Election day feels like a useful opportunity to take a reality check around accountability in local government.
It is the day is when the electorate tell political parties what they think of them.
Just as government has to renew its mandate through the ballot box, so does local government – that is how a democracy works. So how is local democracy doing?
Are local authorities more empowered and locally accountable than they were four years ago? Ask the ‘so what’ question and even if you do not buy into the ideology of localism, the realpolitik of it is that every mainstream party needs a successful, trusted and respected local government.
Its approval ratings are positively stratospheric compared with most national polls. Local government can look back over the past four years with considerable pride. It has coped with austerity, is leaner and fitter than most parts of the public sector and it is driving innovation and collaborative service delivery.
It has also adapted to a wholly-changed landscape and kept on delivering with a lot less cash. Most importantly, it is doing what our electorate think is important.
But somehow it does not feel like we have the right relationship with Westminster and Whitehall. The coalition government has implemented many welcome reforms via the Localism Act 2011 and local authorities up and down the land applauded communities secretary Eric Pickles’ statement: ‘Just do it’.
Wholesale reform was implemented and many localities experimented with different models of cross-sector delivery.
Does it feel less bureaucratic, less top-down command-driven? In places it does, but it also feels like work in progress. Whitehall cannot resist the temptation to meddle
The true test of localism is the minister at the dispatch box saying ‘this is not a matter for me, it is a matter for the local authority’. Not words we have heard too often.
On a day when we are likely to see a strange electoral phenomena called UKIP hit the main parties hard, it is worth reminding ministers that local government has the capability of being useful allies.
But, we probably need to decide if councillors are just part-time volunteers running a local scout group or, when we are encouraged to roll up our sleeves and sack our chief executives, we are actually running significant organisations that deliver vital and valued services in counties and cities up and down the land.
In 17 years as a councillor I have not had one single letter about bi-weekly bin collections. We cannot afford to enforce parking restrictions in rural areas without camera cars and surely, pensions for elected members is a classic example of where a locality should make its case to the electorate.
None of these issues, under a localist agenda, are matters for Parliament.
On that basis, embedding local democracy and more importantly, local accountability is work in progress. All opposition parties wish to appear localist, but it is inevitably a matter of time before ministers find all the levers of power and the need to micro-manage, irresistible.
Why does this matter? We are one year from the General Election and the outcome of that ballot is far from certain.
So, my message to the coalition government is simple: trust us, we have delivered, we have met every challenge set us, yet we do not feel trusted nor valued. You cannot tick the localism box just yet – that journey is not complete.
We do not live in a federal state, but the analogy with the US is a useful one.
The US Federal Government exists because the 50 states allow it to. In the UK, local government exists because Parliament allows it to.
It all started out so well. The Government believes the key to strengthening society is to ‘help people and their locally elected representatives achieve their own ambitions’.
We have come a long way since the dark days of centralist regional spatial planning and one-size fits all polices, but there is still a feeling that true democratic accountability is fragile and liable to be withdrawn or overruled on a whim.
If local government is to be truly freed from the shackles of top-down diktat, it could be a powerful ally to Whitehall. Government should have the courage to accept that under localism there is the possibility of failure, but that failure is accountable to the electorate locally, so we expect the freedom to succeed just as we accept the freedom to fail.
Our old friend ‘localism’, which ventured out from the prison gates with a spring in its step in 2011, is perhaps on probation, a status which of course, can always lead to recall.
Cllr Richard Stay is a Conservative councillor in Central Bedfordshire, a trustee of the Leadership Centre, chairman of the East of England Improvement Board and a member of the LGA Improvement Board
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