LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters from Professor Charles Wilson, Geoffrey Sampson, Peter Paterson, Auberon Waugh, T. Francis Glasson, D. B. Taylor and others.
Too many Town Halls
Sir: You are right to criticise the quality of our local government.
But you are too sanguine in sup- posing that the mere reduction in the numbers of officials will auto- matically improve their quality. It will not.
Behind all the clouds of dust and the noise and shouting of local patriots over boundary disputes lies the problem which has even now, after numerous inquiries, been scarcely scratched : the qual- ity of recriiits for local govern- ment and their proper training. Some larger and better organised authorities have thought out this problem: most have not. The structure of management, presided over traditionally by a lawyer, remains fundamentally mediaeval. There is no chain of command, and processes which ought to call for policy thinking are conducted as mere repetition. A few authorities recruit grad- uates for administrative, financial and educational purposes: but compared with industry's accept- ance of the graduate function, that of local government is halting and reluctant. To compare the quality of local engineers with the quality we ought to aim at, you have only to compare the traffic chaos in our cities with the far more successful arrangements in, e.g., the cities of the Netherlands.
Perhaps we should ask fewer questions about the money levels of local government expenditure and more about returns for what is spent. The one clear feature of the present situation is the waste of a high proportion of local expendi- ture through poor administration, poor engineering or poor planning. But if we are to get real value for money, recruitment and training must be the subject of a deliberate and calculated policy designed to bring the majority of local authori- ties up to —at the very least—the standards of the best. Even that will be useless if the antiquated struc- ture of local administration is not itself replaced by a more intelligent system to jettison the ancient customs which rule most of our town halls.
Previous page
