Councils should be close to their communities
The English Devolution White Paper is a difficult document for many District Councils’ Network (DCN) member councils to absorb. However, now is a time to be constructive.
We wholeheartedly back the Government’s aim of extending devolution nationwide. Relatively few district council areas currently have combined authority mayors, but our communities’ desire for empowerment is no less than those in metropolitan areas, in which mayors are the norm.
While DCN accepts structural reform in some cases, we oppose the setting of a minimum population size of 500,000 for new unitary councils. We believe this is a straitjacket that is irresponsive to local geographies and economies. Councils should be close to their communities and there is a danger that local democracy is diminished if councils are this big.
We are also sceptical about many of the claims of huge savings, and alive to the potential for reorganisation to prove a distraction from service delivery. The Government wants us to prioritise housebuilding and jobs – as do we – and the danger is that this gets in the way.
Services provided by district councils – including housing, waste collection, business and economic development, leisure centres and parks – should be enhanced by reform, rather than running the risk of being sidelined as new councils have to focus on plugging gaps in social care budgets.
If we are moving to a new system, it must work better for our citizens and businesses than what we have now. The aim should be to design a local public sector that is best equipped to meet the challenges of the coming decades, rather than to shave a relatively small amount, if any, from budgets now. We should be seeking to move towards preventing problems rather than dealing with their consequences. The citizen and community should be at the centre of both the vision for the future and the debate now, rather than an inconvenient afterthought. The danger of rushing local government reorganisation is that you end up with new councils that are inferior to what they should be.
DCN and our member councils want to work alongside our counterparts in the rest of local government to devise a new system that works. New unitary councils must be small enough to be genuinely local, democratically accountable to communities and focused on delivery. We also believe the debate should consider how best to inject democratic accountability and responsiveness to neighbourhoods into the entire local public sector. This could be an opportunity to tackle the silos between social care and the NHS, community safety and policing, and all public services – not just county and district.
District councils have no monopoly on wisdom – and the same is true of counties and unitaries, mayors and central government. By working together, we’re more likely to be successful, but the chances for positive results will surely be greater still if we involve our communities and businesses.
DCN holds its hand out to the rest of the sector – we are your partners. Together, let’s make this work for our communities. Together, let’s be ambitious.