Local villains
Alasdair Palmer discovers that the dream of localism soon becomes a nightmare when you have to deal with council bureaucrats All politicians appear to be in favour of ‘localism’ at present. This week two of Labour’s ideological heavyweights, David Miliband and Alan Milburn, have argued that Labour’s next ‘big idea’ should be for central government to devolve power back to local groups — that way it will be possible for ordinary people to deal with social problems which the central state has so far failed to solve.
David Cameron, as he leads the Tories on their long march back to the centre ground, has frequently said precisely the same thing, insisting that local people can tackle problems with an effectiveness that the centralised state cannot. ‘Social entrepreneurs and volunteers’, says Mr Cameron, have ‘found solutions’ to problems such as ‘anti-social behaviour, family breakdown, hard drug use, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy and binge drinking’.
Phew. That’s quite a list. But I wonder if anyone who has actually been involved in local issues shares Mr Cameron’s — or Mr Miliband’s or Mr Milburn’s — optimism about what can be achieved through local initiatives. In my neighbourhood, there is a very active local group trying to make the area a better place in which to live. It hasn’t yet tackled family breakdown, class A drug use, domestic violence or teenage pregnancies, but it has been working hard on the more modest issues of trying to ensure safer streets, better parks and to improve the quality of building projects in the area.
It has not met with total success. The biggest obstacle in the way to achieving anything at all has been the local council bureaucracy. Council officials have been variously obstructive, bullying, obtuse and just plain stupid. But they have the Maxim-gun, and we do not. The law gives them the ultimate decision-making power. They control the purse strings. They also have the lawyers to prove to local residents that what they want, wonderful though it may be in theory, does not comply with the Human Rights Act, European law, UK traffic regulations, health and safety law, and so on. Frequently these claims are bogus. But it takes a hideous amount of effort, and the help of some very good lawyers, to demonstrate it.
The officials are also all paid very good salaries (plus benefits and inflation-proof pensions) to ‘oversee’ local affairs in a way that suits them best. They spend their working lives at it, honing their ability to grind down local initiatives — any initiative, that is, which does not come from them — by a simple process of attrition. And the effect of this relentless wearing down is that citizens who were originally concerned and motivated to ‘do something’ eventually come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it: it involves too much time, effort and frustration, often for no tangible benefit.
Unlike council officials, ordinary people the people who actually live in the area and want to improve it — are not paid for their efforts. Trying to improve community facilities is something we do outside working hours and without pay, and it always requires sacrificing something, even if it is just time with the children. Officials can spend all day at a meeting without sacrificing anything. It gives them a tremendous advantage.
Here is one example of how officialdom’s obtuseness has mangled a local initiative. There are 25 schools in my neighbourhood. The roads are used as rat runs, there have been a lot of accidents involving the children and it can be an unpleasant — and occasionally frightening — experience to take your children to and from school. So a number of concerned residents got together to try to redesign the streets so as to diminish and slow down the traffic. We — well, I have to admit I wasn’t really involved, it was my wife (she is Californian) — managed to get a grant for £1 million from Transport for London (TfL) for precisely that purpose.
Then the local officials got their hands on the project. The money, by law, had to go through the local council. The officials, who had taken no interest in the project before it had money attached, and had done nothing whatever to help, immediately said they had to take 20 per cent of the TfL grant — £200,000 — for their ‘costs’. They have not yet provided any account of what they spent that money on. In fact, they have not provided any accounts at all of what happened to the £200,000, despite repeated requests.
Officials then proceeded to delay and indeed to prevent anything from happening. They did not listen to the residents, who had consulted extremely widely in the neighbourhood and had come up with a plan which was endorsed by a majority. They also insisted on hiring a consultant, despite serious reservations about the consultant’s performance having been expressed by two other London communities.
Officials then failed to build any of the ramps and chicanes which local people wanted, and which would have brought car speed down to ten miles an hour. The explanation seems to have been that the officials were not aware that that was the aim of the project; in two years, they failed to read the proposal put together by residents which would have told them.
Instead the council officials hired a contractor to build a project which was not what anyone wanted, and then failed to control the contractor’s spiralling and puzzling expenditure. The contractor, for example, has charged the council for rectifying its (the contractor’s) own incompetent and shoddy work. The council officials have paid, saying they have ‘no option’ (they do, but they cannot be bothered to follow any path other than that of least resistance).
It has been the same story of prevarication, incompetence and inefficiency from local officials across all the other areas where there have been similar initiatives, from the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme to planning. The experience of dealing with these officials has convinced most residents that the only effective way forward is to fire all of them, and let people take charge of their own community. One benefit, apart from completing projects which people actually want, would be a significant fall in council tax.
But none of the political parties is proposing so radical an alternative as getting rid of most of the structure of permanent local government — the local civil service, as it were. Labour insists that all local initiatives should be made ‘in partnership’ with the state — that is, with local government. I can only say that this will guarantee either that what emerges will not match what local people want, or that they won’t bother to get involved at all in the first place.
It is not clear exactly what the Tories want, but no one from the leadership is talking about making thousands of officials in local government redundant. That would, after all, be ‘uncaring’ — at least to the officials. And the New Tories do not want to be accused of being that — those guys vote. So the ‘new localism’ will end up just like the old localism: officials and bureaucrats controlling everything.
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