Michael Kelly: Police have right to quiz services

Our police rarely have the ability to surprise us. However, just when I thought that the new Police Scotland had abandoned any sense of priority and had decided to concentrate resources on monitoring thought crimes expressed in song at football matches, a senior officer comes up with a sensible topic for discussion and action. Chief Superintendent David O’Connor will be urging the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents at its conference, which begins today, to call for an examination of the cost and structure of Scotland’s local government and health services.

This officer does not appear to be basing his proposal on any profound concern for the community or even John Swinney’s budget. It’s more a bit of tit for tat. The police have had to suffer severe financial cutbacks and painful reform. So, Chief Supt O’Connor concludes: “We cannot be expected to bear the brunt of cuts alone.” Well, yes you can, if other areas are political priorities.

As public policy expert Professor Richard Kerley was quick to point out, the police reforms have only just been implemented. There has been no time to determine exactly how much has been saved in terms of public expenditure, much less to assess the efficacy of the reforms in respect of improved services. However, Kerley goes too far with his damnation of the proposal when he calls it “simplistic and immature”.

Whether or not this idea springs from a desire in the police to make all public servants suffer equally and whether or not we can use police and fire service reforms as a template for how it should be done elsewhere in areas funded by the taxpayer, it is right to ask whether or not local government or the bureaucracy to meet society’s burgeoning demand for health services need examination and reform.

Many of us have lived through three types of local government systems – the days of corporations for the cities, county councils and minor authorities; the regions and districts; and the abolition of the regions to create one-tier authorities. None was perfect, despite the enormous sums spent on the two reorganisations and the tremendous disruption and confusion caused by the introduction of the remote regions by the Wheatley Commission in the 1970s. By failing to base his authorities around the cities, Wheatley created an unnatural system that simply demanded change.

When that change came in the 1990s, the Tory government used it to assuage the feelings of what grass-roots it still had and created a lot of small, inefficient councils: 32 is far too many for a country of five million people. There is no economic justification for retaining Clackmannanshire with its population of 50,000 and a budget of only £120 million spent by 18 councillors and the whole range of directors and their staff.

Last week, the Taxpayers Alliance highlighted the number of local authority officers earning salaries above what it claimed was paid in the private sector for similar roles. However, local government needs good chief officers. The way to cut unnecessary expense is to reduce duplication and avoid having to pay 32 chief executives, directors of housing, directors of planning, directors of social work and their deputies and so on.

Local government could easily be made more efficient by incorporating many mainland local authorities into their nearest city council. There would be many other advantages of scale in the provision of services. Making cities the hubs of local government would eliminate the anomaly of rich people in affluent suburbs enjoying lower local taxes while exploiting the amenities and services of their big brothers whose citizens have to shell out for the real cost of providing all a city has to offer in the way of employment and leisure.

The more remote areas of Scotland, particularly the islands, need different attention. Recent business visits to Shetland have brought home to me just how remote Inverness, far less Edinburgh, feels to the northern isles. Communities more removed from the centre of power would need to retain an effective, democratically accountable local authority, which would mean tolerating some smaller councils that could reflect the diverse nature, history and culture of these different communities.

The bolder question is whether or not in an era of devolution – or if we move on to devo-max – local government is really necessary? It began in its modern form when Victorian governments realised that to tackle the social problems arising from industrialisation, authority had to be granted locally to provide water supplies, gas and to handle problems of bad housing and sewage. Now that we have 129 elected MSPs handling the work that used to be carried out by five ministers at the Scottish Office, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify a lower layer of political administration.

Our part-time MSPs, needing to find something with which to fill their time, have been systematically removing power from local authorities. They have curtailed the tax-raising and spending discretions of local government by insisting, under threat of severe penalty, that council taxes be frozen and by decreasing the funding they offer to councils. Councils have been reduced from being decision makers reacting to local sentiment expressed through the ballot box to the role of service providers for the Scottish Government. Their democratic function of ensuring local people get the local government they want has been subverted.

The issue Chief Supt O’Connor is, rightly, raising is that the value for money delivered by local authorities is not apparent. The value of their services is, without doubt, apparent but the time has come to ask whether these services might be delivered just as effectively, and more cheaply, through a central mechanism. This runs counter to all the conventional wisdom, which favours pushing power down. But it is the result of devolution to a controlling government determined to brook no resistance to it policies at local level. Local government’s role as a counter balance to the centre has been neutered. If that is not restored, it might as well be scrapped.