The Local Government reform proposal is welcome but risky
Recently, First Minister John Swinney said that the current way we run Local Government in Scotland means that Local Authorities are “too big to be local and too small to be regional”. Except he didn’t really. He took that line, without credit, from Common Weal and our campaign for local democracy reform.
It’s a pity that he didn’t take more from us or even ask us for a briefing on our own work on the topic before yesterday’s surprise announcement of what could end up being the largest reorganisation of Scottish local government in more than 30 years.
The proposals are, at this stage, just a first stab at this plan, and as of the time of writing, it’s too early even for a public consultation (which we shall be engaged in), but even at this stage, there are messages worth picking up and informing you about.
The first is that, contrary to previous hints at the Government’s thinking in the Programme for Government, there is actually a local tier of democratic governance in this proposal (the PfG stated only that local communities would be able to “influence local decisions”, not control them). New districts (formally called “Community Authorities”) will be formed by splitting the current Local Authorities into 3-5 sections, forming between 120-160 local government bodies across Scotland, which will elect Councillors using the same multi-member ward, STV system of voting that Local Authority Councillors are currently elected on.
Simultaneously, the current Local Authority boundaries will be merged so that 32 Councils will become between six and ten Regional Authorities. These will not have elected members or a separate vote, but instead each District Councillor will double-job as a Regional Councillor too.
And this leads to a major problem. The dash to prevent the need for “more politicians” (both on cost grounds and likely to avoid political backlash) puts the plan in a double-bind.
As Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland has pointed out, if Scotland maintains the current number of Councillors at 1,227, then District Councils become very small with between 7 and 10 members each. But doing this means that each Regional Council becomes extremely large, with as many as 200 members sitting on it. One workaround would be to cap the Regional Councils at, say, 100 members, but this means either that Districts have to decide who to nominate to sit at the Regional level or, worse, Communities that used to be served collectively by around 30 or 40 Local Authority Councillors could find themselves electing as few as four members to run their District. It would be almost trivial for a political party clique to take complete control of their District. This is not democratic.
And this is before we even touch issues like which powers each tier of government has, how the reform threatens to further delay important issues like Council Tax reform, where Councillors will physically work, or what happens to powerful local lobbying bodies like Cosla (we’ll have more to say about each of these topics in our Friday Magazine, so subscribe to it here).
Common Weal’s own plans for local democratic reform, which would be focused on a “local first” approach, can be read in our blueprint for Development Councils. One key difference is that our proposal would be based on setting up new municipal scale councils and allowing them to “draw down” powers from Local Authorities as and when they need them – only once enough Development Councils have permanently pulled powers down to a local level that the Local Authorities are left with the larger scale strategic powers would they then consider merging into Regional Authorities to better use them.
We welcome this long-overdue opportunity for local government reform, but we’re very aware of risks embedded within the current proposals, which point towards them being floated at this time without nearly enough development behind them. We shall await the public consultation and will engage with it when it is launched.