Keep Britain small

PERSONAL COLUMN ANTONY JAY

Regionalism, administrative reorganisation, constitutional reform: they are all in the air at the moment, and the air is a lot fresher for it. But there is a terrible danger that, when the revolution comes, it will be a bureaucrats' revo- lution: aimed at making it easier for officials to run our lives for us: a danger that we will then find the irritations caused by inept bureaucratic interference replaced by the deeper frustration caused by strong and efficient bureaucratic control. It will not be done from malice or lust - for power, merely for convenience and organisational logic. But the logic of the ad- ministrator rests on different premises from the logic of the ordinary citizen. What is tan- talising is that they do not have to clash: there is, if only we can grasp it, an opportunity to let the necessary bureaucratic revolution take place and at the same time give back to the ordinary citizen the involvement, the influence and the importance which have been gradu- ally stripped from him over the past fifty years and more.

If we are to grasp this opportunity we must realise to start with that there is not one problem but three. The first is the White- hall problem, the problem which everyone is discussing. Quite simply, you can plan and direct the affairs of the nation from White- hall, but you cannot manage them. A great deal of executive authority for local and short- term decisions has to be delegated to regional government centres. The second problem is not quite so clear or so urgent when seen from above, but nevertheless it is recognised. It is the local authority problem.

It looks as if the first problem will be solved by the creation of a dozen or so regions of some four million people; that is to say, about the size of Finland or Denmark, and twice the size of Jordan or Lebanon. What happens then? At the moment- there is an illogical, jumbled assortment of county councils, county boroughs, non-county boroughs, urban districts, rural districts and parishes, interwoven with river boards and tourist boards and hospital boards and development commissions and white fish authorities, with a fine pattern of sports councils and forestry commissions and transport authorities and electricity boards and gas boards and telephone and postal services embroidered on the top. These and many others compose the tangled fabric of government as most of us encounter it, and obviously this, too, has to be reformed.

Regional government will unravel part of it by centralising much of the dispersed authority and simplifying the lines along which it is exer- cised, but it cannot of itself solve the problem of the authorities which are too small to plan investment, traffic flow, land use, etc, in any meaningful way, or to provide specialist ser- vices (e.g., schools for deaf children), or to pay salaries high enough to attract good people. This is a common management problem which industry normally solves by laver groupings, and all the research seems to suggest that government will do the same. The optimum size is put at about a quarter of a million, the size of the new London boroughs, and it looks as if units of this size will be created to solve the second problem. Looked at with an administrator's eyes, that just about wraps it up. Rural areas may need some smaller authority because of geographical dispersal, but the new London boroughs have shown that in the cities, where most of the population lives, bigness is the answer. The third problem, from that height, is invisible. If it does become visible, it is dismissed as in- soluble. But to the ordinary frustrated citizen, looking up from below, the third problem is not merely the most acute of them all, but also eminently susceptible of solution. If it is not solved, it will not be because it is too difficult but because it is too uncomfortable.

The third problem is harder to give a name to, because it lies at the root of our political

life. Some people see it as electoral apathy, some as political alienation, some as urban anonymity, some as the triumph of the ad- ministrative machine over the individual. The clearest evidence of it is that to most of us, above all in the new 'successful' London boroughs, the council is the enemy. The apathy which councillors lament is, in fact, impotence. And regional government and local authority reform, by creating larger units, will only accelerate the exclusion of the ordinary citizen . from any involvement in or control over the decisions which affect his daily life.

The third -problem is of a different order from the other two they are problems of bureaucracy, this is a problem of democracy. Bigness, which is the answer to the second problem, is the cause of the third. My own London borough has recently been enlarged to - nearly a third of a million, as large as Gambia, and larger than Barbados or Iceland, and yet it is the smallest unit of government. It has one councillor for each 5,000 of the population. This is such absurdly inadequate representation that political life, for nine tenths of us, simply does not exist unless the council invents it by closing our schools, cutting down our trees, replacing our lamp-posts or descend- ing on us in some other offensive way. Then we band together in residents and ratepayers' associations, without funds and without powers, to fight against the enormous despotic authority of our elected representatives backed by £13 million of our own money.

From time to time I stay with friends in a non-county borough. Administratively it may be an inefficient unit, but politically it is a healthy community. Like us, they have a mayor, a town clerk and all the usual com- mittees. They elect twenty-one councillors to our sixty. But their population is only 18,000. so they have one councillor to every 850 people. The difference is total. Everyone who is remotely interested knows what the council is doing, and most of them have views on what it ought to be doing. Nearly everyone knows a councillor personally, and so these views arc passed on. When an important controversial

decision has to be taken, everyone has his say, and afterwards the bitterness is directed at the side that won instead of 'them' or 'the system.'

Do we, then, have to make a choice be- tween administrative efficiency and political health? Or can we gain the advantages of bigness without losing the advantages of smallness? This is. in fact, a familiar manage- ment problem, and the difficulty is not working out a solution but implementing it, which means persuading the people above to let the

people below make mistakes they themselves would have avoided, trusting that they will gain stature from the new responsibility and experi- ence from the mistakes they will inevitably make at the start.

The first and second problems look like being solved. We need regional government, we need local authorities large enough to be effective. But it is the third problem which holds the key to real reform. And the solution to the third problem is to rediscover the smaller urban communities within the large administra- tive units, communities of ten to twenty thousand people centred perhaps on a shopping parade and bounded by railway lines or trunk roads, and give them political existence. They should elect their own community coun- cil, with never more than a thousand people

to each representative—say, three large streets or six small ones. They must have a full-time community manager with a small staff, and with his offices on the shopping parade or at least next to it. The community council must be allotted a share of the rates paid by its community and enough powers of authorisa- tion to be visibly an effective body. It must also have the right to be consulted by higher authorities, and enough powers of resistance and delay for the community to see that their council really is theirs, and not a double agent for a higher authority.

There are, of course, many other benefits to be gained from community councils. They are a more satisfactory size for social services, for the police, for charitable organisations, and for the application of local common sense to problems of clash between different depart- ments or services. It is a much easier unit for fund-raising and enlisting the generosity of local businessmen, who remain unmoved by the large unit but are willing to chip in on behalf of their own local customers, their staff, and the actual school their children went to or the hospital where they were looked after.

Of course, there are many large questions to answer: how much of the rates do the community councils keep, what powers are they given, what is their relationship to the local authority? Can they, for instance, say, 'No, we don't want our street lights 'replaced this year, so we're using the money to staff and equip a play group and creche in the three rooms behind the launderette'? But different areas can work out their own answers to these questions; what matters is to accept the prin- ciple. This in turn means that local authorities have to part with some of their money and some of their powers, and accept the need for more consultation and persuasion before de- cision and implementation. But if it can be done, we can revive politics and restore democracy in Britain perhaps even more effec- tively than by the reform of Westminster or Whitehall.