The state and local government
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| 320 Thus the Conservatives’ Rates Act 1984 capped the rates of selected councils; and in 1986 all council rates were capped.
Several Left-wing Labour councils refused to set a budget. All the councils eventually backed down, however, except in Liverpool and Lambeth where the district auditors took legal action against 81 councillors. The affected councillors appealed, but the High Court found against them in early 1986. The Liverpool councillors then decided to appeal further: but Ted Knight and 30 other Lambeth councillors did not and were banned from holding office for five years and required to repay the £127,000 of lost interest in a surcharge.321 Moreover, as Simon Duncan and Mark Goodwin note: ‘The three (Lambeth P.L.) Labour councillors remaining in office were able to run the council for several weeks (at one stage only with the help of a High Court order barring a Conservative rates decision) until new elections in May 1986 resulted in a renewed Labour majority’.322 Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Local Government Act replaced rates by a fixed ‘community service charge’ (popularly known as "The Poll Tax”) payable by every adult regardless of income (even people on social security had to pay 20 per cent of the poll tax). Councils would get at most 25 per cent of their revenue from this source (20 per cent in Scotland and 15 per cent in Wales). To increase their total spending by one per cent, therefore, councils would have to raise the poll-tax by at least four per cent. ‘A way had at last been found, it seemed’, as Leys concludes, ‘to terminate the evil effects of the electoral principle in cities where the working class was so inconveniently numerous’.323 The introduction of the poll tax, however, had momentous unintended consequences. There were riots, massive refusals to pay the poll tax, imprisonments and warrant sales for non-payment, which were followed by a sudden change in central state policy on local finance. Margaret Thatcher was also forced to resign, at least in part, over the poll tax issue. As proponents of privatisation Hugh Atkinson and Stuart Wilks-Heeg note: One of the unintended outcomes of the poll tax fiasco was that it had served to make local government one of the major domestic political issues of the early 1990s. In the bid to replace Thatcher in November 1990…Heseltine, in particular…us[ed] the opportunity to advocate…. a replacement for the poll tax…elected mayors…and…the creation of unitary authorities. Consequently, within a week of his appointment, the new Secretary of State announced his intention to undertake a complete review of the finance, structure and internal management of local government.324 The Local Government Finance Act 1992 abolished the poll tax and replaced it with the regressive council tax. However, Michael Heseltine’s successors as Secretary of State – Michael Howard and then John Gummer – had little interest in the internal management of local government: and it was New Labour that subsequently introduced US-style local government executive mayors with cabinets – the optimum internal management arrangement for privatised local government services.325 Structural reorganisation in the 1980s and 1990s In 1985 the Conservatives abolished the six Metropolitan County Councils and the Greater London Council, which were all Labour-controlled. The GLC and South Yorkshire, in particular, had pioneered collective, ‘progressive-populist’ initiatives in the limited spheres of authority available to them. The other major development in the early and mid-1990s was the Tory legislation introducing single-tier unitary authorities in England’s non-metropolitan areas (under the Local Government Act 1992 from 1995/98), and the whole of Wales (under the Local Government [Wales] Act 1994 from 1995) and Scotland (under the Local Government etc. [Scotland] Act 1994 from 1995).326 Structural reorganisation of local government, however, is never a neutral process and always politically motivated. That is, reorganisation in a class society always reflects the interests of the ruling dominant capital class, which as John Dearlove emphasises, ‘embodies a concern to recapture the social relations, style of politics, and class of leadership that existed before the franchise was extended and before the working class rose to some sort of position of local power through the Labour Party’.327 Hence the 1990s reorganisation in England, Wales and Scotland resulted in fewer elected authorities and fewer councillors. Before 1974/75 there were 1,857 councils in England, Wales and Scotland - as Table 5.1 shows - and only 441 by 1998: that is, a reduction of 1,416 (76.3 per cent fewer), and the average population per council increased from 29,000 to 128,000. In both Wales and Scotland, however, the consequences were much more drastic. Wales now has 159 fewer councils than before 1974/75 (87.9 per cent fewer). Scotland now has 398 fewer councils than before 1974/75 (92.6 per cent fewer), while in terms of average population per council it is the most locally under-represented nation in Western Europe (see Tables 5.1 and 5.3). Table 5.1: The growing scale of British local government
