Adam Harrison with the latest from the wonk world
Plenty about the way public services are currently run could be fixed, even if everything is not totally broken. Scottish Labour under leader Kezia Dugdale turned heads once more last month by pledging to abolish council tax – possibly the most unpopular tax ever. It was a clever follow-up manoeuvre to Nicola Sturgeon’s apparent success in conveniently forgetting her own party’s pledge to abolish the tax. Dugdale also pledged to allow local authorities to levy a ‘tourist tax’, something common in countries outside the United Kingdom and which many Labour-led London boroughs have been calling for over many years.
The New Local Government Network thinktank felt the intervention was noteworthy enough to prompt a comment from its director, Simon Parker, who commented that, ‘The [local taxation] system is regressive, fails to reflect changes in property values and does not provide enough money to support good local services. It is good that Scottish Labour has recognised this and we hope these proposals can start a debate on the freedoms that are needed by local government’.
Talking of systems under strain, NLGN was also active last month on the small subject of the future of the NHS. Its deputy director, Jessica Studdert, set the scene with her stark warning that, ‘Our health and social care services are not sustainable in their current form’ and that the absence of focus on prevention is set to lead to ‘political pressure for more money to be found to prop up the crisis end of an unreformed system.’ The tank’s new report, Get Well Soon: Reimagining Place-based Health, identifies an intertwined knot of problems, not the least of which is ‘the evidence paradox’: that pressured NHS agencies do not invest in prevention, and hence lack confidence in ever doing so – because they have never attempted it. And so it continues.
The devolution of public health to local authorities by the coalition government was half a step in the right direction, but failed to ever address the question of where the skin in the game is for one government body – the council – to save money for another – various NHS bodies. The still-unexplained coalition enthusiasm to turn GPs into local commissioners only complicated this picture yet further. Within the ‘15-year forward view’ it proposes, NLGN backs a move to fully integrated local commissioning. This still feels very distant from where the main political parties are at currently and deep scepticism remains. The report cites case studies from other European countries in which primary care is fully locally commissioned, informing us that. Completing a transition to this could be the next big step in the UK.
Something that is certainly broken is London’s housing market, and it is smashed in all sorts of ways. Eight years of Boris Johnson have seen the capital slide into a crisis in which companies such as Deloitte have announced they are building homes which are affordable for its employees.
Last month both Centre for London and IPPR released big reports, respectively: Keeping the Promise: A Manifesto for London, and the final report of the London Housing Commission. Centre for London’s publication is naturally more wide-ranging in public policy terms, ranging from innovative forms of governance such as ‘pop-up civil parishes’ to demanding the power to set a London minimum wage. But accelerating housing delivery is the second main area the tank draws our attention to, and it proposes: a new agency to deliver affordable homes in well-designed places; reviewing the green belt while preventing urban sprawl; and denser construction in accessible locations. In some ways IPPR goes further, asking that the London Plan receive equal standing to the National Planning Policy Framework; that both London and the boroughs be able to borrow more to build more; that stamp duty be devolved; and, overall, to ‘double the supply of new homes to London to 50,000 per year by 2020’. Ensuring that ‘London has sufficient housing at submarket rents’ would also be a welcome change in emphasis following years of Tory rule from City Hall and Westminster which have tag-teamed in their efforts to eliminate genuinely affordable housing from the capital – the housing and planning bill being the latest effort in this regard.
There are plenty of big ideas around; fingers crossed Sadiq Khan is victorious in next month’s London poll to put some of them into practice.
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Adam Harrison is deputy editor of Progress
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