How realistic is STV for local government?

Tweet

The Welsh government’s proposal to allow individual councils to decide for themselves which voting system to use raises a series of interesting questions.  On the one hand, it’s disappointing that the government is unable to come to a clear preference on a method of voting to apply across Wales, although I understand the pressures within the governing party which create that difficulty.  On the other, it’s difficult for those of us who want to devolve more power to local government to argue against giving the choice rather than imposing a single system, even if we might prefer that the power to be devolved was over rather more substantive issues of policy.

In theory, it’s possible that council areas could end up see-sawing between voting systems, depending on whether the ruling group after any given election was for or against STV.  In practice, I suspect that getting a sufficient majority under STV to reverse a decision to adopt it will be a much harder task than getting a majority under FPTP to adopt STV.  In short, any changes are likely to flow in only one direction.

Some commenters seem to assume that where those parties in favour of STV are in power (essentially, Plaid and the Lib Dems), the change will be made, and where they’re not, the councils will remain under the FPTP system.  I suspect that’s rather an oversimplification, because of the way that STV plays out in different types of area.  As far as the Lib Dems are concerned, their influence in Welsh local government at the moment is so limited that consideration of their position is largely irrelevant, although that may change in the future, of course.  The position of Plaid is rather more complicated.

It’s true, of course, that Plaid uses STV for its internal elections, and that the use of STV for all elections is formal policy.  But support for that position is not universal, and there are good reasons for that.  STV requires large multi-member wards, and it’s easy to see how STV will work well in urban areas such as the valleys of the south and the cities of Wales.  Rural Wales, though, is a rather different matter. 

The councils where Plaid is either in control or the leading party (Gwynedd, Carmarthen, Ceredigion) are all essentially rural counties, and there is a feeling in many areas that existing single member wards are already geographically large.  Combining three or four existing wards into single much larger new wards is unlikely to be popular, even assuming that the seemingly relentless pressure to reduce the total numbers of councillors ceases.  It is likely to make councillors appear even more remote from the people they represent.

It’s not an argument which sways me against STV; even recognising the difficulties, I still favour STV because I believe that it produces a fairer and more democratic result.  But it would be naïve to think that individual councillors who have been elected on the basis of their support and activity in one area are suddenly going to enthuse over the possibility that they will have to fight elections in a much bigger area where they are considerably less well-known.  And council groups are composed of dozens of such individual members – persuading those groups to adopt the change may not be entirely straightforward.

So, whilst in principle I welcome the way in which the Labour government in Cardiff has opened the door to a more democratic system of voting, I’m not going to hold my breath in expectation that it will be adopted anywhere.  And for Plaid, for whom this probably looks like something of a concession, it may turn out to be more of a curse than a blessing, if they can’t actually get their groups in the relevant areas to implement it.

Losing the plot

Tweet One of the things that struck me shortly after being first elected to the Vale of Glamorgan council in 1979 was the different approach to items of expenditure.  The larger items, sometimes in the millions, were generally nodded through, whereas the smaller items were the subject of much more debate.  I remember a lengthy debate at one personnel committee about whether an officer should or should not be sent on a course costing a few hundred pounds.  My suggestion that minor decisions of that nature should really be operational ones made by officers wasn’t exactly well-received.

There’s a general point here.  Most of us find it easier to discuss and deal with sums of money which are within our experience.  Hundreds and thousands of pounds are ‘real’ amounts of money; millions are just numbers.  I suspect this is the underlying reason why so much of what passes for politics is concentrating on the smaller sums rather than the larger ones – just think about a number of recent press releases from the Taxpayers’ Alliance or the opposition parties in the Assembly talking about expenses and salaries.  It’s not that salaries and expenses aren’t important; it’s just that they are close to being insignificant in the context of overall public expenditure.

In the same way, a lot of the debate around the proposed reductions in the numbers of local authorities in Wales has been around the number of Chief Executives or Directors of Education, and the cost of employing 22 rather than, say, 8.  But that isn’t where any real savings will come from.

(And, as an aside, it’s by no means certain that these particular savings will actually be realised anyway.  If, for instance, 8 Directors of Education each appoint an assistant to look after each of the former council areas, the result could well be that there is a reduction in the number of Directors from 22 to 8, but the number of people doing their work increases from 22 to 30.  And no doubt the 8 will expect higher salaries than the 22 in respect of their increased responsibilities.  There are an awful lot of devils hiding in the detail here.)

