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If you can’t beat ’em, abolish ’em!

2 January 2005

After three years in which New Labour has taken a beating at local elections, and with voters increasingly turning to non-mainstream parties, the government has announced sweeping changes to local government with drastic cuts to the numbers of councillors and the eventual abolition of district councils altogether.

You would think that after being deserted in droves by voters at the council elections last year New Labour would be trying to smarten up its act in local government in an attempt to win back support. If so, you would be wrong. New Labour appears to have a much simpler solution than that to its little local difficulties.

Apparently choosing to put out the news on 1 January (The Guardian, ‘English councils braced for shake-up’), the government recently announced plans to cut the number of district councils as a prelude to abolition and to sharply reduce the number of local councillors. The changes, justified in the name of efficiency savings, would be the biggest shake-up in local government since 1974.

Two consultation papers are to be published next month, ahead of a local government bill which is expected to be introduced after the next general election. These white papers — covering neighbourhoods and how to attract high calibre councillors — are expected to be followed by further white papers looking at the quality of council services, electoral cycles and how local government can be restructured in response to a review of efficiency savings.

What this reduction in funding under the guise of efficiency savings undoubtedly means is that district councils will be further emasculated while services continue to be cut — indeed Charles Clarke, in his previous role as education secretary, made it clear that councils should become ‘enablers’, rather than providers of service.

Nick Raynsford, the local government minister, has also stated that district councils should consider merging functions such as payrolls and council tax collection while Alan Milburn, tipped as a likely successor to Tony Blair, went even further when he talked about bypassing local councils altogether with ‘new levels of governance’.

It is particularly ironic that all this talk of efficiency savings comes at a time when local government funding is being cut and council tax continues to rise — council tax has increased on average by over 70% since New Labour came to power in 1997.

The way councils are funded, with the majority of their money coming from central government rather than council tax, means that any increase in spending above the levels recommended by the government has a disproportionate effect on council tax levels. As the government-set levels are clearly unrealistic, councils are effectively pressurised to cut services. This disproportionately affects the worse off as they are more likely to rely on social services.

Even more worryingly, the large increases in council tax — because of its regressive nature — represent a massive shift in the burden of overall taxation from rich to poor.

While genuine local democracy would give councils the freedom to raise expenditure to provide better quality services if that was what local residents wanted, the way in which councils are currently funded strongly discourages this.

With the government’s plans to move power even further away from local councils it looks as if working class people will continue to bear the brunt of taxation increases while having less say about how their money is spent.