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ViewsJanuary 20th, 2014
Today’s report from the Williams Commission has – as was widely expected – recommended that Wales’s 22 local authorities merge into between 10 and 12.
Anyone who worked in local government in the mid 1990s will surely experience a sense of deja vu. While the method of announcement is different – the fastest way of getting the various White Papers on the 1996 reorganisation was to watch them spew out of the fax machine – the message is depressingly the same: the current arrangements aren’t quite right, we need bigger councils with boundaries coterminous with others, and we need more efficient and effective services. Even the climate of austerity is not that dissimilar – don’t forget the early 1990s were so tough that many authorities had no capital allocation for a few years.
The truth is that there is no perfect solution.
Wales’s geography does not lend itself to easy sub-division into neat, similarly-sized units. Any line on a map that reflects community identity will, with the exception of Wales’s cities and big towns, result in very small local councils. Any line on a map drawn to meet size criteria will result in behemoth councils, remote from ordinary people geographically and struggling for an identity. It’s no accident that some councils created in the 1996 reorganisation ended up with names that meant little to the average Mr or Ms Jones.
Public services also require different spatial scales – even the old county councils felt that they were too small to deal with transport and economic development, coming together into a south Wales wide ‘Standing Conference on Regional Policy in South Wales’, while services such as managing community halls and grass cutting can be successfully managed at very local levels. Arguably, even the Williams Commission’s reinvented county councils* aren’t big enough for transport and economic development, yet are perhaps too big for community-level services.
The impact of reorganisation mustn’t be forgotten.
My own experience of the 1996 reorganisation was that re-arranging the deck-chairs paralyses local authorities for 3-5 years. The run-up to change is marked by good staff leaving or retiring, while those who are left jockey for position. And any change to policies or services that is remotely radical is off the agenda in case the successor authority doesn’t like it or can’t implement it. The period after reorganisation is taken up with yet more jockeying for position, sorting out IT, HR, harmonising services and disposing of unnecessary items from town halls to desks.
If we want to delay innovation, efficiency and improvement then reorganisation or merger is a sure-fire way to do it.
Much more important than the number of councils and their boundaries is what they do, how well they do it and at what cost, and whether it is what people want or need.
The Williams Commission report has some very valuable contributions to these issues, as does our own pamphlet by Mike Hedges (published today and available here) and the contribution on Click on Wales. Sadly, debates about leadership, scrutiny and remuneration don’t make good headlines and are without doubt even more difficult to achieve than local government reorganisation.
But it is these – not boundaries – which should be the focus of attention if Welsh people are to get the public services they so desperately need.
Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation. She worked in a county council from 1987 to 1996 and then at the Welsh Local Government Association to 2002.
*The resulting map bears an astonishing resemblance to the pre-1996 county councils – Mid Glamorgan (minus Caerphilly and Bridgend) re-appears as Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil are recommended to merge; South Glamorgan is revived as Cardiff and the Vale are proposed to merge; ‘big Gwynedd’ re-emerges as Anglesey and little Gwynedd are suggested as bed-fellows and even the former Dyfed is a possibility if Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion merge. The rest of Williams’ proposed authorities are essentially split counties – so Gwent North (Caerphilly – Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen) and Gwent South (Newport and Monmouthshire), Clwyd East (Wrexham and Flintshire) and Clwyd West (Conwy and Denbighshire), and so on.
Williams concludes that he was right from the beginning when he asserted his mantra that government in Wales is cluttered with too many small organisations which make life too complex and that we would be better off with fewer, larger principal local authorities.
The report dismisses the evidence that in Wales, as across the globe, performance is not related to scale by referring to the number of small authorities subject to special measures by the regulators. The reality is that regulators are obsessed by process not outputs – and large authorities please regulators when they throw mountains of resource at process.
The report dismisses the examples of countries throughout Europe who have smaller local authorities than Wales but at the same time have higher levels of performance across wider functional responsibilities – including the health service.
We will only make Wales a better place when we make citizens and communities ever more engaged in their own health, their own learning, their own environment and economy. We will not achieve these goals by putting an ever greater distance between people and government. Williams aims to make that distance larger in Wales than in any other country in Europe – by a long way.