If there are significant savings to be achieved, they won’t come from simple reductions in the numbers of chief officers.  They will come from combining teams and reducing jobs at much lower levels in the organisation; they will come from harmonising systems and procedures; and they will come at a cost of a significant initial investment.

Last week, the Welsh Government produced a headline figure of £650million savings.  Reluctant as I am to agree with the Tories, I can’t help but feel that this is, as they say, a figure plucked out of the air.  I don’t know whether it’s an accurate figure or not, but what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that any savings that are achieved will largely come at the expense of jobs.  Jobs will be cut directly by dictat of the Labour government – and they seem quite proud of it.

But, hold on a minute – is saving money really the driver for local government reorganisation?  The savings seem to have become central to the debate, but wasn’t the original argument more about taking a strategic view and addressing the perceived failures in the services being delivered?  When did that argument turn into a financial one?  I was never convinced that reorganisation was the best way to improve performance in any event; but reorganisation aimed at saving money is almost certainly not.

Not as different as they sound

Tweet Sometimes, the MP for Monmouth makes it too easy for people to treat what he says as something of a joke.  His comment yesterday, talking about the publication of the draft of the latest Wales Bill and saying that Wales is edging towards independence fits into that category.  I wish it were true, of course; but the idea that this paltry concoction is any sort of a step towards independence is laughable.

Some of his other comments need to be taken a bit more seriously however.  For too many of those for whom the establishment of the Assembly is an unchallengeable given, his comment that devolution is a one-way street and that “No-one is talking about taking powers away from the Welsh government in areas where it is performing badly” may be dismissed in the same way. 

But, thinking about it, is this attitude of an MP towards the Assembly so very different from the attitude of many AMs towards local councils in Wales?  Much of what our AMs say about local councils seems to be predicated on the assumption that ‘if they don’t do as we tell them, we’ll take the power away from them’, because they see local councils as being simply agents of government rather than having any real mandate of their own.  The two positions sound very similar to me.

Both are, ultimately, based on a very simple premise – that there’s a ‘right’ place for power to live, and any power exercised at a 'lower' level exists solely with the consent of that ‘right’ place.  I don’t doubt that many nationalists and devolutionists would argue that there’s a difference, but I’m not sure that there is.  And constitutionally, David Davies is right – the UK constitution quite clearly defines power as being in the gift of the centre, acting on behalf of the monarch whose power was bestowed on her by God.

At the very heart of Davies’ comments is an axiomatic belief about the right of those who hold power to retain it.  It’s a belief shared by many of those who are only really disagreeing with the way he applies it.  Anybody who wants to disagree with him needs to start by accepting that power belongs to the people, not the centre, and that the people have the right to decide where it should be exercised.  Merely moving the ‘right’ place for power to reside from London to Cardiff will never be enough.

More centralism

Tweet There has been mixed reaction to the about turn by Plaid Cymru yesterday, in deciding to back Labour’s bill on local government reform after all. The Tories' simplistic approach is to slam Plaid for criticising Labour on the issue just a few days ago, and then supporting them yesterday.  Whether that’s a far criticism or not depends on what, if anything, changed in the interim.  The Lib Dems’ spokesman, Peter Black, claims that Plaid got nothing at all in return for their change of heart, whereas Plaid claims major concessions.

As ever, it’s hard to distinguish the hard truth amongst the spin and invective, let alone work out whether anything will really change as a result.  It does appear that Plaid has gained agreement from Labour on only one real issue, and that’s the question of timing.  Even if the bill is passed, nothing can now happen until after next May’s Assembly elections.  To dismiss that as a complete sell-out is a little unfair, but that’s not the same as saying that it’s a major gain.  Since no-one really expects any party other than Labour to be leading the next Welsh Government, and the bill will already be an act by the time that government takes office, it means that the legislative framework for Labour to plough ahead with this will be in place well in advance. 

Any changes to Labour’s proposals will now come about only if Labour does not gain an absolute majority; and will then be a result of horse-trading between parties.  Perhaps the optimism of the opposition parties about denying Labour a majority is justified, perhaps not.  In the first case, it means that there is some possibility of change after the event, in the second, it means that the changes have merely been delayed by a few months.

But one of the other points about Plaid’s statement struck me as rather more significant.  What exactly is the party’s vision for local government in Wales?  According to Leanne Wood’s statement, Plaid’s vision is now about “retaining the existing 22 Local Authorities making them work together as combined regional authorities”.  I’m not convinced that that is very different in its effect from the centralising agenda of Labour.

