At the same time, Pickles’ communities and local government department published the six tests against which the government is to measure its drive to devolve power.
There is a lot to recommend this agenda, and much of it follows in Labour’s footsteps. The Total Place pilots, undertaken towards the end of Labour’s time in power, revealed the savings that can be made from decentralising and freeing up local public agencies to work together. Other aspects of both governments’ agendas – for instance, expanding the use of personal budgets in social care – clearly have the potential to give people, individually or in groups, greater power over their own lives. That is surely something progressives ought to welcome.
It would be a mistake, therefore, for us to reject localism outright. It similarly does not quite ring true for Labour to dismiss it simply as a ‘smokescreen for cuts’. Irrespective of debates on the deficit, there are good arguments for decentralising power in Britain, as the examples above suggest, and which Labour itself rehearsed in government.
Instead, we need to be clear what the benefits of localism are – why, and under what circumstances, it should be pursued, and what will therefore constitute success or failure for the coalition.
The benefits are twofold. First, decentralisation can mean greater efficiency, giving people at the frontline, with a better understanding of what works for a particular individual or community, greater power over where resources go, and greater power to join up budgets around individuals, families or communities. Second, decentralisation can mean putting more power in the hands of individuals and communities.
These, then, should form the basis for two tests for progressives judging the government’s localism agenda: Does it increase efficiency? Does it give people greater power over their own lives? And, to add a third test, does it do those things in a way that is fair? Where government actions pass those tests, Labour should support them. Where they do not, a progressive critique should be based on the charges of inefficiency, disempowerment and inequality.
The result would be an opposition that supported progressive reform, and even pushed for more of it in the form of increased competition in public services, expanding the use of personal budgets, or giving local people more power to challenge local public agencies. Failure to do so would put Labour on the wrong side of the independent living movement, most of the commentariat, the charity sector, community groups up and down the country, and history. That is not a good place to be.
But it would also be an opposition that would be able to point to botched attempts at localism which fail to achieve the efficiencies that might have been realised otherwise; an opposition that points out that many people are likely to feel less in control of their own lives under this government, not more; and an opposition that reminds the government repeatedly that its approach to decentralisation will likely work better for richer communities than for poorer ones.
First, botched efficiencies. As Labour’s Total Place pilots suggested, there is huge scope for public service outcomes to be improved and money to be saved through public agencies, such as local authorities and the local NHS, working better together, complementing each other’s resources instead of duplicating them. But the government has shown relatively little ambition on this front: its successor to Total Place is another round of pilots, more limited in scope. These ‘community budgets’ have been described by the New Local Government Network as ‘a golden opportunity missed’, while some of the local areas involved are ‘frustrated by the absence of a clear offer to devolve money’. In the words of the Conservative leader of Westminster council, ‘the pooling of Whitehall budgets is just not happening … no budgets are at present delegated.’
But the government has also set in train a series of reforms undertaken at breakneck speed and likely to make joined-up working at a local level more difficult, not less. While the Department for Communities and Local Government goes local, promoting the devolution of budgets for commissioning public services to ward level, the Department for Work and Pensions goes in the opposite direction, making its contracts for supporting people into employment larger, covering whole regions. The Department of Health, meanwhile, is merging primary care trusts into bigger units in preparation for abolishing them in a couple of years’ time, to then be replaced by GP commissioning consortia which may or may not be geographically contiguous with local authorities. Meanwhile, the Department for Education plans to remove the duty for schools and colleges to cooperate with other agencies in providing integrated services for children and young people. All this at a time when statutory agencies are haemorrhaging staff, and thereby many of the people who acted as contact points for other organisations. Not only will it be harder to make savings through joined-up working with other agencies, these reforms will themselves cost money. It is estimated that the NHS shake-up alone will cost £1-3 billion.
The second line of attack is disempowerment. The Tories accept in principle that the ‘radical shift of power’ they seek will require active government to ‘empower communities’. This will require more than government simply ‘getting out of the way’. But practical policies here are thin on the ground, and the government’s own description of its plans to empower communities are dominated by the creation of legal ‘rights’ vis-à-vis the state – all to be welcomed, but not empowerment at its most active given that some will be better able to make use of those rights than others. The cuts will, furthermore, hit the welfare benefits and public services which currently give many people the active support they need to feel and be in control of their own lives. Will disabled adults losing their mobility allowance feel more in control of their lives, or less? Will public sector workers losing their jobs? Will elderly people denied state-funded care in their own home? Will college students losing their educational maintenance allowance? Spending cuts are inevitable, but their scale and depth are not; nor are the significant costs of public sector reorganisation outlined above; nor is the dearth of policy on active empowerment.
Finally, there’s unfairness. Poorer areas are being hit harder by the cuts than their wealthier counterparts. Councils scoring higher on the index of multiple deprivation face higher cuts. This year the region whose councils face the biggest cuts will be the northeast; the region whose councils face the lowest will be the southeast. The government is hoping that the ‘big society’ will step in where the state retrenches, but research suggests that voluntary sector organisations tend to be more dependent on public funding – and so are more likely to be adversely affected by the cuts – in more deprived areas. Devolving power to localities could be done so as to make Britain fairer – but not if the government lacks a strategy for building community capacity in poorer areas and inequalities between localities are exacerbated by unevenly spread cuts.
Rejecting the government’s localism agenda wholesale won’t work for Labour. Dismissing it as cover for cuts is unlikely to either. A progressive response should fight for efficiency, empowerment and equality in this time of change. Where these are served by the government’s agenda, we should welcome it. Where they are not, we should attack it vigorously. In both instances, the party has a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable from the more reckless aspects of this localism, while hounding the government into doing more to strengthen communities and the individuals within them.