In the dying days of a parliament, with MPs daily trashed over expenses and the Speaker falling on his sword, a report from backbench MPs into central/local relations will hardly set the nation's pulses racing. But this week's inquiry conclusions from MPs on the CLG select committee will go down like a rat sandwich at the Department of Health and the Home Office. The idea that local government should have any involvement in health and policing other than on partnership boards, let alone in commissioning these services, is about as welcome as an outbreak of swine fever in Marsham Street. But such radical proposals outlined in The balance of power: Central and local government were only a part of the CLG select committee's otherwise-very radical conclusions into the balance of power between central and local. Its report went further than the 2007 Lyons review, including calling for local income tax and a return of the business rates, and its tone was distinctly hostile to Whitehall, ministers and central government generally. Indeed, to judge by the report's content, the all-party group of MPs appear to have been completely charmed by their localist interviewees, such as our own contributors George Jones and John Stewart. One can almost imagine the MPs' hisses and boos as hapless ministers and officials from the centralist tendency in the Department of Health and Home Office tramped into the committee room. The report said that when the MPs ‘put the local government case for increasing their powers over local policing and health, we were struck by the extent to which [the DoH and HO] were opposed to it.' It is understandable enough for ministers to shrug off the report, if only because they have other matters on their minds – such as their future careers. But, nonetheless, its trenchant conclusions just 12 months from an election which is expected to see a change of Government cannot be simply filed in the House of Commons library. The MPs, who include the current chair of the all-party parliamentary local government group as well as a former Conservative local government minister, have laid down a challenge to whichever political party ends up winning the election. Michael Burton, Editor, The MJ
