Disaster highlighted the impotency of councils
The resignation of Kensington and Chelsea’s leader will do nothing to repair local governance
Of the inferno in London’s Grenfell Tower, we now know two things. The first is that residents, local people and safety experts had long warned about the state of fire security in the block. We also know measures were available which would likely have prevented a fire inside one flat from engulfing the building. So why were residents not heard?
In the final analysis one of the answers must be that residents did not have the power to get their concerns acted upon. It was not that their fears were not known or were not valid, but that the step from knowledge to action was not taken.
The reason they did not have power is no doubt complex, but even on the day after the calamity it was observed that at least part of the reason must be systemic. Better precautions could and should have been taken to secure the block. The fact that they were not taken shows that there is a fault in the system of governance. Kensington and Chelsea is a borough of about 160,000 people. In a political unit that large, the distance from the little people in the neighbourhoods up to those in charge is very long. It is hard for any small group to be heard. These residents had people speaking for them in the local council, but that voice was only one of many and did not carry much weight.
Furthermore, this council, as British local councils generally are, is itself bereft of power. They have some limited responsibilities which they exercise pretty much as administrative agencies under direction from Whitehall. They are not actually local governments. Governments raise and spend their own money, while councils depend on central government for the overwhelming part of their funds. On the fundamental business of tax and spend they struggle to tailor what they do to the local area, and instead largely do what they are told. So they do manage some local affairs, but they do not represent local populations. In his book The British Constitution, the late Anthony King concluded: “Local government is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a part of the British constitution.”
Your local concerns compete with those of others, and if yours are to prevail there must be power behind them. This is the iron law of democratic governance. Those who govern deal with the matters they are forced to deal with. Other matters are squeezed out. The people in Grenfell Tower and its neighbourhood were apparently not heeded because they did not have direct political representation. They did not have political representation because they are a small and peripheral group in a large district and because the council at the head of that district is not a local government in the business of representing local people.
This absence of local political representation is visible in many areas of British life. In recent years, for example, we have had terrible flood catastrophes. These have also been the result, at least partially, of failures to take precautions due to systemic failures in governance. There has been no clearly defined local responsibility: local councils have had little and ambiguous authority in the matter. Flood protection throughout the land is the job of Whitehall in London and the national Environment Agency. That’s a long way to go to get someone who is responsible for innumerable little rivers to take an interest in yours.
Local councils do their jobs well, but that job is not to represent the population. They are not attuned to acting as the local population’s representative, and local populations are not attuned to turning to their council for representation. There is not the relationship between council and population that is the fabric of local government. This is reflected in dismal participation in local elections. That Kensington and Chelsea’s leaders displayed no shame in dissolving a cabinet meeting to discuss the fire because there were journalists in the room is also an obvious symptom. The resignation of council leader Nick Paget-brown last night does nothing to treat the disease.
This void should be filled with local units of government that are different in two ways from today’s councils: they should be both smaller and have more responsibility. There should be nearness between local people and their authorities, and those authorities should have the power to give their populations representation.
Our national politicians want us to think that Britain is a well-governed country, but it is not. A well-governed country has the apparatus to deal with the population’s concerns. In Britain, part of that apparatus is absent. A vital link in the chain of command from local people up to governors is missing. We have the most centralised system of government of any country in Europe; nobody else believes it is possible to deliver good governance without local governments. As we have now seen in even the wealthiest borough in the centre of the capital, that is a failing enterprise.
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