In the first place, there’s something deeply conservative, small c, about simply retaining the existing structure of 22 councils, which was something of an arbitrary creation in the first place.  Just as Labour seem to have a fixed idea about the right number being smaller than 22, Plaid’s proposal seems to start from a fixed idea that whatever currently exists is the right number, they just need to be forced to work differently.  I really don’t know what the ‘right’ number is – for me the question starts by asking what the role of local government is rather than what the boundaries should be.  That’s a question which none of the parties are asking, except by default – and that ‘default’ is effectively that they’re there to do whatever central government tells them to do.

And that’s the part which really disappoints me more than the innate conservatism of sticking to 22, and more than whether any deals done in Cardiff Bay are worthwhile or not.  Because this is centralism pretending to be support for local democracy.  There is no vision coming from any of the parties about meaningful internal devolution within Wales to strong local government which has its own democratic mandate through the election of councillors; all of them are simply looking at which structures will enable the most efficient implementation of national policy.

It’s a long way from the internal discussions that I remember in the 1970s about empowering local government.

Generals with maps

Tweet I rather liked the line about the dangers of a general with a map in a combat zone.  I’m not sure that it stands up to scrutiny though – it strikes me that a general without a map might potentially be even more dangerous.

It’s clear by now that the minister is determined to press ahead with a reorganisation of local authorities which will reduce the number of 8 or 9 in total.  It’s also clear that the other three centralist parties represented in the Assembly agree in principle with the push for a reduced number, even if they are quibbling about the detail.

It’s also clear that there are councillors in all the parties who will resist the proposed changes.  Here in Carmarthenshire, in a rare display of unity a few weeks ago, Labour, Plaid, and the Independent Party joined forces to declare that Carmarthenshire should remain a stand-alone authority.  They’re whistling in the wind though – their influence on their leaders in Cardiff is about as close to zero as it can get, and their views will simply be dismissed as self-interest.

It might be true that their protests are based on self-interest, but even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are genuinely seeking to do what’s best for local democracy in Wales, they’ll still be ignored.  That simply isn’t the question being asked; and having the right answer to the wrong question won’t advance their case greatly.

It seems to me that the question being asked by Cardiff’s centralists has little to do with good or effective local democracy at all – it is, rather, about finding the most efficient way of delivering certain key services, and primarily amongst those, education.  Efficiency and democracy are not at all the same thing.  But seeking to judge the latest proposals against that key criterion of ‘efficiency’ (assuming that the term even has a simple agreed definition) raises more questions that it answers.

Firstly, why does the area of Glamorgan and Gwent require four regions, when four or at most five is deemed adequate for the whole of the rest of Wales?  Where is the evidence that requires the population of a region to be less than x and no more than y?

Secondly, why is the sanctity of existing boundaries taken as a given?  What’s wrong, for instance, with splitting Conwy and merging half with Gwynedd and the other half with the rest of north Wales?  Yes, I know, of course, that it’s easier to treat existing authorities as whole units, but if the question is how we find the most ‘efficient’ structure, this is an unnecessary constraint.

Thirdly, why do all services have to be delivered to the same pattern?  I can understand – even if I’m not entirely convinced by the evidence – why fewer education authorities might be an improvement, but why do services such as leisure centres have to be managed at the same level?  It simply looks like a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

Fourthly, given the need for better co-ordination between health and social services, why is the NHS not being included, and aligned to the same boundaries, as Plaid have in fact suggested?

Fifthly, where does this leave the Welsh Government’s drive for city regions?  Whereas the regions have previously included ‘whole’ authorities (for instance, Carmarthenshire in Swansea Bay), the new plan will mean that some authorities (such as Dyfed) are partly in and partly out.

But the biggest question of all, which the minister seems to be completely unwilling even to contemplate, is about the value of democratic elections to these new ‘authorities’.  If the aim is to ensure the most efficient delivery of centrally prescribed services to centrally ordained standards in a consistent fashion, how does electing councillors to regional authorities add any value at all?  How much influence can any elected councillors actually have?

It’s a point that I’ve raised before – if certain services are considered so important that they have to be uniform and consistent in terms of both policy and delivery across the whole of Wales (I’m not at all convinced about that, but it seems that all four Assembly parties are), then why pretend that elected local government has any rôle in delivering them?  Better by far to keep local government local and let it concentrate on those services where there is room for local variation and difference.

