IT’S TIME TO SLIM DOWN THE TOWN HALL FATCATS
They moan about austerity while slashing services we actually want, yet hundreds of them earn six-figure salaries. Now a new study says our local government needs a radical shake-up...
What is the point of local government? are councils supposed to function like national government on a smaller scale, or are they meant to empower communities against an over-centralised state?
Propound on lofty theories of democratic participation all you want but the voters are after a few basic services from their council and not much more. they want their children educated and their planning permission requests granted some time this century.
they want vaguely passable roads. Potholes and roadworks will always be with us but it would be nice to complete the school run without feeling like you’ve just crossed the hindu Kush in a Mini Metro.
they would like to have as few bins as possible, for them to be collected weekly and not to be dawn-raided and renditioned to Guantanamo Bay every time they put a wine bottle in the wrong bin. Beyond that, they would like to be left alone.
Government bureaucrats, local and national alike, believe becoming more involved in our lives is the way to improve them. We would be willing to do almost anything – even recycle and eat our greens – if they just agreed to keep their distance. Don’t call us, diversity and inclusion officer, we’ll call you.
But local government is only as good as it is organised. a Sheffield University study has proposed cutting Scotland’s 32 councils down to 17. Researchers used a computer algorithm to create Greater Glasgow, a municipal monolith stretching from Renfrewshire to parts of Stirling, which would oversee 1.2 million residents as the largest council in the UK. Edinburgh City Council would annex the Lothians, while the three ayrshire authorities would merge into one.
the study’s authors cite Denmark and France, both of which have rationalised local government of late. Our Continental cousins are less bound by the battle cry of the Scottish civil servant: ‘It’s aye been this way.’
Far from a dynamic engine of civic management, the current system emits a dull groan of sclerosis.
Executive-heavy, enmeshed in red tape, lacking in vision, what should be the most vital tier of government – the one that educates our children and regulates our small businesses – operates with all the agility of a clunking fist.
there is no problem that can’t be solved by another rule and anyone – resident or retailer – who doesn’t like it, will have to lump it. Councils were put on this earth to make holyrood look good.
the current set-up was established a quarter-century ago and replaced the two-tier system of regional and district councils that had governed Scotland since 1975. a streamlined network of councils, shorn of layers of duplication, directives and democratic dross, could overhaul Scotland’s system of local administration. If nothing else, we would no longer have to pretend that employing 32 directors of education to implement a single national curriculum is a sensible use of taxpayers’ money.
Rationalisation promises an especially attractive prize to sceptics of big government: the opportunity for a bonfire of the bureaucracy. Councils employ a quarter of a million Scots (244,000 as of June 2018), an increase of 1,210 on the previous year. Glasgow comes out top with 18,000, but another five also boast head counts in excess of 10,000.
Even when they try to save money through cutbacks, councils end up stinging taxpayers: between 2012 and 2017, local authorities handed over £627million in ‘golden goodbyes’ to 15,000 staff, an average of £40,000 per departing worker. as farewell gifts go, it’s a sight fancier than a clock from argos and a round of ale down the Crown & Duck.
those less prone to getting the old heave-ho are the executive class. town hall top floors are groaning under the weight of public sector fatcats. Earlier this year, the taxPayers’ alliance revealed that 222 Scottish council executives are on sixfigure remuneration packages – almost double the number in Yorkshire and the humber, which has a similar population profile to Scotland.
NORth Lanarkshire Council is the best bet for those after the optimal final salary deal: 18 of its senior staff are on more than £100,000, the highest of any local authority in Scotland. When alison Evison, head of council umbrella group Cosla, said on thursday that ‘our essential services are at breaking point’, it’s not hard to see why.
While local government’s share of the pie has grown smaller under those part-time opponents of austerity the SNP, the trimmings are not necessarily made in the most deserving places.
In 2016-17, City of Edinburgh Council introduced charges for some of its breakfast clubs, while in the same period the former finance director of publicly-owned Lothian Buses, in which the council is majority shareholder, received £563,862. that’s a lot of Shreddies. In fact, it would cover the annual cost of 80 breakfast clubs.
One of the reasons for these inflated pay packets is the superannuation deals enjoyed by council employees through the local government pensions
scheme. employee contributions start at 5.5 per cent and top out at 12 per cent and packages are typically index-linked, so payouts rise in line with inflation.
Such schemes are a distant memory, if even that, for most who make their living in the private sector. Yet last year, council pension funds totalled £1.3billion, an increase of almost £200million on five years earlier.
This is why one council chief executive in england has warned that, by 2019-20, a third of council tax revenue in the UK will go to financing the retirements of local government employees.
Many council staff do creditable work but it hardly seems fair that those of us who will have to cut our cloth in retirement until it is practically threadbare should be compelled to underwrite the Saga cruises and Zumba classes of every traffic warden and school receptionist in the land.
And if essential services are at ‘breaking point’, here is some (free!) advice for town hall budget chiefs.
Stop hiring celebrities to launch initiatives, mug for the cameras and push buttons. In 2010, Renfrewshire Council paid £15,000 for former X Factor contestant Olly Murs to switch on Paisley’s Christmas lights just as the authority was facing budget cuts.
end the staff awards bashes. You’re a bin collection outfit, not the Oscars. Between 2012 and 2015, Glasgow City Council and its arm’s length organisations spent £425,000 on awards ceremonies for employees.
These back-slapping gong galas, thrown at high-end venues such as the Royal Concert Hall, were held, the personnel chief rationalised, because workers ‘deserve some thanks and recognition’. If only there was some other way to reward employee labour – possibly via a monthly deposit into their bank account.
