Earlier this week I had a chat to Dr Phyllis Starkey, Chair of the Communities and Local Government Select Committee in Parliament. She's been in the position since 2005 and an MP since 1997.
Before entering Parliament, Dr Starkey was leader of Oxford council and a councillor for 14 years and was also the Chair of the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) from 1993-1997.
TP: How do you know, as a Westminster MP and Chair of a Westminster committee, that you understand the issues that are affecting councils around the country?
PS: Of course, we’re not representing councils. We’re representing the public who are served by councils so we get feedback from our own constituents. The members of the committee obviously come from all three parties and represent very different parts of England. The select committee has a significant number of supporting staff and some of them are experts in some of the issues we are investigating. They help to suggest areas which might be of interest although it’s the members of the committee who decide on which topics we will examine.
TP: Where do you think that places the committee in terms of the relationship between central government and local government?
PS: The select committee’s role is to monitor and scrutinise the performance of Department of Communities and Local Government. Many argue that a great deal of what local councils do is dictated to them by central government. To that extent, in scrutinising the department, we are scrutinising and monitoring all the statutory services that the DCLG tells local government it must deliver. That’s one of the reasons our next big inquiry in the autumn is looking at The Balance of Power: Central and Local government.
This has been a matter of debate for a very long time, decades, and there’s a pendulum effect where a government will come in and decide it wants all sorts of things delivered by local government and take much more control either through financial means or by setting out performance indicators. It will then discover controlling everything through the centre is not a very effective way of delivering. So it lightens up and frees more power to local government.
We’ve gone through this pendulum over the last 3-4 decades regardless of which party is in power. At the moment we’re going through a swing where we’re getting more devolved power to local government. The Lyons review started looking at local government finance — the council tax really — and whether it should be reformed and if local councils should be given other means of getting money. It was widened out to look at the function of local government because you can’t examine finance unless you decide what local government should be doing. It produced an interesting and very lengthy report with recommendations, very few of which central government has actually implemented. It’s not fair to say it’s been ignored. When Sir Michael Lyons gave evidence to our committee, his view was that many of the principles underpinning his recommendations had been taken on board by central government and that you could argue they had been implemented by stealth.
There is a real difficulty for any government to effect a root and branch reform of local government finance. The last time was the poll tax, or community charge as the Conservatives like to call it, which was an absolute disaster and ultimately led to Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. The reason why it’s difficult to reform the council tax is whatever you do there will be winners and losers. In opposition parties may talk about wholesale reform of council tax or even the introduction of a local income tax, but in power when they’re actually confronted with the facts - there will be millions of vociferous losers - they back off. So parties go for gradual reform and tinkering with the system.
Councils do have more powers now to act than they did in the past. And they are being given the freedom to raise additional business rates, for example, in order to use that money for specific projects within their locality. We’re encouraging local councils to provide evidence to us, with the ideas of how they want the system to change.
TP: What are the deadlines?
PS: The deadline for written evidence is the 29th September. The Committee will start to have oral evidence sessions in the autumn and, although we’d like written evidence before we start, people can still keep sending work in. We’re asking them for their comments on whether local councils should be given greater freedom to raise local taxation themselves, what powers local government needs, and why they can’t do these things now. Central government has argued they’ve given local government power and many councils are not using it.
The councils themselves need to change their mindset, and start doing things instead of always using the excuse that they’re not permitted to, or that central government doesn’t want to, or that they don’t have the finance. Councils need to think much more imaginatively themselves. Do they think local councils should be given more powers to, for example, have democratic oversight over other services currently not run by local councils such as local health service, local policy services?
TP: Have you looked through Hazel Blear’s white paper, Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power?
PS: Obviously the government is making the right noises, which is about community empowerment.
TP: Will they follow that through?
PS: They may do. We should give them the benefit of the doubt and local authorities need to take the government at face value and embrace the changes, rather than not accepting those changes and complaining it’s not enough. The government is also making the point that the same arguments used by local government to say power should be devolved can be used at a much more local level —at neighbourhood level to involve local electors much more in spending and community resources decisions. There needs to be a more participatory democracy as well as the directly elected and accountable democracy at present.
TP: So do you support things like petitions forcing council debates and referendums?
PS: They can be useful. Much more exciting and interesting is this notion of allowing local communities to manage things like community centres or a local sporting facility. It could put upon community trusts to manage those sort of services. In particular, the idea of encouraging young people in making those sort of decision in deciding where the extra money on youth services should be spent - involving the users of those services in saying how that money should be spent.
TP: How about directly elected mayors?
PS: Personally, I’m not very keen on directly elected mayors. I accept the London mayor, which I voted for, has been very successful but London is a very special place. You could argue London is more of a regional tier. I think directly elected mayors are a diversion from the real issue — giving councils greater financial and legal freedom to respond to their local communities. A directly elected mayor in my view often descends into a cult of the personality rather than a serious debate about priorities. I wouldn’t wish to be critical of any individual elected mayors but in some areas communities have gone for a directly elected mayor because they were so fed up with the repeated failure of the councillors they’ve got and this was the only alternative they could think of to get out of the situation.
TP: One argument is that local politicians aren’t good enough to be given more power. After being Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee for three years, how high is the quality of our local politicians?
PS: Clearly the quality is variable, just as the quality of Members of Parliament is. There’s no evidence that the quality of councillors has got worse or better. It’s interesting that even in the 18th century you found commentators railing against the poor quality of local councillors so I think this is a theme - a bit like people complaining that young people are badly behaved. There are some extremely impressive councillors in many different sorts of councils who are operating in innovative ways for their local communities. And there are some very unimpressive councillors. I suppose it’s fair to say you tend to get more of the unimpressive ones in areas where one political party has more or less an uninterrupted hold on the control of the local council.
TP: Britain has a very centralised form of government. Is there a country’s model of government you particularly admire and also do you think, longer-term, the trend really is moving back towards localism in Britain?
The trend is moving back to greater localism. That’s particularly appropriate because we are a very urbanised country - localism is even more important in urban communities where people have a great attachment to their immediate neighbourhood and less attachment to their greater urban area. In my constituency of Milton Keynes South West, we have urban parish councils and I’ve been incredibly impressed by the high regard people have for their local parish council and the way they can raise an additional levy on the council tax on the local community and spend it on physical improvements within their own neighbourhood. It’s a direct demonstration to those electors of the extra tax they pay achieves.
You have to be very careful about importing models from other countries because every country has a different political culture. A structure that works well in one country may not work in the same way if you import it. We should, however, look at the experience of other European countries because European culture does share many things in common. In France, they have elected mayors but they have huge financial resources compared with councils in Britain. It’s the resources available that makes local government strong.
Scandinavian societies have a huge degree of social cohesion and also equity. Certainly as a Labour MP, that is the equity which we will be trying to deliver more effectively in Britain and therefore there are a great many lessons to learn from the Scandinavian councils. They directly commission health services as well as other services — although they don’t necessarily deliver those services themselves — they are more relaxed about commissioning health services from the private sector than we are in Britain.