On local government

We all get frustrated with local councils, often rightly. Following nearly 20 years serving at various levels, I reflect on what works, what doesn’t and what urgently needs changing.

A very good friend of mine will often text me with screenshots of local news or a photo of a page from our local paper, the Bury Free Press, with the simple caption “bloody council”. It’s usually about something relatively low key; parking charges, planning permissions, bins, road closures or potholes. This isn’t end of the world stuff, we aren’t being invaded, the sky is not falling, and no lives have been lost. But he’s angry. Very angry. Is he just an angry man? No. He loves a good moan, like many of us, but he isn’t alone in being so irked by ‘jobsworth councils’. Look at the letters page of a local paper and, invariably, something somewhere could be done better, and the author knows precisely how.

One of many incoming messages and an astute political comeback from me

Concerned as we all are by the big topics of the day – the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza and heightened tension across the Middle East, inflation, the NHS, immigration, a changing climate or taxation – if, when we step outside our door, the road surface looks a mess, the pavement is uneven, our bin hasn’t been emptied, a pothole has gone unfilled, and a god awful block of flats has been given planning permission while those in conservation areas jump through hoops to replace a window….we’re angry. Then we drive to the shops only to see that the parking charge has increased, or the hours we must pay to park have changed, and then, oh boy, the red mist truly descends. You see, local councils are responsible for those little things that we all see when we leave our homes, that contribute to our quality of life, and often dictate our mood for the day.

After spending nearly 20 years on local councils, at one level or another, do I really think they are that bad? Yes and no. My biggest gripe today remains what it was 19 years ago when I was first elected in a Bury St Edmunds Town Council by-election; that all too often council staff explain, at great length, why you can’t do what you want to do rather than help you get somewhere close to what you want to achieve. Their starting point is ‘no’ and you, the elected representative, are a necessary evil of democracy who is not an expert, have no idea just how complicated siting a dog poo bin actually is, and must be thwarted at all costs. It’s all part of a merry dance where, eventually, you think you’ve won a major victory by having a dog poo bin in the next postcode replaced with a slightly larger one. This isn’t all staff, of course, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some brilliant individuals over the last 19 years who ‘get’ this and as a result we’ve gone on to do and change some pretty key things, which have resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds of investment in Suffolk.

“Victory is mine, victory is mine. Great day in the morning, people, victory is mine.” - Josh Lyman in the West Wing

If I have another major complaint, it’s this; councils are too risk averse. They are terrified of being sued. Quite often, this fear is warranted and caution is needed. If you’re dealing with what I call ‘hidden services’, like adult care or supporting children with very acute needs, then the utmost care must be taken. If, however, you’re dealing with hanging baskets, Christmas lights or a road closure for a street market…then perhaps we don’t need to risk assess the project into oblivion. These things have been going on for decades and we’ve not seen scores of the population taken out by plummeting pelargoniums. Let’s find a sensible middle ground that makes death by daffodil unlikely but still allows things to go ahead.

A case in point is the Bury St Edmunds Christmas Fayre, it was one of the foremost Christmas Markets in the country – often listed in the top two or three, alongside the likes of Bath, Lincoln and Winchester. Of course, there were issues with traffic – and those could have been addressed – but, following a terrifying training course, West Suffolk Council staff returned determined to prevent it ever happening again because the risk assessment was just too scary. And they won. One of the region’s best loved events bit the dust because of red tape. Battle weary councillors, exhausted by years of being told no, barely put up a fight. But, at least we’re all safe, eh? In this sterilised world where less and less is allowed to happen.

Some council employees might be reading this and feeling rather wounded and, here, let me come to their defence. I don’t recall meeting a council officer who did not care, much as I’ve never met a single councillor who does not care. We all get stuck in loops of working practice and councils are places drowning in red tape. I sometimes think we’re addicted to bureaucracy in this country. I used to blame the EU but even without their dictats, we’ve proven ourselves incredibly adept at creating regulation where no regulation at all would be better. As a councillor, when you escalate smaller issues to senior staff at director level, they tend to understand and help you find a way to fix it. They’re at that level for a reason. But councils are an environment where, all too often, you end up speaking with one of the highest paid individuals there to fix a pothole or an emerging PR disaster relating to a hanging basket risk assessment. People further down the food chain are just doing their job and enforcing the reams of regulation foisted upon them. So please don’t hold it against council staff, it’s the system and culture that’s broken.

