Letters
Centralist assumptions
Sir: We take so much of the dominance of central government for granted that even to question centralist modes of thought will often appear absurd. Thus we assume we live under a system of government in which small local authorities could never be given substantial powers. We take it for granted that central government should control their expenditure, arguing only about the extent to which it is done. We feel that the centre should rightly treat local government expenditure as part of its own when it carries out its Public Expenditure Survey. We see local elections as unimportant, not believing they can make any difference locally, although they may be seen as a test of the national standing of central government. We see the institutions of local government as so insignificant that the same government and ministers which set up London government and metropolitan government can decide to sweep them away without even having thought about the consequences.
The village of Whitehall, that little world of the centre, that knows not the world of local government outside the few London authorities where so many of the villagers live, has ruled not so much by the specific powers it actually has, but because the set of assumptions dominant in our system reflect their centralist perspective.
Yet consider these propositions. Many local authorities are as big as states in federal countries, to whom substantial powers of legislation and taxation are given. Kent County Council is bigger in population than 16 of the states of America and bigger than every state in Austria. Our local authorities are not the small local authorities, so commonly assumed. They are amongst the biggest in the Western world.
There is no economic argument to justify the statement that central government requires detailed control over local authority expenditure for macro-economic purposes. Local government revenue expenditure unlike central government expenditure is not financed by deficit funding but out of taxation. It does not affect the PSBR or money supply or aggregate demand. After all, if such control is so necessary, then how do the federal countries of the world survive, and even those many unitary states whose national governments do not seek to control directly the expenditure of local authorities?
The public expenditure planning process gives ministers a direct choice between cuts in their departments' expenditure and cuts in local government expenditure on the services covered by their departments. Is it surprising that they set more severe targets for local government expenditure than for their own? But why then should local authorities pay any attention to the targets?
The existence of 'over-spending' and `under-spending' authorities, for both exist, is not a sign that the system of local government is working badly. It would be working badly if every local authority spent what central government wanted. For then what would be the point of local elections and local taxes?
There is an election whose result we will now never know: the GLC election of May 1985. That election would not have been determined by national factors, but by the electorate's judgment on Ken Livingstone and his Labour administration. Opinion polls have shown that many vote differently in local elections from in general elections. Those differences are usually assumed out of existence by commentators on local elections.
If local accountability requires public access to committees, publication of council decisions and of annual reports, and inter-authority comparisons, why is there no equivalent accountability for central government which operates behind a cloak of excessive secrecy? Why do central civil servants not emulate the openness of local government? Perhaps the real problem lies in local government: that councillors and officers believe what central government thinks. They have too often been taken over by the assumptive world of centralism.
George Jones
Professor of Government, LSE
John Stewart Professor of Local Government and Administration,
University of Birmingham
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