Today’s local elections matter, but the campaigns have missed the real issues

HOW many Tories does it take a fill a pothole? Four — including an elected Mayor and Prime Minister. That was the message seemingly sent out by surely the most bizarre photocall of the 2023 local election campaign.

I am certain the Tory spin doctors set it up to try to convey the sense that the Prime Minister is in touch with grassroots issues.

Another, less charitable interpretation of the image of four men staring at a hole in a road in Darlington — including the most powerful person in the land — is that it finally provided proof that English councils have been hollowed out to such an extent that even potholes are now a prime ministerial issue.

If national government cared about local government — and truly respected it — we would be living in a more functional country where more could be done at a local level and the fabric of local communities would be in a better state.

But it doesn’t and we don’t.

Ever since the Eighties, local government in England has been in demise. Whitehall distrust of “loony” local councils led to their powers being whittled away, particularly over areas like education. In the last decade, their spending power has shrunk dramatically.

The net effect of all this is that every new cycle of council elections becomes a less enjoyable experience for the councillors involved. Each time they go to the polls their local problems have got bigger but their ability to do anything about them has got smaller.

At some point, national politicians are surely going to have to throw their local colleagues a lifeline. They can’t keep relegating council issues to the sidelines. There is going to have to be a recognition that councils actually hold the key to some of the major national issues we face.

Take the housing crisis. Will it be fixed by greater promotion of home ownership or the building of more social housing?

I would argue firmly for the latter — but, in this campaign, there has been more focus on the former.

This is presumably because political advisers say more aspirational policies play better in focus groups and they want to use the local elections to build awareness of general election pledges.

Perhaps — but there is a very big problem with this approach: it most likely makes the housing crisis worse, through the inflationary effect of schemes like Help to Buy, and therefore the job of local councils even harder. Surely local elections should be about policies which do the opposite?

I hope I live to see the day when council elections are used to debate true council issues, like council or social housing, and which party has got the best plan for it. It might prove more of a vote-winner than they realise.

The same problem is at play with the NHS.

In this campaign, more pledges have been made about the NHS than about social care. But, as an ex-Health Secretary, I am confident when I say that a major drive to help councils improve social care would be the quickest and most cost-effective way of easing NHS pressures.

So why doesn’t it happen? Because the political orthodoxy in Westminster is that focus groups only respond to messages about the NHS and therefore it is a waste to commit resources to councils, which voters don’t care about.

At some point, we have to break out of this simplistic thinking. We need to build our councils back up so they can play a meaningful role in the fixing of national problems.

We are going to have to re-learn what people understood in the Fifties and Sixties: that some issues are better led by local government than national government.

As power over education has increasingly concentrated in national hands, so the obsession with the university route has become ever more dominant. It is local government which always had a much greater understanding of the value of technical education. When councils had more control, education in England was more balanced between academic and technical.

To be fair to the Government, it has given Greater Manchester the chance to re-prove this point with the granting of extra powers in our new “Trailblazer” devolution deal.

It is a big chance for local government in England to show it can still come up with better solutions. We fully intend to rise to the occasion.

We now need to build our councils back up so they can play a meaningful role in the fixing of national problems