Roll up that map of England . • • In
grander days, our distinguished public figures could amuse themselves by draw- ing and redrawing the map of Europe, of Africa, or even of Asia. But in the two decades since Lord Radcliffe decided what was India and what was Pakistan we have fallen on leaner times. To-day the heirs of those distinguished public figures have to content themselves with drawing and redrawing the internal boundaries of these islands.
This is not without its advantages. For one thing, we can all join in. It is easy for most of us to profess an opinion about whether Swindon is spiritually closer to Bristol and the wild and woolly south- west (as Lord Redcliffe-Maud and the majority of his fellow Royal Commis- sioners would have it) or to Oxford and the London-dominated south-east (as the one-man minority report argues): it is not so easy to have an informed view on the proper allegiance. of Schleswig-Holstein, the correct definition of Nigeria or the just frontiers of Israel. And, if we are wrong about Swindon, it is on the whole less likely to lead to bloodshed.
But it is essential that the temptation to discuss this week's report of Lord Redcliffe-Maud's Royal Commission on local government in England in terms of the map-drawing game is firmly resisted. There are far more important issues at stake, issues that the report broadly identifies as efficiency and democracy (Lord Redcliffe-Maud deserves at least one cheer if only for having avoided the Wedgbenglish of 'participation). The argument about efficiency is, in essence, clear enough. Local government expendi- ture is currently running at some £5,000 million a year, and rising rapidly. This cannot continue, and the need for better value for money in the years ahead will become paramount. And this in turn will not happen so long as local government remains as inefficient, wasteful and even sometimes corrupt as it is at present, when the uneconomically small scale of most local government organisation, con- flicts between overlapping authorities, and the shortage of high-calibre men pre- pared to devote all their spare time to serving (unpaid) on local councils, all conspire to give the ratepayers a pretty poor run for his money.
The commission's solution, after deal- ing with greater Birmingham, greater Liverpool and greater Manchester after the fashion of Greater London, is to divide the rest of England, accounting for a little under-two thirds of its total popu- lation, into fifty-eight new jumbo-sized `unitary' local government areas, with populations ranging from just under 200,000 to over a million, and averaging around half a million. The term 'unitary' means simply that the new directly elected authorities would enjoy all the powers of all the authorities at present comprised within their borders. The com- mission further groups the fifty-eight, plus the four metropolitan areas, into eight `provinces'; but these are mere recep- tacles, of no consequence unless at some still more distance date Westminster (whether or not spurred on by the Crowther Commission on the constitution) chooses to devolve to them powers at present residing with the central govern- ment.
But what about the Redcliffe-Maud report's second desideratum, 'democracy'? Unhappily, while the report admits the need to strike 'the best practicable bal- ance between the needs of efficiency . . . and the requirements of effective repre- sentation' it lamentably fails to do so. It is a commonplace that people feel that existing local authorities are too remote: Redcliffe-Maud would make them still remoter, with nothing to compensate for this deprivation. The Commission's research team undertook a survey which found that the vast majority of people identified as their 'home area' either the parish (in the country) or 'a group of streets around their homes' (in towns). `Only in the smaller towns did people tend to associate the home area with the town'; the report adds, 'and the smaller the town the more often they did so'. Yet the significance of this is completely ignored.
Again, the commission curiously fails to identify—even after three years' honest toil—the outstanding defect of local government; namely, that its councillors are re-elected or rejected not on the strength of their performance in local government, but because of the perform- ance in national government of the party whose label they bear. Responsive, res- ponsible and respected local government will only be achieved once this defect is overcome. It will not be overcome by Redcliffe-Maud's 'unitary' authorities, whose councillors would be swept in and out of office by the national swing even more ineluctably than our present local governors are. It can only be overcome by building a second tier of really small local government units, with which people can genuinely identify, whose elected representatives are personally known as individuals and not simply as wearers of red or blue rosettes, and yet which have real and genuine power at their own level.
Redcliffe-Maud recommends, indeed, a second tier of local councils; but it is a travesty of what is needed. For these are simply the existing local authorities drained of all power—except the power to levy rates. (The fact that their boundaries are to be unchanged for five years after the enactment, which in any case will not occur during the present parliament, of the commission's other recommendations removes, incidentally, the government's last and in any case unconstitutional argument for delaying the implementa- tion of the Boundary Commissioners' recommendations for parliamentary constitutencies.) 'All the powers of local councils' the report explains archly, `should be concurrent powers'—which means that they are to be of two kinds: minor, such as providing village greens, which they can do if big brother doesn't actively intervene to stop them, and major, such as the preservation of trees, for which 'the specific agreement of the responsible authority should be required preliminary to action by the local council'.
This is to turn local government into a farce. A farce, moreover, in which the only effective spokesman of genuinely local interests .would paradoxically be- come the Member of Parliament at West- minster, battling against a remote council with a constituency ten times the size of his own. Yet the Redcliffe-Maud report is too good a document to be left to moulder in the pigeon-holes where the work of most Royal Commissions comes to rest. Lord Redcliffe-Maud and his colleagues have done half their job well. But we are forced to echo Pitt and say `Roll up that map of England, and now get on with the other half'.
Previous page
