In the famous Sherlock Holmes story, the clue was the dog that did not bark. The silent canine in the Prime Minister’s recent Fabian pamphlet about public services is the role of local government. The thrust of the pamphlet is to call for the devolution of decision-making from central government to frontline service managers.
Important steps have recently been taken to lift the burden of central regulation on councils, in particular those judged to be best-performing. Alan Milburn has observed that devolution must not stop at the door of the Town Hall. He is right, but, except for those services for which councils have direct service responsibility, the government’s approach seems designed to by-pass the Town Hall altogether.
We risk a prospect of managerial devolution to a ‘frontline’ made up in each locality of separate local agencies, the council being just one of them. Each has its own autonomy within a centrally-set framework of priorities and targets. Gordon Brown was right to make it clear in his recent speech to the Social Market Foundation that this ought to be only half the picture. The corollary of greater local autonomy has to be greater local democratic accountability.
The government’s public service reform programme rightly emphasises accountability to, and the involvement of, service users. This can and should go beyond consultation, as we are already seeing in greater tenant involvement with cooperatives and estate management boards. Alan Milburn’s proposal for the election of governors to foundation hospitals is an application of the same principle. But the multiplication of such single-purpose local governance arrangements will not alone deliver what is needed.
The needs of local communities cannot be met by approaching each service separately. Education is not something that schools produce alone, nor is health the sole responsibility of hospitals. Schools need other public services to enable a learning environment outside school that includes parental support. Hospitals need to work not only with primary care in the health service and social services departments but also with community safety, housing, environment, leisure and transport services.
The tangle of partnerships set up during Labour’s first term show some recognition of the problem of co-ordination, but only from a departmental perspective. So we had a string of initiatives, each overseen by its own partnership, to tackle crime, drugs, early years, health inequalities, unemployment or neighbourhood regeneration. Scant attention was given to the interconnections among these issues.
Common sense has now broken out. Local strategic partnerships are emerging to co-ordinate action across a local authority area around a community strategy developed in dialogue with local communities.
Local co-ordination is not enough, though. There also needs to be a capacity to identify, choose among and deliver on local priorities across, as well as within, services. Consultation by many crime and disorder partnerships has identified local priorities that do not correspond with those set nationally by the Home Office. But consultation is not a matter of asking local people for their views and adding up the answers. Some voices are quieter than others, but deserve to be heard. Opinions differ because beliefs, values and interests conflict. The task of civic leadership is to ensure that all voices are heard, and that genuinely difficult choices are made through wide deliberation, but with a clear understanding of who is accountable for the final decision.
People do not elect councillors just to run council services, but to work for the well-being of the locality and its communities. And this means holding other public services to account. That is why the 22 councils judged excellent in the first round of comprehensive performance assessment made their first demand greater power to influence all public services in their areas. Having proven their ability to provide strong leadership and work in partnership, they deserve the power to ensure that all public services reflect local needs and deliver joined-up government at local level.