Leighton the Trojan

Tweet I quite like the proposal put forward yesterday by Leighton Andrews for a time limit on councillors in Wales, but I wonder whether he’s thought through the implications, not least for his own party.

The plan isn’t without its flaws and omissions of course; 25 years is a very long time, and there’s no obvious logic in applying the rule to councillors but not to AMs and MPs.  Above all, it doesn’t really get to grips with the reasons why there are so many long-serving old men on our councils in Wales.

In the bad old days when I was a member of the old Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council, most councils met in the evenings, and councillors were simply paid around £14 a time for turning up at meetings.  For a committed individual it was, just about, possible to combine being an effective councillor with holding a full time job.  But most councils now meet during the day time, and councillors are paid a basic salary of a little over £13,000 a year, which changes the picture in several ways. It makes it harder for people who work full time to commit to doing the job properly, whilst on the other hand, the salary is too low for many people to give up the day job.  Small wonder that the job ends up looking particularly attractive to retired people.  

I’ve expended time and effort over the years trying to twist arms of people to stand in local elections, and like anyone else who’s ever tried that, I’m aware that it isn’t an easy task.  Whilst it’s certainly true (as seems to be the premise behind the new proposal) that there are some old-stagers who are determined to carry on to the end and are thus keeping out other people, it’s equally true that some are still there because they and their party have failed to find a successor candidate.

And that brings me back to the impact on the Labour Party.  In parts of South Wales, as anyone who’s ever campaigned there will know, the only thing that keeps the Labour Party alive and kicking is the elderly councillors who exist in a state of mutual dependency with the party.  They are the people who come out and knock doors and deliver leaflets, in parliamentary and Assembly elections as well as council elections.  Take them away, and what’s left?

Could Leighton Andrews be working to a secret agenda to destroy his own party’s hegemony from within?

Who's taking the decisions?

Tweet The proposal that Welsh should have prominence on all road signs in Wales is one that I find it very easy to support.  It is, after all, only a repeat of a proposal made 40 years ago by the official committee set up to look into the matter.  And the suggestion that there should be no mass replacement of road signs, merely a gradual replacement as and when new signs are needed, is certainly a way of minimising the cost, although it will inevitably mean that the process of replacement is a very slow one.  (As an example, I noticed earlier this week on a rural road in Carmarthenshire that there is still a road sign pointing to a place called “Llanelly”; it’s a sign which no one has ever felt it necessary to replace.  And I doubt that it's unique.)

I’m less enthusiastic, though, about the idea that this should be imposed as a rule which all local authorities will be compelled to follow by the Welsh government, even though I know that it won’t happen any other way.  It’s a classic case of a dichotomy between the decision that I want, and the question of where that decision should be taken.  I’m not a great believer in the idea that individual decisions should be taken wherever we can get the “right” outcome.

It’s a point I’ve posted on many times before – what are local councils for; what power should they have; and what value do elected councillors add?

Currently “local government” functions are a mishmash of different things.  In some fields councils are simply acting as local agencies implementing government directives, in others they set policy for themselves.  And there are some fields, of course, when it’s not always entirely clear where policy is really being set.  It was disappointing that the Williams Commission didn't really address this question of purpose - there seemed to be an implicit assumption that local councils are primarily agents for local delivery rather than policy-setting bodies with their own democratic mandate.

The result is that local and central government regularly blame each other for failure and try to grab credit for success.  The councillors we elect have, in reality, little real power over many of the decisions for which they are nominally responsible.

I don’t for one moment believe that we would all draw the line in the same place – I’m an instinctive decentraliser, and accept as a consequence that local control necessarily leads to local differences, and that I will not like all of those differences.  But it would surely be better to draw such a line between truly locally determined services, and nationally determined services which are merely delivered locally.  The former could be delivered by strong local government recognising the mandate which elected councillors have, and the latter by local offices of national government, deleting all pretence that there’s anything “local” about the policies being pursued.

Claiming that road signage is the prerogative of Wales’ local authorities and then decreeing every aspect of policy concerning their format and siting is merely perpetuating a dishonesty – what is there left for councils to decide?  A more honest policy would be simply to move the responsibility to the highways authorities which are already direct agencies of national government.

More centralisation and quangoes

Tweet When I served on a planning committee back in the 1980s, no one batted an eyelid at the idea that I could talk to voters in my ward, ascertain their views, declare in advance that I’d support them, and then go along to a meeting and argue the case on their behalf.  It was sometimes difficult to find out what people thought – opinions were often divided – but representing the views of electors was part of what I thought I was there to do.

