Next month marks the diamond anniversary of ‘The Class sketch' involving John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Cleese is much taller than the other two, equipped with a smart suit, bowler hat and umbrella - probably looking like many civil servants of the 1960s. The attitudes portrayed in the sketch still seem to have resonance in other ways today.
Whitehall loves hierarchies. The inaccurate language of ‘two tier' imbues many Government publications, ignoring that town and parish councils exist in most parts of shire England. It even finds expression in the ‘lower tier foundation formula'. When the civil service dream of unitary councils across England is achieved, a new vocabulary will have to be learned – until Whitehall starts referring to mayoral strategic authorities as upper tier and unitary councils as lower tier!
The patriarchal attitude towards local government is revealed in the centre's approach to transparency. The transparency code issued under the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 requires councils to publish all items of expenditure over £500 and all items of expenditure on a Government Procurement Card. It recommends publishing all transactions on corporate credit cards.
Local government needs to articulate a different way. If national values must be prescribed, Government should regularly update them. But all fees and charges should be set locally, where relevant subject to a requirement that it is on a full cost recovery basis.
Different rules apply in Whitehall. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and other departments publish spending using an electronic purchasing card solution only above £500 and – wait for it – spending on other items only above £25,000, a threshold 50 times higher than applies to principal councils.
The purpose is to improve the transparency of how public funds are used, ‘in order to allow government to be held to account and to drive down costs within government'. Perhaps if local government thresholds had applied, expenditure in support of trade envoys might have been exposed to media and public scrutiny sooner?
The question we should be asking is whether the mismatch can be justified. It creates extra work for councils compared to central government – for what benefit? The desire is ‘to provide greater transparency of local authority's activities so that they can also be held to account by local residents'. If the public look at the mass of data councils publish, it seems to encourage concentration on minutiae instead of councils' strategic spending choices. The assertion that ‘central and local government are subject to transparency requirements proportionate to their scale and context' merely underlines that Whitehall thinks it is so big and important that its expenditure should be subject to less scrutiny than the local state.
Not much evidence is to be found of resetting the relationship with local government that was heralded in October 2024. Moreover the differential treatment of local government in the transparency code identifies another weakness in our centralised system. Whitehall is very poor about updating financial values to take account of inflation. The code was issued in 2015 and has been updated only once, in 2025, to seek to achieve alignment with the transparency requirements of the Procurement Act 2023.
£500 in 2015 is worth £697 (+39.4%) in January 2026 according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator. Why are councils obliged to publish items of expenditure that, in real terms, are worth significantly less than when the code was introduced? That is before we consider the question of whether a limit that is only 2% of the Whitehall figure is justifiable.
The malaise goes much wider. The most egregious example is council tax, still based on valuations from 35 years ago in England. Wales is committed to its second revaluation in 2028 (not surprisingly delayed until after this May's Senedd elections) and every five years thereafter. The local housing allowance rate for temporary accommodation has not been changed since 2011. The maximum grant level for disabled facilities grant was set at £30,000 in 2008 (Wales has increased it to £36,000) and values for the section 24 consent regime for certain contracts and disposal under local government reorganisation were set in 2007. The fees for alcohol licences were set in regulations in 2005 – far from the only example of how Whitehall fails to increase levels to reflect at least inflation, let alone whether the fees cover the costs faced by councils.
There is a common impact of Whitehall's inaction. It adversely affects the financial position of councils or, as a minimum, creates unnecessary or additional work.
Local government needs to articulate a different way. If national values must be prescribed, Government should regularly update them. But all fees and charges should be set locally, where relevant subject to a requirement that it is on a full cost recovery basis. Councils would never allow the drift that has occurred in many areas, and are much more agile in taking and implementing decisions swiftly.
But, for now, local government knows its place.
Ian Miller is chief executive of Wyre Forest District Council
