Super council sums done on the back of an envelope

With D-day looming on the decision to merge Canterbury’s council with three others in east Kent, Labour activist Dave Wilson questions the benefits of handing more power to fewer people

What are local councils for? Simply to represent people in taking decisions on public services that affect everyday life – things like planning, licensing, parks and museums, and bins collection. It follows that to be effective, councillors have to both reflect the views of local people and to intimately know the area they represent.

The current proposal for an east Kent mega-council is an assault on both these principles. It will reduce the numbers of councillors, down from eleven to four in the city, making them more remote from voters and less able to represent their areas.

The past 20 years have seen an erosion of the role of councils through a combination of cuts to government funding and wide-scale outsourcing, to the stage where we now have the lowest level of democratic representation in western Europe.

Is this in any way important? Who cares who provides the bin collections or paves the streets or cuts the grass in Dane John, anyway? Well, no one: until something goes wrong. Then we need someone on our side.

After all, if Serco don’t collect the bins, residents have no power to make them do the job they’re paid to do. So we rely on the council to put pressure on the appointed contractors and, if something can’t be fixed, to be accountable.

We need an effective council to control building development, as we’re seeing with the major housing schemes being proposed. We want our councillors to protect our city and countryside and to do that they have to know their patch, be in contact with the people they represent and be capable of arguing our case against well-funded professional developers.

Over the last hundred years councils have developed many services. They created parks and museums so that local people could benefit from them. They set up safety nets for local people in trouble.

Well before the welfare state, enlightened councils ran schemes to help the unemployed, homeless and sick. They developed their economy, setting up bus companies, paving the streets and building gas works to support local businesses and employment. Civic enterprise, this was called, and it was no bad thing. All this used to be unremarkable. Some councils did more, some less, but there was a consensus that these were valid activities for local government. Councils could respond to local conditions in a way that central government could not. In short: local government was A Good Thing.

But no more. Stripped of most of their powers and scandalously underfunded, local councils are in crisis. Now we are being asked to accept the creation of a new mega-council which covers Whitstable to Romney Marsh, to produce yet more service cuts to balance the budget.

This is a badly thought through deal which isn’t agreed with Kent County Council and is so poor a deal that Ashford council pulled out.

There is no proof that this merger will deliver savings, although there are some backof-an-envelope calculations; but since the whole idea rests on creating new town councils to take on some of the workload in Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay, and possibly merging some parish councils, this is going to increase, not reduce, costs.

Worse still, this will mean that there are three local government bodies providing services in each area, an idea which means no one will be able to work out who does what. Accountability will be lost, along with the support of professional officers. And for what? Councillors will be even more remote than at present. They will be more stretched in terms of case work and they will know less about local issues. After all, what can a councillor in Dover know about the impact of Mountfield Park on Bridge or Wincheap?

So now we must ask seriously: what are local councils for? When does a council cease to be local? After all, if someone asks where you live, you probably don’t say “east Kent”, do you? It doesn’t sound right – its not a real place, is it?

People with long memories will remember when Canterbury City Council was created to include Whitstable, Herne Bay and the rural areas around about and what a fuss that caused through the towns feeling a loss of power to Canterbury. A takeover, they called it, and some still do. How will people feel about becoming part of this massive new district?

This looks like a carve-up giving more power to fewer people. Is this what the people intended when they voted to “take back control”? Why have our MPS, so vocal on the issue of the EU, nothing to say about the negative impact of this mega-council? Its time we got answers.