It was just after I’d retired as a councillor in 1991 that the new law was implemented turning the planning process into a quasi-judicial one, where any views expressed in advance were held to be prejudicial and to exclude the councillors concerned from speaking of voting on the issue.  It was a part of the then Conservative Government’s policy aimed at emasculating local councils in the interest of promoting development - as if the Town & Country Planning Acts weren’t already sufficiently biased in favour of developers.

Coupled with formal timescales for determining applications, the result was pretty inevitable.  More and more decisions were delegated to officers, and there was less and less room for local democratic expression.

It looks as though Labour in Cardiff are about to complete the process started by the Tories in London, taking further responsibilities away from councillors and giving them either to council officers or else to an arm of central government.

Coupled with a proposal to give the unelected local service boards power to draw up strategic development plans which will sit above the plans drawn up by local councils, it’s another huge shift of power away from elected bodies and into the hands of appointees.  When Labour pretended to be against this sort of thing in the past, they called them quangos.

It also underlines once again the disjointed and incoherent approach to local government which was also well demonstrated in the appointment of the Williams commission.  The government and the Labour Party still haven’t decided what they think local government is for, let alone what powers it should have.

What is the point of local councils – supposedly run by elected members – having a planning function at all if the plans are set elsewhere, along with all the rules for determining applications?  Why not just be honest and have a single national planning authority with a few regional offices?  That would seem to be the direction of travel for Welsh Labour.

Unfulfilled expectations

Tweet The more time passes, the more the local government non-reorganisation proposed by the Williams Commission appears to be dead in the water.  The all-party consensus which Carwyn Jones hoped for evaporated before it formed, and the arbitrary “decide by Easter or else” deadline has been shown to be just that, entirely arbitrary.

The First Minister must be wondering how on earth this has happened.  After all, he included representatives of all four parties on the commission and must have expected that their, apparently unanimous, conclusions would be rubber-stamped by their parties.  Was that expectation really so unreasonable?

It seems to me that there are two factors which come into play here.  The first is the extent to which the party representatives were chosen by their parties rather than selected by the First Minister, and the second is the extent to which they kept in touch with their respective parties during the commission’s deliberations.

On the first it was never entirely clear.  It’s part of the way of doing things in the UK – and another of those habits which the Assembly seems only too keen to ape – that appointment processes for such commissions are anything but transparent.  Whether the individuals were nominated “through the usual channels” by their party leaders, or arbitrarily selected by the First Minister is obscure to say the least.  But even if we assume the worst case, that he alone made the decision without consultation, he must surely have expected that in choosing an ex-leader of one-party, an ex-special adviser to the leader of another when in government, and an ex-director of policy for the third, he was choosing people who would, at the very least, have a good “feel” for the likely response of their parties.  That strikes me as a not entirely unreasonable starting point.

On the second, it is hard to believe that the party representatives would have come out so unanimously for their proposals if they had any inkling of the likely reaction from their parties.  One can only conclude that communication has been minimal.  I suppose that the Lib Dems can, almost, be forgiven – it seems that “their” man left the party during the process.  But I’m not sure what excuse the other two can offer.  The whole “all-party” exercise ends up looking like a charade.

For whatever reason, the First Minister’s reasonable expectation has not been realised.  He must surely be left wondering what was the point of the exercise, and where he went so wrong.

How big is big enough?

Tweet In its editorial reaction to the report of the Williams Commission, yesterday’s Western Mail told us sternly that “post code lotteries are intolerable within a country of only three million”.  It’s one of those things that “everybody knows” to be true, but it begs two questions.

The first is this: what is the difference between a ‘post code lottery’ on the one hand and differing service levels based on local democratic choice on the other?  The answer, in essence, is that there is no difference; it all depends on perspective.  Centralists instinctively demand complete standardisation and conformity whereas decentralists accept that differing levels and quality of service are an inevitable concomitant – from those two viewpoints they merely describe the same phenomenon in different words.

The second question is this: if three million is too small to allow differing service levels, how many is enough?  It is implicit in any statement saying that ‘n’ is too small that there is a larger number which is not too small; in this case, what the paper calls ‘post code lotteries’ are apparently acceptable if only the population is large enough.  Why?

