leaning up politics
The GoVernment would be well-advised to take more seriously than the Lord Chancellor has done Mr Harold Wilson's demand for a Royal Commission into corruption in central and local government. The public will not be satisfied that present processes of law are sufficient to deal with the problem. The Poulson affair continues to receive attention and publicity, and the latest arrests will presumably not be the last. But it is widely believed that the resources of the police in dealing with this one complex affair have been strained, and it is doubtful whether, had another affair of similar complexity come to light, there ould have been enough police officers sufWiciently skilled in financial fraud and corruption to handle it. There is no reason to suppose that the Poulson affair is unique. Some of those wellfitted to judge these matters consider that the only exceptional thing about the Poulson affair indeed is that it has come to light. Whether this be true or not, the suspicion that it is so is very deeply ingrained in the public mind. That suspicion will not be removed by ministerial pronouncements, and it will continue to persist after the Poulson files have been closed.
The principal cause of potential corruption lies in the immense increase in land values as a consequence of planning permissions being granted. These permissions to develop undeveloped land are in the main determined by unpaid local councillors on planning committees, advised by paid local government planning officials, and subject to some scrutiny by civil servants in the central government's Department of the Environment. A secondary cause of corruption lies in the ability of local councils, boards, officials and committees, again subject to some scrutiny by appropriate government departments like Education and Social Security, to place large and valuable contracts with construction programmes. Another potential cause of corruption lies in the local nature, of police forces controlled by local authorities, although here again there is a central government scrutiny through the Home Office inspec torate.
There is plenty of prima facie evidence to justify suspicion. There are plenty of questions which could do with satisfactory answers. What kind of people become local councillors and serve on planning committees, and why? What are the connections between local and antral officials, and between such officials and contractors? How zealous are professional associations of architects, solicitors, planners, engineers and so on in protecting their members' interests rather than in maintaining their members' standards of professional conduct? Is the giving of presents general, or widespread, throughout the contracting industry? It is questions like these, which cannot be dealt with in general terms in courts of law, which could be asked and answered best by a Royal Commission with wide terms of reference and able to produce conclusions and recommendations, the effect of which should be either to convince the public that its suspicions were unjustified or to propose appropriate reforms to reduce substantially the incidence of corruption in local and central government.