Source: D. Wilson and C. Game, 1998, p. 315 Table 5.2: The democratic deficit (number of councillors)
Source: D. Wilson and C. Game, 1998, p. 315 The total number of councillors in England, Wales and Scotland fell from 25,710 in 1974 to 22,188 in 1997: that is, by 3,522.328 Moreover, as Table 5.2 shows, the unitary reorganisation of the 1990s alone reduced the number of councillors in non-Metropolitan England, Scotland and Wales from 7,148 to 4,909: that is, by 2,239 (31 per cent) with Wales – where the number of councillors fell by 36 per cent - being particularly affected. Britain, as Table 5.3 shows, in 1996 also had fewer and larger ‘local’ authorities than any other advanced Western capitalist country. Moreover, these figures showing inhabitants per elected member massively understated the scale of local government’s under-representation. For, as David Wilson and Chris Game demonstrate: When our two-tier system and many districts’ multi-member wards are taken into account, the reality is that an average English district councillor will have an electorate of between 3,000 and 5,000, a county councillor one of up to 10,000, and a metropolitan district or London councillor one larger still. Multiply these figures by, say, 1.5 for total residential populations, and the reality is, in a city such as Birmingham, that many councillors represent wards of around 25,000 people.329 Table 5.3: Britain’s large-scale local government compared to other EU countries (1996)
Source: D. Wilson and C. Game, 1998, p. 228 The shift from direct provision to ‘local governance’ of services The ‘democratic deficit’ associated with the reduction in the number of councils and elected councillors was also crucially related to the growth of ‘local governance’: that is, the shift from direct local government provision of services to a system in which the local authority is only one of many agencies providing local services, and elected councillors were directly responsible for providing fewer and fewer services. The Democratic Audit in 1996 identified 5,207 local Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (‘quangos’) – Urban Development Corporations, Housing Action Trusts, NHS Hospital Trusts, Careers Service Companies, City Technology Colleges, Further Education Corporations, Higher Education Corporations, Grant Maintained Schools, Housing Associations, Local Enterprise Companies, Police Authorities and Training Enterprise Councils – which are agents of the central state carrying out government policies. Thus by 1996 there were at least ten times as many local unelected executive ‘quangos’ as there were elected councils run by well over 60,000 mainly ministerially-appointed or self-appointed ‘quangocrats’: almost three for every councillor. The estimated expenditure in 1994/95 of this ‘new magistracy’, moreover, was £5,920 million – well over half the total money spent by elected local councils.330 Chapter Six How local democracy was further undermined by New Labour This Chapter discusses how New Labour has further undermined local democracy. The first section shows that the big business-funded New Local Government Network is the main group influencing New Labour’s ‘local governance’ project. The second section focuses on the outcomes and impact of the Local Government Act 2000, which has fundamentally changed the internal management of local government. The third section discusses the implications of the Local Government Act 2007, which also gave further impetus to the transformation of English local government into unitary structures. The fourth section shows how the power of the ‘quango’ state increased even further under New Labour. The fifth section considers the current structure and functions of local government. The New Local Government Network The New Local Government Network (NLGN) – which, according to Labour’s National Executive Committee member and Vice-Chair of the Local Government Association Sir Jeremy Beecham, is ‘the provisional wing of the consulting and contracting sector’331 – was established in 1996 by a small group of senior Blairite figures in local government:
