Steve Bishop: There are too many councils and we cost too much

Steve Bishop is strategic director for South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse District Councils

UK local government costs too much. It costs way more than it needs to. That’s why we keep meeting our sector savings targets. And it’s why the government is sensible to keep demanding more. Because we cost far more than we need to. And why? Because there are far too many councils for what’s needed to deliver UK local government services in the 21st century.

There are 433 principal councils in the UK:
201 districts
55 English unitaries
36 mets
32 London boroughs
32 Scottish unitaries
27 counties
26 Northern Irish districts
22 Welsh unitaries

Think of the duplication across so many organisations. Duplicated property assets; duplicated business rates; duplicated chief execs, directors and managers; duplicated subscriptions; duplicated software licences. Not to mention the diseconomies of small scale in so many organisations procuring individually from the many local government supply chains.

In 2005 Sir Peter Gershon estimated this unnecessary and inefficient duplication across the UK cost the country billions each year. And despite central and local government assertions to the contrary, most of the costs remain.

It is no surprise that the few councils so far prepared to partner up and share people, overheads and assets find savings so easy. Not simply because they are innovative, brave and pioneering… but because there is so much waste to grab so easily.

This is no criticism of the 1974 design of local government. It is hard to imagine now, but back then a council computer was a rarity. Those lucky few that existed had the processing power of a modern coffee percolator and the vast majority of council services depended on paper-based systems. Paper required people, armies of clerks, recorded and maintained the card systems and ledgers needed to keep track of residents, tax payers, customers, suppliers; even paper records to maintain stock control of the paper.

With any paper-based system there are logistical limits to the number of records a single manual database and team could be expected to maintain accurately. Hence the need for hundreds of council tax registers in England alone, hundreds of electoral rolls, and therefore hundreds of councils.

But now, in the 21st century, after 30 years of the silicon revolution, with year-on-year exponential evolution in processing power and digital capacity, we could just about handle the nation’s council tax records and billing off a single electronic system. Certainly half a dozen systems could cope, not the hundreds we have. Indeed, think of the big outsourcing firms who already undertake much of the council tax work – each has a single system which copes with dozens of council clients. The same is true of our other local authority systems such as business rates and waste collection, even the sacred cows such as planning, housing and elections require far fewer than the wasteful numbers of databases we artificially spread them across now. Each one needing more staff than necessary to maintain and use them.

Not only has IT speed and storage capacity outpaced our archaic council structures, but there have been similar revolutions in workforce management. Remote working, home-working, mobile working, flexitime, shared staffing were all alien concepts back in the 1970s civil service. But all have become embedded in society and again require fewer numbers of employers to manage them.

Then there’s strategic thinking and regionalism. Few councils can now drop their gaze at their own borders. With local enterprise partnerships, city deals, devolved traffic policy and the joined up health agenda, councils are now “forced” to participate and collaborate in a dizzyingly complex web of partnerships. How bewildering and confusing is this web for us council workers – imagine trying to explain it to Joe Public? They’d think we’re mad – no wonder it’s “broken Britain”. And how many are effective with member organisations sharing completely aligned objectives? Very few, instead we waste time defending our little corners and arguing the toss.

I haven’t mentioned two-tier madness yet. I’ve spent most of my working life lecturing family members, and anyone sad enough to listen, on the difference between district services and county services. My dad and sisters don’t realise the apoplexy I’m on the verge of when they refer to “the council’s road department” in the same sentence as “the council’s benefit hitlers” – when they live in a two tier area! Our British citizens just don’t get the difference, after 40 years of trying. So let’s quit trying and give them what they want – the simple notion of “the council”, which in our jargon means unitaries. Which would also make massive savings. And would improve the effectiveness of those services that should never have been sundered – such as waste collection with waste treatment and disposal.

So, the solution to all this wasted public money and effort? It’s simple: rationalise the number of councils. Be businesslike. The private sector is not always right, but it wouldn’t stand for an artificially large number of suppliers in the market. It would aggregate the hordes of smaller suppliers into a fewer number of larger suppliers to reduce overheads and reduce unit cost. We need to do the same.

We need to design UK local government for 2014 society, taking account of the many advances there have been since 1974. At the very least match new unitaries to LEP boundaries – only 39 in England. Wipe out the wasteful duplication and save billions. It’s not rocket science, after all, even the government has grasped the solution – but is only applying it in Northern Ireland and Scotland prior to the general election.

And what about localism? Is the 21st century British public passionately engaged with local issues, local politics, local democratic accountability? Are the polling stations straining from the hordes of citizens desperate to exercise their local vote? No. The massively expensive democratic machinery, dating back to the late 1940s is also archaic and out of date. So, replace it. Accepting that democracy, expensive though it has to be, is still preferable to the alternatives, let’s just keep it proportionate to the mood of the masses. Apathy does not justify localism. So 39 councils and councillor structures at the most it is then.

Now, 8,500 parish councils? That just won’t do…

Photo (cropped) by Judit Klein