However, councils should welcome good things in the bill for two reasons. Firstly some of the ideas are genuinely good, and secondly it shows that we are not ‘oppositionist’, but supporting good ideas on their merits, and opposing bad ones for their demerits.
The general power of competence is to be welcomed as the last eradication of the ‘legalistic’ impediment to council activity. I struggled to think of activity newly enabled which would not have been permitted under the general power of ‘wellbeing’ introduced under Labour, but there may be some.
The ‘commmunity ownership’ principles can be seen as an extension of progressive cooperative principles. However, they will be difficult to deliver in a time of budget cuts. For example, we have tried to work with a community group seeking to take over a library. However, following initial in- principle support, they then required the council to guarantee the subsidy funding in future years. The impossibility of such guarantees (especially given the two-year funding settlement) is a rock on which most of these transfer ideas will founder, certainly where they need a subsidy to operate.
The ‘neighbourhood plans’ for eased planning permissions make heroic assumptions about the lack of nimbyism in some areas, but time will tell. If all 10,397 parishes draw down the £20,000 government subsidy for these plans, the cost will be over £200 million. In the absence of a pilot this looks like ideology, not policy.
I welcome the transfer of public health powers to councils; indeed Liverpool’s own Doctor Duncan pioneered this municipal approach. However, we should be under no illusions that in most cases the new freedoms given to councils in the ‘unringfenced’ world will be the freedom to make cuts wherever we like.
David Cameron has rightly said that councils are the most efficient branch of government. Thus the Tory-led government’s decision to single out councils for the largest slice of public spending cuts, and then to frontload them can only be explained by ignorance, arrogance or both. To make matters worse, the councils serving the most deprived areas have been hit the hardest. Eric Pickles’ statement that his settlement was ‘progressive’ would have made even the most brazen of propagandists blush. The truth of what will unfold in the following months will be felt by communities the length and breadth of the country, but hardest in deprived areas. This will be the true local effect of the government’s policies.