Local blueprint ready to go

The leaders of Kent and other Tory councils could offer David Cameron much-needed drive and experience in government

By David Walker

Kent councillors made the running when the Tories last came to power in 1979, and the county’s leader, Paul Carter, wants to repeat history. ‘Bold steps for radical reform’ it says on the cover of his recent pamphlet. And they are, perhaps, too challenging for a government which, if takes power in May, may have other priorities.

However, taken together with writing and speech-making by two other prominent local Tories, Stephen Greenhalgh of Hammersmith and Fulham and David Parsons, leader of Leicestershire, the Kent intervention presents an intellectually sustained version of Tory ‘localism’. An incoming Tory Communities Secretary – David Cameron recently promised not to make machinery of government changes, implying the department will be kept – has a ready-made and ambitious plan of action, if he or she wants one.

Carter reminds old hands of Sir John Grugeon, a proto-Thatcherite leader of the county in the late 1970s, who challenged the incoming government in 1979 to lift ‘burdens’ (ring a bell, that phrase?). Grugeon asked the new Tory Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine, to repeal a raft of legislation which forced the council into spending. This was regarded as too radical an idea at the time.

Carter has been leader of Kent County Council for nearly five years, in succession to the redoubtable Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, and before that a borough council. His tenure as a county councillor matches Labour’s years in power nationally. With a business background in property and retail Carter is a formidable operator and his pamphlet radiates his strong confidence that local government can do.

Provided, he argues, ‘the vast sums of taxpayers’ money’ placed in the hands of unelected quangos is redistributed to elected local authorities and secretaries of state cut the apron strings trying up councils.

Carter has been thinking big. Kent – its net budget in 2010/11 £848 million – is a large county, and supplies his model. He wants to redraft the map, to give power to 46 new sub-national entities, modelled around the historic shire counties and city regions. Scrapping Labour’s regional structure would give this new tier financial clout (if local government got the money). The package includes getting rid of quangos, including the Arts Council, Environment Agency, Highways Agency, Ofsted, Sport England and the Tenant Services Authority – their budgets transferring to local government. 

 An irony of this line of attack is that you end up with a map of England that would not look out of place on a late 1960s wall, as drafted by Lord Redcliffe-Maud, the man commissioned by Harold Wilson to review sub-national government. But Carter says his is no left-leaing abstraction because it would be based on existing ‘organic’ authorities. It would presumably involve tidying up, however, and the fate of unitary councils and the shire districts in the Carter master-plan is not clear.

The pamphlet also recommends severe pruning of the functions of the inspectorates – and Communities and Local Government. The Audit Commission would be sent back to basics, though would go on providing independent assessment and take on a new role in ‘needs-led analysis to guide national funding allocations’. Carter goes back to the public service agreement signed by Kent with the Treasury in 2001 as a clean-cut model of central-local relationship.

It’s an ambitious aim, but one using different language the other senior local Tories endorse. They all stop short, however, of jumping one brook: money. Carter, Greenhalgh and Parsons are adamant billions could be saved by streamlining and local joining up. But their basic model remains one where councils get grants from the centre, including money that now flows out down the NHS and Department of Work and Pensions pipes.

One effect would be to increase rather than decrease the proportion of local expenditure that comes from the centre and de facto make councils even more the agents of central government. Only by changing the basis of local taxation – a new property tax or a local income tax – could money be raised locally. The Labour government fought shy of such radicalism and a Conservative successor mindful of the fate of the poll tax looks even less likely to want to open this box. The Conservatives are committed to freezing council tax, which itself would decrease the proportion of local spend raised locally.

Not all local Tories are riding high. The CPS says it will prosecute the leader of Essex County Council Lord Hanningfield over claims on his House of Lords expense account; he has stepped down from the leadership.

A new Tory government would lack public executive experience, having been out of power at Westminster for a long time. Yet locally the Tories are awash with experience of power.

Eric Pickles, the Tory chairman, was leader of Bradford, but a few years back. His colleagues are light on administrative experience. Paul Carter, on the other hand, held the Kent County Council education portfolio before he became leader. This made him responsible for the schooling of 240,000 children and another 32,000 in early-years classes. An incoming Tory education secretary – which looks like being Michael Gove – might have high intellectual credentials, but no comparable record in dealing with the nitty gritty of schools and teachers, or handling parents.

Carter has strong views on for example mainstreaming the schooling of children with special educational needs – he favours special schools. David Parsons, the leader of Leicestershire, has put a lot of effort into making partnership work with the districts, and drawn him into a forward role in housing – not a country responsibility but of huge political potential, especially if government investment spending takes the hit when budgets are squeezed.

In London, as in the other counties, the Tories are in a strong position, collectively and individually. Tory leaders in central London are, because of local circumstances, attuned to diversity. That is in two senses – both that within a borough such as Hammersmith and Fulham or the City of Westminster populations are mixed, and among the Tory-led boroughs there are mighty differences. Even neighbours such as Barnet and Enfield, on London’s northern outskirts, are dissimilar, and the Tory leaderships too.

If the Tories win a House of Commons majority, their newbie MPs will be arriving at Westminster at the same time as a batch of new or renewed Tory councillors will take or resume power.  In London, especially, both in individual boroughs and through the representative body London Councils their self-confidence will be high. To the borough contingent need to be added Boris Johnson and his deputy mayors, including Sir Simon Milton, the former leader of Westminster, who is tipped as a possible minister in a Cameron government.

Loyalty and deference are traditionally the watchwords of local leaders in both the Labour and Tory parties. But the imbalance of experience this time round is striking. Will local Tories stay silent if their colleagues in power in Whitehall either don’t deliver or show the usual reclutance of government ministers to listen to advice from the town and county halls?

25 February 2010

David Walker. Managing director, communications and public reporting at the Audit Commission. These are his own views.,