Red tape bonfire It’s a good start. After two months in the job, the communities and local government secretary, Ruth Kelly, appears to have listened to complaints about the cost of inspection and decided there may, after all, be something in them. Unlike her predecessor, who was fond of pontificating about the bigger issues, Ms Kelly has come to the LGA conference and said something practical, which everyone can understand. She said, we needed ‘much less red tape’ – her words – and a cut in Whitehall rules. She even backed this up with research showing the disproportionate amount of time council managers spent on compiling information for Whitehall. And she announced a task force into indentifying needless Whitehall regulation, with a view to scrapping it. You can’t get more plain and simple in nomenclature than the ‘Lifting burdens task force’. It does what it says on the tin. Now, there are those cynics who will argue that task forces are a good way of kicking difficult issues into the long grass. Others may point out that all kinds of freedoms were promised to high CPA performers, and they are still holding their breath. However, Ms Kelly has at least made her position clear, namely, that she agrees inspection must be more locally-based. And her choice of Michael Frater, Telford & Wrekin’s chief executive, to head up the Lifting burdens task force, will reassure local government. Apart from running a four-star council, helping get Walsall back on the road, and seeing his authority win the Best Achieving Council category in The MJ Achievement Awards last week, Mr Frater is a long-serving chief executive and consummate networker. But he also has no time for poor performers, and is unlikely to recommend the scrapping of regulations, if he feels they have a purpose in preventing shoddy services. So, it will be down to local authorities themselves to ensure they maintain quality, and in this, the comments from LGA chairman, Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, must also be welcomed. He called for 30 national outcomes which councils would be responsible for delivering, backed up by a local performance framework and peer intervention. As always, this will pose no problems at all for high performers, but some challenge for the two-star rankers. But, if Whitehall and Westminster are to be convinced local government can do the inspection job itself, then it will want evidence.
