Ross Martin: Time for break from centre

SCOTS are being asked to vote for their council today, but so few of us realise that we can change the shape of local politics – and the services they provide – forever, writes Ross Martin

SCOTS are being asked to vote for their council today, but so few of us realise that we can change the shape of local politics – and the services they provide – forever, writes Ross Martin

IN SCHOOLS and other buildings all over Scotland today, public services are being disrupted. Not by industrial action or the protestations of community groups campaigning to halt a housing development in their back yard. Nor is this service disruption caused by budget cuts – not yet at least. What we are witnessing, and we are mainly bystanders, is the very process which will determine whether more disruption is inevitable. This is the election of Scotland’s 32 local councils, and it’s happening in a school hall near you.

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These elections will decide which members of the public from within each community, on a ward-by-ward basis, will be responsible for decisions which will last a lifetime. They will decide how many schools will close, which swimming pools survive being drained of cash, where will savings in the social work budget be made?

Scottish local government is facing a prolonged period of budgetary restraint which will test your local council, and the individual councillors who constitute it, like never before.

After ten years of significant growth, when public service problems were solved using yet more pound signs, we are entering a period of active restraint. Restraint in public expenditure, but active in terms of political desire to do things better, to improve public services in response to increasing expectations.

How will local authorities cope with this supply-and-demand dilemma? Is it possible to articulate and deliver a service improvement in a period of restraint? Let’s look at education, the largest local authority service, accounting for between a third and a half of each council’s spend.

Never mind fewer education authorities, although we are already seeing operations merge, we have far too many schools in Scotland, at least based on our current model of provision.

Built for the baby boomers, our crumbling education estate is a classic example of over supply and too little demand. Too many of our councils have failed this basic demand management test.

An additional problem is the talent and brain drain of experienced senior councillors who, having shown their loyalty to their local electorate through the transition to the new voting system and not having taken the golden goodbye that was offered at the time, have now decided that it is time to hand over the municipal baton to the next generation. Of course, there will be no shortage of individual councillors, representing parties or not, coveting the commemorative chains of civic office, deftly side-stepping the tough political decisions to come, but experienced, wise councillor counsel may well be in shorter supply.

The byzantine bureaucracy by which council leaderships are still selected, on the basis of how many senior positions can be allocated within the budget rather than through consideration of service need, often ignores or are simply disengaged from the democratic will of the electorate.

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Chance would be a fine thing, an engaged electorate determining who runs which public service.

It is more than ten years since the creation of the Scottish Parliament and a political term longer since our unitary councils were first elected, but very little has changed. We now need new ideas, new thinking, new ways of working to put the local back into local government and get things done.

The challenge for our incoming councillors is simple. Think, and do things differently. Physicist Albert Einstein is a hero of mine. He pointed out that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome was the very definition of insanity. Well, we need to change how we design, develop and deliver local public services.

Here are three initial ideas:

l Introduce elected mayors in Scotland’s cities. If it is good enough for pretty much the rest of the world then what’s wrong with Scotland?

l Grow Scotland’s small company base by working with the likes of the Federation of Small Businesses to deliver, and better design, localised parts of our public services. From accounting to architecture, grass-cutting to graphic design and planning to plumbing, we could see a huge expansion in small businesses, diversifying local economies and strengthening the national one.

l Identify which members of the council workforce, nearing retirement or not, have the skills and interest to support the development of social enterprises. This would provide the glue which binds our local communities together.

Of course, there are other ideas out there in local manifestos for parties and independent candidates, as one of the encouraging features of this campaign is that it is much more localised, with more variation around the country, rather than the uniform approach usually taken when the council elections are on the same day as a national vote.

I’ve been travelling around the seven cities to get a flavour of individual campaigns and been very encouraged by the diversity of policy options on offer, both within and across the parties.

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We have seen from Labour a push for the co-operative council model in Edinburgh, where they are seeking an alternative to the failed attempt at outsourcing services in order to both improve quality and drive down costs.

The SNP’s key policy pitch in the Highlands is to greatly strengthen the city committee in Inverness, its regional capital, investing the power to improve economic infrastructure along with a range of new functions to bring decision making to the local level.

In Glasgow, the Greens are making the running, looking to ensure an environmentally sustainable legacy is left from the Commonwealth Games, and, in Aberdeen, the Lib Dems are fighting a very hard localised campaign which effectively seeks to insulate them from the negativity of their coalition at the UK level.

Of course, the Tories support the direct election of mayors, and with Boris Johnson set to thump Ken Livingstone in London, who can blame them for trying to reconnect with a Scottish electorate which has remained stubbornly resistant to their political charms.

This campaign is being fought in 32 council areas, and we are also seeing signs of localism showing through many other campaigns, with central party headquarters apparently enabling local parties to flex their muscles and dare to be different.

This policy space allows for local variation, for trial and error for the flying of policy kites – useful in the run-up to the independence referendum.

This election will also see the likely increase in the number of independent councillors as the drift away from political parties continues.

It is not yet clear what individual characteristics or policy initiatives may come to the fore as the inevitable coalition discussions get underway this weekend.

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However, it is likely that independent councillors will play a bigger role than before in shaping Scottish local government.

As the Scottish electorate considers the council elections and whether they should vote, they should bear in mind that, due to a likely low turnout, each individual vote will be more important than ever before, helping to determine the shape and character of every local council. So the challenge today is to the electorate to use the hard-fought-for opportunity to play their part in democracy and put the local back into local government.

• Ross Martin is director of policy at the Centre for Scottish Public Policy – www.cspp.org.uk