Hidden behind this is the way in which supporters of devolution – whom I had long thought to be instinctive decentralists – turn out to be centralists in practice in a Welsh context.  Strangely, I’ve heard some argue that they are in favour both of rigid central standards and powerful local government.  I can only conclude that they’re either confused or dishonest, because, for any given service, we really can’t have both.

Somehow, since the advent of devolution from London to Cardiff, an idea seems to have caught on amongst the politicians and media that there is no need or justification for any differences within Wales, whereas differences between Wales and England are perfectly acceptable.  It’s a valid vision for Wales, but it isn’t the one which many espoused before the Assembly was established.  And it isn’t one which ever drove me.

Another missed opportunity

Tweet A cynical description of a management consultant of the sort so popular with businesses and government organisations is “a person who borrows your watch to tell you the time”.  It encapsulates the view that the ‘independent’ ‘experts’ have been hired, first and foremost, to confirm what those hiring them already ‘know’ – but with the extra credibility that comes from being external.

Crucial to this approach is hiring the ‘right’ consultants – they need to be sufficiently compliant – and giving them the ‘right’ brief.  It’s a definition which somehow sprang to mind when I read this sentence in the foreword to the report of the Williams Commission yesterday:

“In establishing us, the First Minister made clear that the status quo was not an option.  We have found extensive and compelling evidence that that is indeed the case.”

The consultants that I’m used to don’t often make their role quite as crystal clear as that; it’s usually a bit more nuanced!  But there can be little doubt that the Commission has told the Welsh Government what it wanted to hear.  Quelle surprise.

Sadly, their brief was written entirely around “governance and delivery”, thereby absolving them of any duty to consider what local government should actually do, and concentrate instead on how they do it.  I wouldn’t argue that there aren’t problems with the how at present, but to adapt a piece of management speak, “doing the wrong things well is probably worse than doing the right things badly”.  It seems, however, that doing things well is deemed more important by the Welsh Government than doing the right things. 

Local Government in Wales is a complete mish-mash of three types of activities, with vague and imprecise boundaries between them:

·         Services where the councils really are free to decide on policy and delivery as they wish.  They can choose to spend more and deliver a better service, or to spend less and cut the council tax.  Different parties and candidates really can promise different approaches which they can then implement when elected.  This category includes things like parks, leisure centres, and libraries.  It’s worth noting that this one area where they have complete freedom is the one area where they currently seem, perversely, to be trying to divest themselves of all responsibility.

·         Secondly, we have some services where the councils have absolutely no scope to set any policy and are totally constrained by the law as to what they can do.  The limit of their scope for being different is perhaps using different and incompatible IT systems to achieve the same ends – things like electoral registration, for instance; or births, deaths and marriages.  I find it hard to see what, if any, value is added in these areas by having locally elected councillors responsible for them.  They are administrative tasks which could just as easily – and probably more efficiently – be managed nationally.

·         Then we have the services in the middle where the local councils like to believe that they have some freedom to set policy and do things differently, but in reality are hide-bound by central directives and standards.  These are things like Social Services and Education – and it’s worth noting that these are precisely the service areas in which local authorities are perceived to be failing.  The two facts might not be unconnected…

I’m not sure whether the services referred to in the third category should actually be delivered by Local Councils at all; I’m open to be convinced either way.  My starting point is that if local councillors with their own democratic mandate are to run services, they should have the freedom to set policy – and the freedom to deliver a poor service as well if they so choose, and if the local electorate choose a bunch of incompetents to run the council.  It’s called democracy.  But if a service is deemed to be too important to be left to local decision-making, then we should stop pretending that local authorities add any value and run the service nationally. 

It all depends on your viewpoint on the extent of any local democratic mandate; I tend to the view that we should maximise local control, and I accept that one inevitable result of that is that service levels and quality will vary; but if the majority believe that consistent service levels are more important, then they should advocate proper central control, as the only way of meeting that objective.

The latest report doesn’t address that sort of question at all – and the Commission is recommending a series of local government mergers on the basis of an assumption that we should simply continue as we are.  The merger process will be costly in the short term, even if we believe that there will be savings in the longer term.  Eyes will inevitably be taken off balls in the process; such problems as we currently have will continue until the process is complete.  It’s a serious missed opportunity.

Selling planning consents

Tweet Some of what Cameron said this week on fracking is surely indisputable.  It would undoubtedly create jobs, it would undoubtedly lead to major capital investment, and it would undoubtedly increase UK energy security.

