Localism can set the people free
Author: Lord Heseltine, Daily Telegraph |
The size and scope of government, both local and national, is on the political agenda at the Conservative party conference in Manchester this week. Yet the first observation to make about local government is that it is hardly local at all. In essence, it is an extension of a variety of Whitehall Departments.
Depressingly, there is a similarity here with much of our national structure in which corporate headquarters, financial institutions, quangoland and the National Health Service, for example, overwhelmingly look to London for more than they used to and certainly more than they should have to. Over the past half century, the process has led to an alarming accumulation of central power and the separation of local knowledge from corporate strategy and government policy-making.
The attempted nationalisation of the so-called commanding heights of the economy, post war confiscatory tax rates that destroyed much private capital and denied its replacement, tax privileges to quoted companies in their takeover of private firms, the growth of the London-based state, the hollowing out of local government activity in favour of unaccountable and undemocratic quangos and the ever more detailed constraint of what discretion remained to our municipalities have erected a monopolistic society unlike other advanced economies.
I think an essential feature of the practice and philosophy of the Conservative Party is choice. ?Set the people free? is amongst our most evocative clarion calls. The political world has wrestled with the public wish to do just this and reverse the post war trend. This has, in fairness, led to a degree of delegation to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But the English institutional straight jacket remains as firmly buttoned as it has ever been.
The tax changes of the mid-80s began a process of economic regeneration that is showing conspicuous benefits in provincial England, while the privatisation process has returned power from whence it should never have been removed.
But government remains too large, too centralised, too rigid. Here lies an opportunity. We need a refreshing wind of change that empowers local government, including through the election of directly elected mayors to focus the attention of their communities on the complex interdependent challenges they face rather than a system where local officials wait for the latest grant or the attendant instruction from Whitehall. We need mechanisms that drive communities together, embracing academia, the private sector, the voluntary sector and others with a stake in our society to seek solutions designed in the circumstances on the ground and not forged as a national ?one solution fits all? diktat from London.
The regeneration competitions, City Challenge, of the 1990s, provide a useful template. The trigger on the starting pistol is there to see. Billions of pounds are spent every year through quangos which have received the cash that would once have been channeled through local government. Give them the chance to get it back. Watch a new era of Victorian-style municipal entrepreneurship help us out of the suffocating centralism that now dominates too many procedures and attitudes.
The report ‘Can Localism Deliver’, published today by Localis and Policy Exchange, is an important contribution to the debate on city regions. It is vital that policymakers take into account the lessons learnt from Manchester if we are to move forward into a new era of localism.