Shore thing
Christopher Booker
It was hardly surprising that on television on Monday night Mr Peter Shore wore the apprehensive look of a man who has just Put a match to a slow-burning fuse connected with a distant keg of dynamite. For as Mr Shore was well aware, his announcethat next year's 'rate support grant' is to be cut by £600 million is likely to lead eventually to the greatest explosion in local government history.
Over the past two or three years there has been something very unreal about what has been happening in Britain's town halls. Everyone has become aware that they have been engaging in the most tremendous sPending spree (between 1971 and 1975 sPending rose from £6.2 billion to £14.3 billion, and this year seems likely to be nearer £18 billion). Staffs have expanded by MY or even 100 per cent. New town hall salary scales have become a byword, tales of waste and profligacy legion. The press has been full of stories of almost fairy tale extravance, ranging from municipal ski slopes and £100,000 council flats, to the appointment of £4,000-a-year typists. £5,000 a year 'toy library co-ordinators' and £11,000 a year 'leisure directors.' Yet somehow the full impact of this incredible wave of expenditure has never seemed to reach us. And the explanation of course is simple. An ever greater proportion rtown hall spending has been disguised rn us in the form of central government subsidies. The more furious the spending sl3ree has become, the more we have as ratePayers been shielded from the true cost of It. Between 1971 and 1975, for instance, the Contribution we made through rates rose °n1Y from just over £2 billion to just over f4 billion. The share we contributed as taxIf.34Yers, however, rose in the same period roM £2.8 billion to nearly £8 billion. It is this perhaps more than anything Which accounts for the fact that, over the Past eighteen months, despite plaintive cries of 'cuts' and Mr Crosland's claim that ,t.he Party is over', there has so far been nttle real sign that the spree has in any serious way abated. It is true that, up and ?own the country, a great many councils in?ve managed to achieve economies of a Kind, some quite impressive. But in the e_arlY months of this year, despite the 'Social vOntract,' town hall spending overall was !till rising at an annual rate of nearly 30 per While 'the worst of the big spenders,' il3Ke Camden, Haringey and several other teoughs in London, have continued to rOW around the taxpayers' money almostit there was no economic crisis at all. ‘-aMden's spending on housing alone this Year was planned to rise from £29 million to
£39 million. And like many other councils Camden and Haringey remain pledged to their NALGO members that there will be 'no staff redundancies' of any kind, whatever the circumstances.
Faced with this spectacle, and with the IMF breathing down the Government's neck, Mr Shore has now been driven to a last desperate resort. He has drastically cut the government's contribution to town hall spending, knowing full well that certain councils have no intention whatever of seriously changing their ways. In other words, come next April, the ratepayers, par ticularly in certain areas of the country, will at last begin to be brought face to face with the appalling financial consequences of what has been going on in their town halls in the past few years. Despite reassuring statements that the overall rise will only be an average 15 per cent, it is already clear that in the more extravagant areas (not just in the 'shires') some ratepayers are going to have to pay far more than that. Haringey for instance, is already talking of 35 per cent (which for some people could mean an extra £3, £5 or even more a week). Other boroughs like Camden will not be far be hind (and it was very noticeable on Tuesday that all the worst rises were being forecast for areas which have given firm pledges that there are to be 'no redundancies').
The theory behind Mr Shore's move is that, directly exposed at last to the full blast of their town hall's recklessness, the beady-eyed ratepayers can then, if they so wish, toss out the councillors of the ruling party who landed them in this mess, through the ballot box. But of course it is not as easy as that. For a start, there are those areas of monopoly control by one party where it is almost inconceivable that there could be a change of party. Much more seriously, however, would a new set of councillors have the courage, the knowledge or even the legal powers to take the sort of measures which alone could make a serious rather than a merely apparent difference?
For the sad fact is that the real conflict in British local government today is no longer between one set of councillors and another.
It is between the people and the real power in the town halls, the officers—the army of council officials who have enthusiastically presided over the vast expansion of bureaucratic power of recent years and who have been its chief beneficiaries.
It is quite clear from the comments made this week by the spokesmen for various municipal bodies, and by officialsof NALGO, that they have not the slightest intention of giving up their newly created empires. They have not the slightest conception of the need for real economies,
which they see only as threats to themselves and to their whole ideology (however much they dress it up as 'threats to public ser vices'). They have lived for years in an increasingly unreal world of jargon and
bureaucratic rubbish, which has become entirely self-perpetuating. And with honour
able exceptions, they no longer have any idea of the relationship between the vast sums of money they are spending and the fact that it actually has to come from somewhere in the first place (even though they are all themselves presumably ratepayers). Most of them would not recognise an example of 'waste' or unnecessary expenditure if it was staring them in the face.
This is the real nature of the confrontation which Peter Shore set in train by his action on Monday—a final head-on clash between this new privileged class, and ratepayers who will, very soon, no longer be able to afford to keep it in being. It is likely, over the next year or two, to lead to some very unpleasant scenes—major 'rate strikes,' cuts which will be made specifically to hurt the public as much as possible rather than to economise (one London council is already threatening to withdraw street-cleaning and refuss collection services from 'better-off' areas). But the breaking of the power of any privileged group is always a long, hard struggle. And in the end, by farce majeure. it will have to come.
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