Peter Black

The BBC reports on a Welsh Government Cabinet paper that seeks to bring order to the way that local Councils collaborate but only succeeds in raising questions about the Government's own direction.

On the one hand they are promoting four regional consortia to deliver education in Wales, on the other they are now seeking to decree that all future collaboration should take place within six defined regions, that have different boundaries to those already being promoted by the Education Minister.

They also say that existing collaborative projects will remain unaffected despite the fact that many of those involve groupings of local authorities different to both the other two. This is not leadership, it is floundering in the dark.

Taken with recent Welsh government legislation that allows ministers to pass an order forcing the amalgamation of two or three local councils, this latest document looks more and more like reorganisation by the back door. It is a further sign that the government is dodging key questions about how public services are delivered in Wales. Why for example does it proscribe collaboration within local health board boundaries but make no mention of jointly delivering services with those organisations? What about the further and higer education sector or the police?

We need a debate on the future shape of local councils that includes worked up options and principles for reorganisation that includes all locally delivered public services. What we have instead are Ministers saying one thing in private but who are in denial in public. Their approach has more in common with bullying than leadership. They seem afraid to start up a public discussion for fear of what it might lead to.

In an attempt to once more get things moving on this point I have reproduced an article I wrote for WalesHome back in March 2010:

Trust the people: time to devolve from the Assembly

THERE is a question to be posed about where local government will fit into a newly empowered Welsh Assembly, making laws within the ambit of the 20 fields of competence granted by the Government of Wales Act 2006.

In the new system of governance, there is a wider debate as to what structures we need to deliver services to a nation of three million people and, in particular, whether 22 local councils and seven health boards are appropriate vehicles to spend the bulk of the Assembly’s £15 billion budget.

My view is that we most probably need bigger and fewer councils but that the main debate should be around the democratisation and accountability of service delivery as much as its efficiency. In contrast, the Welsh Government’s agenda is becoming much clearer as we approach the next set of Assembly elections.

My concern is that in Labour and Plaid Cymru we have two very centralising parties whose objective is to emasculate local government. Already, we have heard calls for social services and education to be taken off local councils, while the intentions of other parties towards reorganisation remain secret. Ministers are seeking or have acquired legislative competence over the governance arrangements of schools and also over many new aspects of local councils but are not saying what they will do with it.

In fact, there seems to be a cross-party consensus that there will be a reorganisation of local government in Wales after the 2011 Welsh General Election, the problem is that nobody wants to talk about it until then and the chances of any coherence emerging from any of the other parties as to how they see the future structure of local government is negligible.

Motives are particularly important in this process. Everybody acknowledges that having 22 Councils means that a number are too small to achieve economies of scale and that there needs to be some reform to address this. However, there is no consensus on what the future map of Wales should look like. This issue needs to be addressed before the 2011 Welsh General Election not just because there is a need for a debate but also because how a party plans to reform our democratic structures goes to the heart of their vision for Wales.

Firstly, what is the role of the Welsh Government and of the National Assembly? Following a successful referendum, their role is to set out policy, to make laws and to deliver that through guidance and funding decisions. It is not their role to directly deliver services, nor in my view should they seek to set up other arms-length bodies or add to the role of existing bodies by passing over to them functions currently delivered by councils.

Secondly, how do we give people greater control over the decision-making process in their own areas? There are in fact many ways that this can be done but the starting point is to enable the democratically elected bodies that serve local communities, in this case the Welsh unitary authorities. These councils should be more accountable, constituted on a scale that can deliver services efficiently and encompass a broader range of responsibilities so as to produce a more strategic and joined up approach to governance.

To achieve this we should reforming local government so as to create eight or 10 unitary councils elected by the single transferable vote system in multi-member wards. There would be fewer councillors, approximately a third less, making between 800-900 across Wales but in return they would be better remunerated so that they could devote a substantial amount of time to delivering and scrutinising services and acting in a more strategic way. Each council would be run by a full time cabinet with no more than 10 councillors in each executive body and have a number of strategic directors.

At the same time, the heath boards should be disbanded and their functions should pass their functions to the democratically elected councils, thus creating a single health and social care function that would eliminate duplication and waste and be accountable to local electors not the centre.

And let’s not stop there. All of post 16 education needs to be transferred back to councils so that they could deliver the 14 to 19 agenda as a seamless whole and incorporate the very important vocational education delivered by further education colleges into their service provision.

Councils should also acquire greater strategic control of transport within their area including the power to deliver cross-modal transport solutions and a wider economic development remit. And these bigger unitary authorities should be the ones delivering regeneration initiatives such as Communities First on behalf of the Welsh Government, not the Government micro-managing it from the centre. There are many other central government functions that might be better delivered by such a strategic locally elected body. That is a matter for further discussion. My purpose here is to start a debate and to get people thinking about a way forward.

I am an instinctive democrat. My belief is in empowering local people and giving them a chance to influence the direction of services in their own area. Democracy may have its flaws and at a local level. We can all come up with a horror story that involves their local Council but ultimately it is for the electorate to cast the final verdict and with proportional voting that becomes much easier.

Instead of national politicians treating local government as scapegoats and indulging in playing blame games, let us find a way to work together as equals and in a way that for once delivers the sort of transparency and accountability that was promised when devolution was first voted on in 1997.