Tread carefully on reform proposals
Councils don’t want to become dumping ground for services
From time to time in any job, you must do the hard yards. Last Friday afternoon when I sat in on a two-hour workshop-seminar that focused on the Future for Local Government (FFLG) reforms, it definitely qualified as hard yards and tested my concentration skills. However tedious the discussion might have been, these are important reforms with the potential to do much good, but also with the potential to do much harm. So, what are the Future for Local Government reforms and where did they come from?
I think the idea for the local government reforms arguably came as a sidekick to the Government’s Three Waters reforms. The idea seemed to just fall out of the sky, when someone asked the question — if the Three Waters reforms remove water services from councils and those services are then provided by someone else, what would councils have left to do all day?
It seemed there would be a huge void created in the council’s workload and there would be all this spare capacity and time to do things, but no one knew just what those
things were. Other questions arose, such as: is local government still relevant, and what is its role? Should some councils be looking to amalgamate to bring the remaining services up to a size that would create savings for ratepayers? What new services could be provided by councils in the future, now that we will apparently have all this spare time on our hands?
These types of questions helped lead to the formation of a government-sponsored working
group that has now been tasked with finding some answers. But there lies a glaringly obvious blooper. Wouldn’t it have been a much more logical process to ask the Future of Local Government questions before the Three Waters were removed from councils? Had that been the case, there may well have been a different outcome for that flawed model and our mindset would be completely different as we ponder our future.
Now, the FFLG reforms look like a process that is just looking for new
services for councils to provide and that collectively, we are destined to be thrown some crumbs to keep us all happy (maybe) and busy. An oftenheard phrase in governance is “be careful what you wish for” and my political antennas are sending me this message on these reforms.
The last thing councils need is to become the dumping ground for all the services that government and others don’t want to provide or have difficulty doing so. Just imagine the glee on the faces of the bureaucrats in Wellington if the reforms resulted in all their problematic services and the issues that burden them, suddenly disappeared and became the problems for councils. Instead of being blamed for all the shortcomings, they would be the ones doing the blaming.
At the seminar I referred to at the start of this article, there was an abundance of people advocating for councils to take on the provision of some health and education services. I wonder if anyone has bothered to tell the professionals and government ministries who are already providing these services? I wonder, would councils do any better job? I wonder, wouldn’t councils just confront the same problems and obstacles these agencies do?
While the notion that local people with local knowledge providing local services has great appeal and can be highly successful in specific ways, it also comes with risks. It needs to be made clear, that any service provision that government divests to councils needs to come with an adequate funding package and resources to support those services.
We’ve seen it in the past, where tasks have been imposed upon councils but not supported with any suitable funding mechanism. This has resulted in ratepayers being left to pick up the cost. How crazy it would be, for councils to ask for the opportunity to provide different services and then be clobbered with unwanted added costs.
I want to be positive about the reforms, but I have reservations. Councils need to be very careful what we wish for and not look for a solution before we know what the problem is.