The private contractors who fund the NLGN NLGN is funded by the private contractors whose profits are boosted by the privatisation of local government services. In the financial year 1999-2000 the NLGN received £279,542 from ‘corporate partners’ during the passage of the Local Government Bill 2000 through Parliament.333 Since 1996, at least 47 different pro-privatisation private sector organisations have financed NLGN.334 In September 2000 NLGN had 30 ‘corporate partners’, 36 in September 2002335, 24 in September 2008 (including Aim Infrastructure, HBS Business Services and Tesco, which are no longer partners) and, as Appendix 1 shows, 24 in April 2010:
Capita Group plc until 2006 – when its Chair Rod Aldridge was also backing the controversial academy bid for the Brighton Falmer High School stepped down after questions were raised about a personal loan he made to the Labour Party – was one of the NLGN’s major funders.338 In 2002 NLGN published a pamphlet entitled Advancing a New Public Service Ethos by Rod Aldridge OBE and Gerry Stoker - ‘two authors…sharing similar ideas’.339 For, even though Capita and KMPG no longer fund the NLGN, which describes itself as ‘independent’, as Paul Gosling emphasises: ‘it is actually intimately connected to private sector interests… “Partnership for Best Value, a practical guide for members and senior officers” (which advances the case for PFI and similar deals) was co-written with accountancy firm KPMG’.340 NLGN’s Innovation Network In 2001, NGLN ‘established an Innovation Network, creating a space for ambitious local authorities to experiment with new ideas, share learning and influence public policy across all levels of government’ – to counter the criticism that it is primarily financed by big business. However, in 2001 £340,000 (68 per cent) of the £500,000 NLGN received was still provided by private sponsors; and 16 councils paid NLGN £160,000 (32 per cent).341 Conversely, the Labour Campaign for Open Local Government only received £11,022 from trade unions and individual supporters between November 1999 and the end of 2001.342 The London borough of Lewisham paid £10,000 in 2001; and the decision to join the Network was taken by the Chief Executive under delegated authority.343 Since July 2002, the NLGN has increased its local authority partners from 19 to 35 in April 2010 (see Appendix 2). NLGN’s early lobbying success NLGN’s early lobbying success – unacknowledged in all conventional studies of local government – was reflected in New Labour’s 1997 General Election Manifesto. The latter included a whole section headed ‘Reinvigorate the Private Finance Initiative’, and under the heading ‘Good local government’ stated: ‘We will encourage democratic innovations in local government, including pilots of the idea of elected mayors with executive powers in cities’.344 NLGN’s executive included former Local Government Minister Hilary Armstrong’s closest advisers, for example Jerry Stoker (see Appendix 3); and the Local Government Act 2000 implemented its original agenda. The standard textbooks on local government used in higher education courses, however, contain no reference to the NLGN.345 NLGN’s key personnel, big business and New Labour John Williams – appointed Executive Director of NLGN in April 1998 and previously New Labour’s Organiser in Lewisham – left in June 2002 to become Market Development Director for Local Government at Serco, which is one of the private contractors that funds NLGN. Managing Director of Local Government, Peter Holder, said: “Serco is continuing to expand the services we provide in local government and John will be part of a new team delivering leading-edge partnerships and modernisation programmes”.346 Serco had just won the largest contract of its kind to date – worth £210 million over seven years – to run Bradford City MDC’s education services.347 John Williams justified his employment by this multinational private contractor to enhance its profits – and his own income – as follows: Today, in a global world...the opportunities for an individual to progress a career within the private sector with the aim of making a difference...is an increasingly real and attractive one…A global firm like Serco provides a platform and capacity to accumulate the experience of leading [neo-liberal P.L.] thinkers and [privatisation P.L.] practitioners around the world to develop a vision for public services that can be applied...348 John Williams in 2003 was seconded from Serco to the CBI as director of public services where he was ‘responsible for leading the development of the CBI's contribution to the public service reform agenda and, in particular, advancing the role of competition and contestability’. Yüklə 5,87 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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