So far, I’ve not done much to alleviate the fears of those who think ‘townhall fat cats’ do nothing but deliberately make life difficult for your average Joe, or indeed Josephine – it’s 2024, after all. That’s far from the case, lots of really good work goes on in so many areas. There are projects I’ve been involved with that I’m so proud of – from small wildlife friendly gardens through planting over 200,000 trees across the county, not to mention all the residents I’ve helped with planning applications or issues with local schools and education. But that’s enough of me blowing my own brass instrument, I do what councillors are elected to do.

Daffodil and wildflower planting along the River Linnet

Where a good deal of the real work goes on is within those hidden services I referred to earlier. Homelessness, children in care, special educational needs and adult social care. Unless you’re unlucky enough to call on one of these services, you wouldn’t know they were happening. And the problem is more and more people are unlucky enough. People are living longer, a fundamentally good thing. Children are surviving childbirth who would not have survived even ten or fifteen years ago, a fundamentally good thing. Yet these two happy advances have consequences. We have an aging population, with a growing elderly cohort, and at the other end of the spectrum, more children with more and more complex needs. Wherever you live, regardless of the structure of local government (more on that in a moment), caring for those most in need very often falls to local councils and this costs money. Lots of money.

That the individuals that work in these services care can’t be disputed but, bluntly, through the fault of successive governments, many local councils – particularly those in rural areas due to the way funding formulas are based on historic deprivation indices – do not have the resources they need to adequately deal with the pressure on the service. Too often, this is seen as uncaring. Bad services, of course, exist and should be called out but many of the issues faced by councils are due to resourcing. Taking Suffolk as an example, where I led on the finances at the County Council between 2021 and 2024, over the last fifteen years these key services have gone from accounting for roughly 60p in every £1 the council spends to 76p in every £1. But even that is not enough to keep pace with demand where, in Special Educational Needs alone, the number of Children with Educational Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has gone up from 5,000 to nearly 8,000 in a few short years. National funding has not kept up, increases in Council tax (often reluctantly voted through) cannot keep up and national attempts to address issues like the cost of social care are repeatedly kicked into the long grass. The result? Amongst other things, potholes and lots of them.

The glamorous life of your local elected representative - never without a tape measure to negotiate pothole filling

The brutal reality of local government is that when these key services that legally must provided cost more and more, then optional services get cut or reduced. Roads must be kept ‘safe’ but that doesn’t mean looking nice and it means potholes are allowed to reach an ‘acceptable’ depth before being repaired and often a temporary repair is made to buy more time. This can, quite literally, mean someone in a van turning up and stamping some tarmac into it. White lines on minor roads don’t need to be repainted, advisory signs don’t need to be replaced – so those can respectively fade away and fall over. Weeds go untreated for longer. You get the picture. In real terms, what councils spend on maintaining roads and pavements is less than it was fifteen years ago. As a result, they look worse and the road or pavement (‘asset’ as it is known) is older and more likely to fail. So, when you step outside your front door and the area looks, frankly, not as good as it should and not as good as it did twenty or thirty years ago – it’s not because people don’t care, it’s because the funding of those hidden services is broken, and nobody has fixed it. This is just the roads, the same applies to other ‘nice to haves’ like grant funding to arts and museums, tree planting and other environmental initiatives, economic development and investment in town centres. The list goes on.

But money is finite. It’s not just local government asking for more. Compelling arguments are made for the need to invest more in defence, tackling illegal immigration, cleaning up our rivers and waterways, building national infrastructure and, of course, the NHS always wants more. In a world of finite resources, how do we fix local government finance? Parking reform of social care and SEND funding, which must come, and the re-evaluation of funding formulas (which will bring winners and losers if the overall pot stays the same size), the next part of the answer may surprise you. Particularly coming from someone who has been a local councillor for the best part of two decades. You need to cull us and cull the number of councils. Figuratively, of course, don’t get too excited. And it can’t just be a light trim, we need a military grade short back and sides. Simply put, there are too many councils and too many councillors at a time when we need economies of scale.

