The government’s local government reforms are good: that’s why we’re worried

Common Weal is very positive (and indeed very pleasantly surprised) by the latest iteration of the Scottish Government's proposals for local government reform. The desired destination is a genuine breakthrough in what has otherwise been a march to increased centralisation in Scotland. Our positivity is why we are worried...

We have published a briefing today (reported in the Herald) to support the planning reforms but raise alarm about the method proposed for achieving them. We fear that they will be almost impossible to deliver at anything other than a cost which will derail the process.

Our overriding fear is that by setting out on a path which isn't properly considered beforehand, we could end up where we did with the National Care Service, another Scottish Government policy Common Weal strongly supported but which failed.

The main reason for our concern is that the current proposals state that they will 'dissolve' the existing local authorities and rebuild them as a much smaller number of regional authorities but with a much more local tier of democracy below that – in effect the return of the Regional and District Councils which were abolished in the 1993 reforms.

And that is the start of our worries; the Local Government (Amendment) Act 1993 used the same broad methods that are being proposed here and the cost of the reorganisation was assessed as costing about £1.1 billion in today’s money. And that was before the era of management consultancy and when the demands of redoing an IT system were much less onerous.

We suspect there will be little if any change from £2 billion if that path is followed. Why is it so expensive? Because 260,000 members of staff have to be given entirely new contracts with new organisations. TUPE rules apply so since pay scales in different authorities will not be identical, you have to increase the pay of whomever is lower to get them on the same pay scale.

Merging just two Local Authorities into one Regional Authority (never mind the three to five LAs per RA implied by these proposals) means you end up with two chief executives, two heads of finance, two heads of personnel – but you also end up with two HR departments, two child placement services, two different waste collection contracts potentially with two different suppliers.

IT systems will not match and will need replaced or upgraded, and it is very likely that the underlying data is not formatted in exactly the same way – Ms Jane Smith and Miss Jane R Smith may be the same person. Every logo, every business card, all signage, every website, it all needs to be redone. And that is before we get to the cost of merging cultures which can often be the hardest part of bringing two organisations together.

These are all the concerns we encountered when we did our work on local government reform. The question was never where we wanted to get to but how we thought we could get there. And a rapid structural merger seemed to be a bad way to do it.

We instead set out a convergence strategy. If you create the lower tier of local authorities first (we argued for an action-focussed rather than administration-focussed model we called Development Councils) and let them bed in you address the biggest problem immediately.

There should be no structural complication in doing so – these are new and additional and you can think in terms of very greatly beefing-up community councils or putting in place sort of more democratic development trusts and you get a picture of the comparative manageability.

Once those are established we proposed perhaps a ten-year convergence strategy between local authorities. When a local authority puts out a new waste collection contract, it would be coordinated with the other authorities it will merge with so that their respective contracts are harmonised. Data would be coordinated gradually rather than via one expensive redesign contract.

Computer systems can move closer together, salary scales can be brought in line over time, towards the end of the process senior staff reaching retirement would not be replaced as authorities moved closer together. Eventually the cost of combining authorities would be lowered to a level which would not cause concern and the risks of disruption would be greatly reduced.

We want to get to the same broad place as the Scottish Government but we want to get there via a route that gives it the best possible chance of success. A 'big bang' reform does not seem to us to be the safest path to take. It is brave but risky and it would be extremely disappointing if it led to this policy not being implemented.

This is a case where pursuit of speed cannot be allowed to derail progress to a destination.