One hundred years ago, British local government was probably as proud and confident as any in the world. At a time when across Europe most states were doing their best to wipe away the anachronistic parochialism of counties and towns by imposing national laws, regulations and standards, Britains towns and cities were being left to rule themselves by a national government that was much more interested in the weighty issues of global empire.
Then as now, local government was entirely subordinate in law. In theory the unwritten and hugely flexible British constitution made Parliament sovereign and gave it a monopoly of power. But in practice, effective governance depended on Parliament using its power at home in an often informal and relaxed way. So, for example, when parliament tried to take over responsibility for public health in the mid-19th century, it was successfully rebuffed.
Later, that balance between the local and the national was reflected in the careers of successive generations of local politicians who became national leaders, like Birminghams Joseph Chamberlain and Londons Herbert Morrison, and in the transfer of dozens of ideas and policies from municipal experiments to Whitehall policies.
You can still get some sense of this history today in the Victorian gothic splendour of the city halls of Glasgow and Manchester, Nottingham or Cardiff, where everything proclaims the citys power, wealth and pride. Lavish marble, imposing staircases, murals and stained glass are all there to instil the visitor with a sense of awe, and a view of local government as an immutable part of the constitution, the foundation stone on which a living democracy of parties and parliament rested.
Becoming parochial
A century later, things could hardly be more different. While most other European nations have spent the last few decades devolving power France and Spain to their newly created regions, Germany to ever more powerful Länder, Italy to cities that have been able to write their own constitutions, Sweden to local authorities with their own tax regimes the UK has been through an unparalleled experiment in centralisation that has left administrations in many city halls and town halls pale shadows of what they once were.
During the 1980s, British local government steadily lost control over both its revenue base and over what it does. Functions were steadily stripped away and controls imposed. One symptom of this was that by the early 1990s not a single local government leader was well known nationally (at least until the election of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London). By the end of the decade, in some areas the average age of councillors was rising well into the 60s, and voter turnout levels were falling close to zero 2 per cent in a couple of cases, well below 20 per cent in many. Lack of interest was mirrored and reinforced in the London-based press and broadcasting media, which find few topics quite as boring as local government.
Its too soon for historians to determine precisely why British local government experienced such dramatic changes. Some of the factors were undoubtedly self-inflicted: the enthusiasms and follies of the municipal left certainly didnt help as many of those most closely involved recognised when they repudiated the excesses of the 1980s and got down to the everyday business of things like collecting rubbish and teaching children, a forerunner of the present governments focus on delivery.
But much of the decline of local government was also caused by the concerted actions of some national political leaders who had come to see local government as hopelessly parochial, in the worst sense of the word: inefficient, corrupt, self-serving, self-deluding. In the long-run, local government might just as well be replaced by a set of contracts with private suppliers as some Californian municipalities had done. In the meantime the best solution was to make it an agent of Whitehall. So local authorities would be set targets; required to make plans; inspected and audited; and, some might have added, subjected to regular public humiliation by national politicians and the press.
This reform process has left England in a rather peculiar position, now that Scotland has a Parliament and Wales an Assembly. In most countries a good proportion of national politicians learn their trade running towns, cities and states. In some, like France, many ministers continue to serve as mayors. In Britain, by contrast, successive generations have gone straight to Westminster, seeing even relative impotence as a backbencher as preferable to the mundane power of running a council. It sometimes seems as if only the most altruistic or perverse, with the stamina to sit through endless committee meetings for very little reward, would volunteer to commit their lives to serving in local government.
A turning point
Sue Gosss timely book Making Local Governance Work suggests that we may have reached a turning point. There is little evidence that the emasculation of local government did much or anything to improve public services, or to improve the connection between decision-makers and voters. National government now recognises that many of the things it holds most dear the modernisation of public services, the revitalisation of poor neighbourhoods and old industrial cities are unlikely to happen without the active engagement of local government (an early symptom of this shift in thinking has been a steady flow of some of the best people from Lewisham and Newham, Nottinghamshire and Bristol into Whitehall).
But what remains less clear is exactly where English local government itself is heading. Sue Goss offers one set of answers. For her, the issue is not local government as such, but rather local governance. Governance has become a rather vogueish word over the last 10 years, in international affairs as well as in relation to local government. Its virtue is that it avoids the implication that authorities whether local or national have a monopoly of power. Instead it sees them trying to achieve their goals alongside other agencies each with their own powers and agendas. It emphasises process rather than sovereignty.
According to this view, the role of local government is as much about persuasion and coordination as administration, and about working in partnership rather than bossing people around. A fair amount of the book is about the pros and cons of partnerships, too many of which, Goss acutely observes, are probably consumers of value, not producers of value. Much of the rest provides a thoughtful account of where local government now stands, with less emphasis on the formal constitutional role of local government and more on its real skills, capacities, and ability to learn. And she has a useful chapter on why change is hard.
All of this is welcome and full of common sense. So too are some of the stories and examples such as her account of Hill Street Blues Captain Ferillo as a role model for a new generation of public sector managers, a rare example of the manager as hero: he was never out in the field catching bad guys; he was back at the office managing tensions and dilemmas, sorting out accountabilities, holding things together.
Gaps in Gosss account
The big gaps in her account are, in some respects, traditional ones. One is the question of authority. It is all very well for local governance to be shared, networked and embedded in partnerships but when things go wrong who has the authority to fix them, to sack people, and who should be held to account? Similar questions can also be asked of the more informal arrangements of governance that are proliferating internationally.
A second is the issue of scale. One of the peculiarities of British local government is that, in successive reorganisations, it has been taken further away from citizens. We tend to have bigger councils and fewer representatives than other countries easily justified in terms of economies of scale, but often with the side effect of making people feel distanced and detached. Each country seems to strike the balance between supposed efficiency and engagement rather differently it would be fascinating to explore why.
A third gap is the issue of conflict between different tiers of government. The neat theory of subsidiarity is used to suggest that each level can be allotted its own powers and responsibilities, yet in practice life rarely works like this. Certainly the accumulation of powers by national governments had more to do with the prerogatives of war and taxation than any intrinsic merits. Now, as war becomes a far less important shaper of states, we are already seeing much more competition between tiers of government for legitimacy and resources. It would have been interesting to think through where this might lead.
A dual polity
Perhaps the most striking feeling one has reading Sue Gosss account is of the paradoxical peculiarity of the British story. The sheer force with which local government, and indeed the wider public sector, was subjected to reform may have done little to improve services in the short-term. But it did up the ante on thinking, and left the UK with a much more sophisticated debate about radical alternatives, and the lessons to be learnt from other sectors, than the more settled and conservative systems of other countries.
In one of the few original overviews of territorial government in the UK, Jim Bulpitt analysed it as a unitary state with a dual polity. High politics and policy were monopolised by the centre, while the low politics of administrations was left to the localities. Then along came Margaret Thatcher, who in her third term redirected the energies of the centre to the furious reform of low politics.
No one knows quite where the process Bulpitt diagnosed will end. The EU now shares very different constitutional traditions, from nations that see national power as built up out of the bricks of local power, to those that see the nation, and national parliaments, as primary. But it does seem likely that local government will become an increasingly interesting field saved from parochialism and municipal mundanity as it becomes the site of some of the fiercest battles, over everything from the environment to migration, from schooling to crime. Once again, perhaps, and if it really is willing and able to transform itself in the ways that Sue Goss sets out, it could stake a claim to represent its citizens more fully than the distant tiers of national and transnational government ever can.