A council officer explains how localism is panning out at the sharp end
“I work as the principal strategy and performance officer for a unitary local authority in a major English city, and my team have two main functions. Firstly, we’re the council’s entry point for national policy – so we brief councillors and senior officers on anything coming from CSW’s readership, such as new white papers and legislation. Secondly, I coordinate the strategic performance information for our council. That’s both the internal performance information that we collect for our own use, and the data that – until recently, at least – we sent in to Whitehall departments under the Comprehensive Area Assessment, Local Area Agreement and National Indicator systems.
Taking the policy side first, my first communication with central government on any particular initiative is to get involved in a consultation; and we’d always make a case for effective consultation, because without it we end up trying to implement poor legislation. But this government seems to view consultation as a necessary evil, with key decisions made long before the consultations are launched. We understand that, with the government moving so fast on so many fronts, civil servants are coming under tremendous pressure from ministers, but we’d always press colleagues centrally to maintain a firm line with their politicians and make sure their expert opinions are heard.
I do empathise with colleagues at the centre, though. I can’t see [communities secretary] Eric Pickles being any less arrogant with his civil servants than he is with local authorities; and I imagine that departmental staff, like us, aren’t getting any credit for the good work they do. Council officials are proud that we run the most efficient arm of the public services – but it doesn’t suit Pickles to recognise that, and we’re getting shafted in the media.
Putting the politics aside, once we’re past the consultation phase central government communications are generally pretty good. The civil service has some very switched-on IT professionals, and the government uses websites well: the information we receive tends to be well thought-through, and there are good channels for us to seek clarifications.
There are always big differences between individual departments, though. The Treasury is very dry and terse, laying down the law, and health has always taken a similar approach – maybe because that’s how the department runs the NHS – while often heading in a slightly different direction from the rest of government. The education department has always been very good; perhaps because it has a very good regulator in the form of Ofsted, so it can concentrate on policy issues. And the communities department always seems like the pipsqueak of Whitehall: it had lots of clout under John Prescott, but since he was marginalised other departments have stopped listening. It’s a shame, because Prescott gave strong central leadership; although I can’t stand Pickles, he does at least provide that.
On the data side, the coalition says it’s giving councils the freedom to decide how we operate, abolishing reporting regimes and targets systems, and forcing us to be more transparent so that local people rather than Whitehall departments can hold us to account. However, Pickles keeps imposing these pettifogging rules and regulations – we’re told we can’t raise revenue by fining people for not recycling properly, for example – and the transparency policy seems very confused. We’re having to publish all this information on spending, but without any context it’s pretty meaningless. What’s more, there’s no requirement that councils publish the data in a way that means it’s comparable. In some areas, councils are doing so voluntarily – but even there, senior officials and members are questioning the need to.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming harder for people to assess our performance at a national level because as soon as it came to office, the coalition swept away Labour’s reporting regimes. Pickles said then that he would replace those regimes with a single list of data – but that’s now come out, and it’s actually much longer and more complex than Labour’s system. Policymakers must understand that, with 28 per cent cuts to our grant over four years, councils simply can’t afford to collect and deliver this information like we used to.
The rhetoric and the reality here are miles apart. There’s no requirement now for us to collect internal performance data, but far from lifting the burden of onerous upward reporting regimes, the government is actually increasing their weight. We in local authorities are quite used to dropping everything to help out civil servants who’ve just been asked to do something very complicated in a ridiculous timescale, and we’ll try and help where we can. But given the level of job cuts we’re seeing, it will be a struggle to send departments this data – because there might not be anybody left here to collect it.”