Put the brakes on car-buying. Glasgow distinguishes itself as the most profligate council in the country when it comes to luxury vehicles. Since 2015, the City Chambers has splurged more than £100,000 on three Volkswagen Phaetons and associated fees. Yes, your civic dignitaries are terribly important but they’re not above taking an Uber like the rest of us.
GIVe Skyscanner a rest. In the past three years, Scottish councils have racked up almost £7million on flights, only £2.5million of which was spent by the three islands councils. At least you know that extra 3 per cent on your council tax bill is being spent responsibly.
Withdraw from Cosla. It’s essentially a councils’ trade union and it doesn’t come cheap – it’s budgeted for £3million in staff costs next year, almost £700,000 in rent and property fees, and more than £190,000 in catering. Any organisation that spends that much putting on a few bacon butties and a tray of sausage rolls has money to burn. Pull out tomorrow and save on the membership levy.
Have another look over your staff rolls. Do you really need all those consultants, co-ordinators and communicators? It’s unwise to have a council payroll so vast it accounts for almost one in ten Scots in employment. It embeds conservatism towards reform.
Few council employees are altruistic enough to vote for MSPs eager to reform them out of a job. A client state offers all sorts of benefits to its clients but nothing much to the rest of us.
This is one of those annoying issues where there is actually a pretty strong case on the other side. Opposition to rationalisation doesn’t come solely from council workers trying to keep their jobs.
The proposition that we should have fewer councils, with decisionmakers based in the largest towns or cities, cuts against the principle of localism.
This is a viewpoint that evades obvious Left vs. Right categories. Most Greens, some socialists and a goodly number of Conservatives agree, albeit for different reasons, that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people they will affect.
Localism appeals to the Left because it expands the potential for democratic participation and bottom-up change; to the Right, it is a check on a remote and overbearing state imposing top-down, one-size-fits-all policies without regard to local needs and preferences. either way, localism’s proponents view it as a necessary check on central government.
The Sheffield reorganisation would take power away from local people and make councils even more remote from those they serve. This is more than just a theory about how democracy ought to work.
If Midlothian were subsumed into a larger body, as the algorithm recommends, residents of the area would go from constituting 100 per cent of Midlothian Council to only 10 per cent of ‘edinburgh and the Lothians’.
They would no longer be the priority population for their council and would have to compete with residents of edinburgh City, who would make up 57 per cent of the amalgamated authority, as well as taxpayers in West Lothian (21 per cent) and east Lothian (11.9 per cent). One need not be an expert in local government expenditure to know Midlothian would pull the short straw almost every time.
The rationalised communities also show limited regard, as the researchers themselves note, for history, tradition and identity. Their schema would fold two cities – Dundee and Perth – into a single council, with Angus and a slice of Fife bolted on.
These are distinct places and their inhabitants are fiercely proud of where they live. They do not see themselves as lines on a map to be redrawn coldly by distant analysts who will never meet them and may not grasp their attachment to certain areas.
At the heart of this issue are bigger questions we prefer to avoid but which remain all the same. What services do we expect from local government? How should they be delivered? How much are we willing to pay?
Some of this is on us. We are all over the place when it comes to tax and spend. Voters regularly tell pollsters both that they want more spending restraint and that teachers should be paid more; that they would be willing to pay higher taxes for improved services, and that council tax is too high. We don’t just want to have our cake and eat it — we want someone else to pick up the calories.
If it is Swedish-style services we are after, then it will have to be Swedish-style taxes. All the efficiencies in the world cannot close the gap between our expectations and our willingness to pay.
And those tax hikes would have to be across the board. every politician knows this but few will admit it because they live in the eternal transience of last night’s opinion polls.
How much easier it is to tell voters not to worry, that the pot of gold can be replenished with another raid on ‘the rich’, a term once reserved for yacht-helming venture capitalists but lately expanded to include pensioners with a modest house and a few quid down the Halifax.
ANOTHeR bout of local government hokey cokey will poke around the symptoms but it won’t lance the boil. Politics in this country and across the West is shifting in an ever more interventionist direction, with even Right-of-Centre voters softening in their aversion to statism.
The legacy of Margaret Thatcher is under threat from fading memories of what preceded it and the pessimism of a new generation denied that most Thatcherite of aspirations: home ownership. In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the Left is enjoying a resurgence but that doesn’t mean market-oriented disciplines should be abandoned. In fact, they might offer a more workable means of making local government more responsive while pushing down costs.
This can include additional use of shared service agreements – in which two or more councils pool certain costs and provisions – or a first-principles rethink of what councils do and what are the viable alternatives.
Cultural and leisure services could be just as effectively delivered by the private sector and, dangled the carrot of council tax cuts, ratepayers might even be won round to some privatisation of bin collection and waste management.
The ‘dementia tax’ may have cost Theresa May her majority but the social care time bomb is near detonation and it is councils which will bear the brunt.
According to the Local Government Association, by 2020 38p in every pound we pay in council tax will be spent on adult social care. Market-based alternatives, such as insurance schemes, could offer partial relief from the cost burden.
Taking a pair of scissors and a glue stick to Scotland’s local authority map might bring some order to the unwieldy status quo. It may even help tighten the purse strings and prise the cream away from the town hall fat cats. What it won’t do is tackle the underlying problems of rising costs, debt and ever-expanding services.
That will require a much tougher conversation between politicians and the public about what we want and what we can afford. It’s a discussion that can’t be put off much longer and can’t be left up to an algorithm.