Radical change needed

Radical changes to local councillors’ status proposed by a recent British report could send shockwaves across the EU. Rumyana Vakarelska reports

European parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering recently suggested that the four levels of government should become more distinctive from each other, with regional and local government taking the lead on an increasing number of issues. This would give local councillors more influence over the day-to-day lives of European citizens in certain policy areas than either the EU institutions or national governments.

While most political leaders within the EU would likely baulk at such a thought, there is little doubt that the powers granted to local governments are a hot topic of debate for many European policy-makers. 

In the UK, for example, where there is an uneasy power-sharing deal between the national government, the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the local authorities operating at the county level and lower, the ground-breaking recommendations of the recent Councillors Commission report have already proved controversial.

Ben Page, head of the public affairs division at IPSOS MORI, the public opinion research company that compiled the report, said that several key recommendations had been made to Hazel Blears, secretary of state for the communities.

“These include a shorter and fixed term of councillors’ service, less space for other interests, meaning more flexibility on behalf of their employers, and a higher accountability before the public,” he said.

But councillor Tim Palmer, chairman of the County Councils network, defended the existing status quo, indicating that achieving a consensus on the emerging new social and economic profile of the key figures in local government would not be easy, especially when it came to clashes with other professional interests.

Page was realistic about the chances of any of the report’s recommendations being taken on board. “I do not believe that the findings of our report will bring the changes in local government that the UK public requires, especially regarding councillors’ terms of duty and work flexibility, which would allow them to put more hours towards their responsibilities as local councillors,” he said.

“The UK is a small country, so I do not believe that radical devolution will take place here, as one council can differ quite a lot from another [in terms of quality of service, for example] and nobody wants these differences to become more visible,” said Page. “But I assume that our recommendations will result in some smaller practical changes in local government in the summer.”

However, according to Page, the UK is better off than some countries: Germany has a long way to go when it comes to power decentralisation compared to the UK, despite its federal system, while Australia, a much bigger country and one that would therefore benefit from a less centralised administration, is also lagging behind Britain.

Page pointed out that most EU countries, however, have assumed some model of local government, with local authorities managing certain key dossiers – such as health care – as they see fit. This, he said, makes investment in public services more visible to the European electorate – a factor that was of vital importance given the poor standing of politicians among voters.

The IPSOS MORI survey of public perceptions of local government showed that 48 per cent of the respondents did not trust local government, but that 74 per cent trusted hospitals and 79 per cent trusted NHS (i.e. public) hospitals. But when asked who delivered the best services, 67 per cent of the respondents said that it was their local councils rather than central government.

Page thinks that the reason for these confusing answers is that councils are bad when it comes to addressing issues of importance to the local populace and that they do not hold enough ‘surgeries’ with members of the public. If councils communicated more with the communities they serve, he argued, they would also get a better response from the public and the public sector workers in their area. For example, the survey showed that only 10 per cent of teachers want to become head teachers because they are disillusioned with the way in which local school services are run, which clearly leaves councils with a major recruitment headache to be overcome.

Another issue for the local authorities to deal with is the high geographic mobility of the UK population (excluding emigration), with one in nine people moving home every year, thus making planning local services more difficult. Moreover, the UK’s population is expected to increase by roughly four million to 64 million people in 2020, putting more pressure on funding for local services.  

Meanwhile, the UK government’s ongoing changes to school admission rules, which aim to close social gaps, and the consolidation of local healthcare services, may well help local authorities get more power.

Blears’ final response to IPSOS MORI’s recommendations is expected in early summer, but she has already started public consultation on a new White Paper focused on empowering citizens. “We need a little less social engineering, and a lot more social enterprise,” she said. “There are few problems that British communities cannot solve for themselves if only their talent and ingenuity can be unleashed.”

According to data obtained by her department, six out of ten people do not feel that they are given an adequate say on how local council services are run, while more than nine out of 10 people believe that the accountability of councils could be improved. Nearly four out every 10 people do not feel that councillors are representative of their communities, while six out of 10 people do not believe that they adequately reflect their views.

Until the summer, then, there is little chance of any major change to the way in which local government is organised in the UK, but it does seem likely that the kind of investigations into the role of local government carried out by IPSOS-MORI in Britain could well be mirrored elsewhere in the EU.