His claim about lower energy bills is rather less certain, and has already been disputed by some of those involved in the industry. I don't doubt his sincerity in claiming that steps will be taken to try and ensure minimal direct environmental damage - although the extent to which any of us can be certain that there will not be damage is another question entirely.  He may turn out to be right, but I don’t currently share his apparent supreme confidence.

However, all of that is about the pros and cons at a practical and economic level; the point he did not make was that an all-out commitment to fracking commits us, effectively, to another century of dependence on fossil fuels.  Gas may be the cleanest (although I prefer the term “least dirty”) of the fossil fuels, but it is still a fossil fuel, and it still produces greenhouse gases.

We should also be concerned about the financial deal suggested this week, in which councils in England will get to keep the whole of the business rates from any fracking site (the Welsh Government has yet to decide whether to follow suit).  I can’t argue against the principle that local communities should gain from any such developments if they do go ahead – after all, I have argued in the past that the same should be true for windfarms.  But tying those benefits into the planning process is another matter entirely.

Some have already called it a “bribe”, and giving local authorities a direct financial incentive to grant planning consent certainly seems to be flying in the face of the (allegedly) quasi-judicial planning process.

For decades, local councillors have been told that they must set aside any personal views about developments, avoid taking any view prior to hearing the report of the planning officers, and then judge planning applications purely on their merits as compared with agreed planning policies, almost as though they were in a court of law.  So – is it actually legal to offer local authorities a direct financial incentive to grant planning consent for a development which they would otherwise refuse?  I’m sure that it would not be if I tried it.

Agreeing with the opposition 1

Tweet There were two stories in yesterday’s Western Mail which found me agreeing with the basic points being made by two politicians with whom I’d normally disagree on most things.

The first story was the one about the ‘leaked’ letter (experience tells me that for journalists, ‘leak’ can, and frequently does, cover a multitude of sins) from Cllr Hedley McCarthy to ‘party colleagues across Wales’ (a phrase which suggests that the letter finding its way into the public eye can hardly have come as a surprise to the author, given the singularly unfraternal relationships which exist between members of the Labour Party).

There seems to be a lot of general whingeing in the letter – typical internal Labour Party stuff – and the Western Mail seized on it as a sign of a ‘split’.  There seems to be little that the paper likes more than a ‘split’, and the more personal the better.  No surprise that some political opponents leapt onto the ‘split’ bandwagon; it’s a lot less taxing to debate at that level than to engage with the nub of the argument.

None of that was the bit that led me to find myself in agreement with the councillor.  It was rather the nugget at the heart of his argument - almost lost in the coverage of the froth - that the idea that small councils cannot deliver services “…is theoretical and not backed up by any serious evidence”.  This is a very significant point, which I have no doubt that the four centralist parties in the Assembly will completely ignore.  They have already decided that size, or rather lack of size, is the problem.

It is true, of course, that the councils suffering the biggest problems at present are smaller ones; but that’s correlation, not proof of causation.  It could just be that the councillors and officers in those councils happen to be less competent (although I suspect that Cllr McCarthy and I might disagree on that!).  It might even be, as Cllr McCarthy himself seems to half suggest, that the basis used by the Minister for determining ‘failure’ was itself rigged to favour the result that he wanted.

But here’s the real point which those rushing to centralise and consolidate councils are missing: if there’s no hard evidence that the small size of some councils is the problem, there is equally no hard evidence that amalgamating them into larger councils is the solution.  That it is the solution to some problem or other is not in doubt of course – but the problems which it solves are more to do with a populist attempt to cull the number of politicians, and a rather less open and honest attempt to strengthen the control of the centre.

I’m not opposed to reform or re-organisation of local government; on the contrary, I think we need a root and branch review of what powers local government should have, and form and size should flow from that.  To be worthwhile, local government needs to have clearly defined powers and be left to exercise them.  That isn’t what we are getting though – we are getting a process which simply implements the already formed prejudices of centralising politicians who are accreting power into their own hands.

The surprise is not that one Labour councillor from Gwent is expressing his opposition; it’s the fact that he seems so isolated.

What about democracy?

Tweet I cannot disagree with those who argue that senior pay in local government has become excessive in recent years.  And I’m not convinced by the argument that those doing the job are so exceptionally talented and able that we need to offer to pay them at the highest levels to have the honour and privilege of them agreeing to work for us in our local authorities.  I am, on the contrary, entirely convinced that we can find people who can do the job, and do it well, for much lower salaries than those currently on offer.

