Question. What do current local government reforms, and the context in which they are unfolding, have in common with the late 1960s and early 70s?
Well, in 1969, Derek Senior, dissenting member of the Redcliffe-Maud Royal Commission, published his alternative blueprint for the biggest shake-up of local government in nearly a century.
The context was challenging. The long post-war economic boom was faltering and the country’s ability to go on financing the seemingly inexorable expansion of the welfare state was in question.
The then Labour government’s decision to devalue the pound in the face of a balance of payments crisis had gone down like a lead balloon. The political map of local government had turned blue overnight and Labour would be turfed out of national office within a year.
The forecasters were nonetheless telling Senior and his colleagues that the pattern of urban economic growth and suburban living that had transformed the post-war landscape would continue for the foreseeable future, generating strategic and operational challenges that a chaotic and fragmented system of local government was ill-equipped to face.
Senior’s advice was simple: ‘think city-regions’. Accept that some places are simply bigger, more important and more complex than others and let that principle drive the creation of a country-wide, two-tier local government system.
Within that system, create new lower-tier districts, big enough to achieve economies of scale, to deliver day-to-day services. Group as many districts as are needed to create administrative units that match ‘the realities of social geography’ together under new, upper-tier, city-regional authorities responsible for strategic decisions on economic and land-use planning, transport and the environment.
Senior even produced a map showing how the country, outside London, could be divided into 35 functionally inter-dependent city-regions. It was a neat, simple and visionary solution of which the Conservative government that eventually introduced the 1974 local government reforms took virtually no notice.
Wind forward to 2011 and an even more challenging context. The phrase ‘city-regions’ is banned because it contains the dreaded ‘R’ word but the forecasters are again predicting that the new agglomeration economies that have accompanied the transition from an industrial to a knowledge-driven economy will ensure that our major cities drive economic and demographic change for the foreseeable future.
This time, national government is watching as local authorities struggle to form themselves into groups that roughly equate to ‘natural economic areas’ and claim the right to establish new local enterprise partnerships (LEPs).
Simultaneously, and largely in parallel, those same authorities, faced with the ‘frontloading’ of the biggest national funding cuts on record, are desperately searching around for ways of sharing staff, buildings, kit and service-commissioning responsibilities in order to realise economies of scope and scale. New geographies of service provision are emerging, but they bear little resemblance to those that authorities have chosen for LEPs.
Is it just me, or are we in danger of missing the same trick that Derek Senior brought to our attention all those years ago? Help me use this column to find out.