Some areas already have unitary councils but not nearly enough. Here in Suffolk, I was a triple, yes triple, hatter in Bury St Edmunds until 2023. I was a Town Councillor, District Councillor and County Councillor (I remain the latter two). I stood for all three for a very simple reason, people don’t care which council empties their bin, fills in potholes or is responsible for allotments. They just want those things dealt with and to email someone about it. When you’re not on all three, you become a glorified email sorting office…’many thanks for your email, I’ve copied this to Councillor X who is your representative on…’. It is a waste of time. But strategically it’s a bigger headache. It makes no sense that one council is responsible for collecting waste and another for getting rid of it and it makes even less sense that one council is responsible for giving permission for a load of new housing to be built but an entirely different council is responsible for building the roads and schools to service it. In some parts of the country, local councils are responsible for the Fire Service (the County Council is in Suffolk), in other parts it sits with a standalone Fire Authority and in some places with the Police and Crime Commissioner. Some parts of the country have unitary councils, some have combined authorities, some hold elections ‘in thirds’ every year and others have ‘all out’ elections every four years, in some places there are directly elected Mayors and other councils are led by the leader of the largest political group. It is bonkers. Joined up decision making is too difficult and with different tiers of local government they too often end up at loggerheads, particularly when controlled by different political parties. While all you want, dear reader, is for your bin to be emptied, not to lose another alloy wheel in a pothole and to feel slightly less fleeced each time your council tax bill arrives.

Why hasn’t proper, national, local government reform happened yet? A few reasons. Nationally governments have tried to do it by consent and few local councils can agree on what the new structure should look like and even fewer councillors, when push comes to shove, want to be the turkey voting for Christmas. Local consultations take place and lots of emphasis is placed on a few thousand responses from people who really don’t care and, wait for it, would just like their bins to be emptied and things to look nice. Too often, it all descends into squabbling and, low and behold, the status quo persists. I have my own view on what the right size and geography is for rural and urban unitary authorities and whether the leader, or mayor, should be directly elected but so too does every other councillor. We won’t do this to ourselves, or – at least – we likely won’t reach a consensus by ourselves, so government will have to impose a solution. This was always the message I gave when, on the very rare occasion, I had a moment with a Local Government Minister: settle on a model for counties and a model for our major cities, decide what the critical mass needs to be to effectively deliver key services and, in the words of Nike, just do it.

However, we didn’t grasp that particular nettle and now there’s a new Labour government my gut feeling is they will. Just not necessarily in a way that’s good for rural areas. My fear is they will go too big and try, as much as possible, to ensure the demographics make it hard for Conservative control. This might not bother you but what should bother you is that if the size is wrong, giving proper attention to smaller towns and villages could be a challenge. Local identity is important and while reform is desperately needed, the scale and structure must be right.

I’ve written this longer than normal piece because local government is important, but it has become little more than a subcontracted arm of central government, tasked with doing so much of the difficult stuff that national politicians are afraid to touch – social care, housing, special educational needs, roads and buses, public safety and economic development. Local government is too often asked to do all these things without the local freedom, flexibility, structure or funding to make it possible. Where reform has taken place, and it has been given the resources and structures it needs – the metro mayors are an example – local government and devolution is proven to have worked. We need to re-enable local councils, because while we’re not getting enough done, we’re just getting in the way of those, like Business Improvement Districts and others, who are trying to fill the void. Local government reform is the only way to do that.

With my good friend and fellow councillor, John Augustine

Despite the inefficiencies, the heated debates with council staff which too often feel like pushing treacle uphill, and the texts and WhatsApps from my friends decrying the latest decision from ‘the bloody council’, I enjoy being a local councillor. I’ve succeeded in more things than I’ve failed and genuinely feel I’ve left Bury and Suffolk in a better place. But the deck is stacked against us both in terms of funding and structure. It is a system born in another age, woefully out of date with the services councils are now responsible for. I could construct an argument about how important it is that councillors are truly connected and only represent small areas, that it’s a great thing that places like Suffolk have 233 district councillors and 74 county councillors on top of 372 town and parish councils, each with at least five councillors…but the financial and strategic reality is that it no longer makes sense. It’s time to wield the axe and, if the scale is right and it comes to a vote, this turkey is pulling out his own giblets, inserting his own stuffing and leaping into the oven whilst giving a heartening rendition of O Come, All Ye Faithful. Bring on Christmas.