Attacking that culture of high pay is undoubtedly popular amongst the public at large. I’m still uneasy, though, about the unholy alliance of the Tories, Lib Dems, and Plaid getting together to demand that the Welsh Government acts to bring senior pay in our local authorities under control.  I'm not even certain that what they're proposing will work - who's to say that the proposed 'independent panel' won't simply recommend even higher salaries?  History and experience suggest that it will be stuffed with people who are, or have been, part of the system themselves.

I suspect that one argument put forward by defenders of the current system – that this will lead to legal disputes – is just hot air, and can fairly safely be ignored.  After all, the law, in this case, is whatever the National Assembly says it is.  Their question about why local government is being singled out for special attention is a rather better one – why indeed are the same arguments not being applied in the Health Service, where those employed are in any case more directly the responsibility of the Welsh Government?

Indeed, why restrict the assault on senior pay to the public sector?  I would personally be much more willing to accept a blanket piece of legislation restricting the pay of those at the top to a fixed multiple of the pay of those at the bottom – and I’d consider that it would be much more properly the preserve of government to make such provision.  (The Welsh Government doesn’t currently have the power to do that of course – but I don’t even hear them arguing for it.)

That isn’t the cause of my unease either, however.  It’s more the ideological question about what power and sovereignty are, and where they come from, which leaves me uneasy.

It’s clear that, for all four of the centralist parties in the Assembly, power resides with them, and local government is there to do as they say, and within any directives which they lay down.  Pay is just the tip of the iceberg in this context.  I may agree with them about the unacceptability of the outcome of current arrangements – i.e. excessive pay – but I start from a different place. 

Local government has its own democratic mandate, and if we were serious about devolution and decentralisation within Wales, we’d be giving local government more powers, not taking them away or constraining them.  Whilst there’s scope for a lot more discussion about what we want local government to do and how we want to structure it, that’s not the discussion that’s being had.  And instead of opening out that debate, the Government is simply acting in a piecemeal fashion to constrain and limit powers as and when it sees fit.

I have argued in the past that, if we’re dissatisfied with any aspect of the performance of the Welsh Government and the National Assembly, the right approach is not to abolish them, but to change the people and the policies.  I’d argue the same way about our local authorities.  I wonder how many AMs would argue that the solution to any problem at Assembly level is for the UK Government to legislate to constrain the powers of the Assembly.  But isn’t that exactly what they themselves are saying in relation to local government?

Laws and sledgehammers

Tweet Much of the discussion around the decision of the UK Attorney General to take the Welsh Government to the Supreme Court has centred on the process rather than the substance.  A good argument is better than a detailed legal analysis any day.

Insofar as I understand the substance of the complaint, the accusation is that in removing the need for council byelaws to be approved by Welsh Ministers, the Assembly Act has also removed, or attempted to remove, the need for approval by the Secretary of State who, under the labyrinthine nature of the Welsh devolution settlement, exercises such responsibility jointly with Welsh Ministers.  Or rather, she has the right to exercise it jointly; in practice, the process has been that the SoS leaves Welsh Ministers to get on with it.

Now I’m no lawyer, but it was well-understood, I thought, that one of the constraints on the right of the Assembly to legislate was that they could neither take away from, nor add to, the responsibilities of UK Ministers.  If that’s really what the dispute comes down to, then I’d tip the UK Government to win.  And if the Welsh Government really were told this in advance, then they have no excuse for ploughing ahead and ignoring the advice.

Being right on the point of law is, however, no substitute for being right on the politics of the issue, and that’s where things get a little cloudier.  In essence the Attorney General is launching a case in the Supreme Court to protect the right of the SoS to do something which she seems to have had no inclination to do to date.

Worse still, the Welsh Government’s Act is very much in line with the policy of the UK Government, which is to take Ministers out of the loop, and allow local authorities to get on with the job as they see fit, with, in the Minister's own words, "no ministerial involvement whatsoever".  So not only is the Attorney General trying to protect the right of the SoS to do something that she doesn’t seem to want to do, it’s also something which UK Government policy says she really shouldn’t be doing anyway.

In the circumstances, launching a Supreme Court action seems more than a little OTT.  Would it not have been better to simply legislate in London to give effect to the aims of the Assembly Act and thereby implement UK Government policy at the same time?  As it is, it rather looks as though both sides are taking positions for the sake of it.  Still, with the summer upon us, the media need some good stories.  And what better for the silly season than some silly politicians?