leeds and Bradford having councillors elected in wards which in some cases have over 20,000 electors—Headingley in Leeds has nearly 24,000 voters. It is virtually impossible for a councillor to get to know his or her voters in every village and street in the way that local government used to link politics with people. My friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton—she is a very good friend of mine and was an excellent leader of Bradford Council—has represented a rural ward with over 15,000 voters. It has four distinct villages at some distance from each other, as well as several smaller settlements. That is not really local, however local a councillor tries to be.

How we revive and reconstruct local government is a real problem. My noble friend Lady Scott talked about town councils, and we are conscious that in West Yorkshire it is, on the whole, the prosperous and middle-class areas with the most graduates that have the town councils. It is Ilkley and Shipley; it is not the inner-city wards in Bradford, which really need them in order to get people involved again. If we are going to promote town councils as part of the answer to the disconnect between ordinary people and politics, we are going to have to put some real effort into providing support for setting up town councils in those areas.

The incoherence of our current structure is shown in the contrast with Cambridgeshire, which has a county council and several districts. In the Fenland District Council county councillors represent wards of 8,000 to 10,000 voters and district councillors 1,500 to 3,000 voters. That is rather more local and representative. It reminds me of my daughter’s godmother, who accidentally got herself elected in Hertfordshire on one occasion because, when asked to stand as a paper candidate, she said, as a good conscientious Baptist, “This really was a little bit of a cheek, William, because I had only lived there for three years, so I thought at least I want to go round and introduce myself to people”. You can get yourself elected in a ward of 2,000 to 3,000 people such as that; you cannot do it if you have 15,000 people.

As a result, MPs now find themselves spending more time on constituency surgery matters because people understand who their MP is and take their local issues to them, leaving the business of parliamentary scrutiny to the Lords, which is why we are so much busier than when I first entered this House. It is all deeply dysfunctional, and leaves our citizen electors increasingly dissatisfied with democratic politics as such. Then we have police and crime commissioners and other aspects which make it even more incoherent.

The conviction that central government knows best even when local expertise is essential to resolving a challenge, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, remarked, was best shown when Covid came. Public health officers should have been key to the response—they knew what needed to be done on the ground and where facilities should be provided—instead of which, central government outsourced the original arrangements to two multinational companies, one of which was headquartered in Miami. That is how far we have slipped away from understanding that politics on the ground—government on the ground—needs people familiar with local circumstances. As has been said, the same is true of apprenticeships, further education and how we deal with children in care.

There has been a great deal of discussion about councils losing funding and powers, and what we do about the tax base. We all recognise that council tax is not at all the answer. I can speak with particular passion on this, having had two houses for 40 years, one in the Bradford district and one in Wandsworth. In most of those years I have paid more council tax in Bradford than in Wandsworth, in spite of an absurd difference in value between the two houses. That is an example of a tax that is illogical and desperately in need of reform. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, remarked, we need to find a wider tax base but we also need to recognise that fiscal redistribution—what the Germans call Finanzausgleich—is absolutely important if we are to redress the very damaging regional inequalities between the prosperous south-east and the north of England.

Dehenna Davison, when speaking to the Northern Research Group conference last week, defined devolution as:

“Give more cash and get out of the way”.


But central government is not going to give more cash and get out of the way. We know that—we have seen that—so we have to find some way of having a negotiation process whereby we redistribute central government money but also find a wider tax base from which local government can draw.

Incidentally, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and others that by far the most important thing for me in the Northern Research Group conference last week was the chairman, John Stevenson, saying that the north should stop talking about improving transport links. Instead it should say, “What we need in the north is the Charles line”—the trans-Pennine link renamed—because that makes it sound like the obvious equivalent of the Elizabeth line, and that is the way we have to pitch our arguments.

Where shall we go from here? The PACAC report has not received as much attention as it deserved. Governing England sets out the arguments for a statutory cross-party commission on the future structure and powers of England’s government. It needs to be cross-party because we all know that once we have one Government setting something up, the next Government are bound to change the structure. As far as we can, we need to get a degree of consensus about a structure for local government that is both coherent and stable for a change, and will last for 20 or more years. We also need shared assumptions on what the reform of the tax base would be.

I regret that my party and the Labour Party did not respond fully to that report—we did not pay as much attention to it as we should have—and I regret that the Government’s response to that report has not been particularly generous either. After the next election, a reform of the way in which the governance of England is conducted at all levels is a vital part of what any new Government must be. If we want to regain trust in politics and re-engage some of our citizens more, that is part of how we do it. Let us all recognise that we face a situation of deep popular disengagement and disillusionment with the democratic politics we have in this country.