Councils have good reason to fear Pickles
Telegraph View: The Local Government Secretary knows how to expose the fantasy world of town hall culture, having been a council leader himself.
7:25PM GMT 18 Feb 2011
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The chief executives of eight local councils in Greater London earn either the same as, or considerably more than, the President of the United States. This may strike us as an unbelievable state of affairs – but no doubt the council "CEOs", as they increasingly style themselves, think they're worth it. Over the past few years, local government has acquired West Wing-style airs and graces. Council leaders preside over "cabinets" and are protected by cohorts of "support teams" whose function is as much to do with circulating propaganda about services as providing the services themselves. The communications unit of Haringey council in north London, for example, has been running an exercise called "Did you know…?" to foist statistics on its residents. Strangely, it has yet to ask them whether they know that the unit – according to its own lavish website – employs 28 people, or that its marketing budget is £4 million.
This is the culture that Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Local Government, wants to dismantle. This week, he announced plans to force councillors to hold full meetings to scrutinise their senior executives' pay deals. The Local Government Association, while perfectly happy for its members to accept most of their funding from Whitehall, regards this as impertinent "top-down" interference. After all, it points out, senior council salaries are already published. That is true – but until Mr Pickles started making a fuss this week, most members of the public had no idea that 220 council employees earned more than the Prime Minister's salary of £142,500. As we reveal today, Phil Dolan, the outgoing chief executive of South Somerset district council, earned almost £570,000 last year.
Mr Pickles knows exactly how to expose the fantasy world of local government, having been a council leader himself. He has, for example, declared war on the "town hall Pravda printing presses" that are destroying genuine local newspapers – thereby conveniently exempting local authorities from independent criticism. The Government's new code of conduct will ban councils from publishing their own so-called papers more than four times a year.
But knowing town hall culture as well as he does, Mr Pickles will be aware that he faces formidable opponents. Councils have spent years building up complex structures whose purpose is to justify excessive spending. The spending review has given them a new reason to exist: to blame the Coalition for cutting front-line services while quietly ensuring that it is indeed headline-grabbing services rather than bureaucracy that are cut back.
The Local Government Secretary has no time to lose. He must start a national debate about the proper function of local government before the worst cuts bite and the flow of propaganda from high-spending councils to the liberal media becomes unstoppable. To do so, Mr Pickles must ultimately go beyond drawing attention to the three million "non-jobs" in local government: he must encourage us to ask fundamental questions. For example, are simple revenue-generating operations, such as residents' parking permits, really the remit of local government? Are leisure centres, however popular, best run from the public sector? Does the council tax system go far enough in forcing town halls to justify their spending?
The immediate priority, however, must be to give the public more information about hidden council waste – some of which, it should be pointed out, is generated by Conservative councillors with delusions of grandeur. For example, we need to know more about procurement, a subject that many councils prefer not to discuss but, again, something that Mr Pickles has the inside knowledge to investigate. If that provokes more accusations of top-down interference, then so be it: most of the money spent by local government comes from the centre, and it is high time that Parliament interfered with the process of dribbling it away.
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