The history of a mistake

Ferdinand Mount

'Too remote? No, I don't think there's any danger of that.' The Minister sounded puzzled by the suggestion, as though the possibility were itself too remote to be worth the consideration of a practical politician. At the time, February 1971, Mr Peter Walker was at his zenith. Still a month short of his 39th birthday, he had been Britain's first 'Environment supremo' since the preceding autumn. The reform of local government was to be his first monument in a modernising ministry. As we spoke in his ministerial hutch at the House of Commons, he defended himself, politely and assiduously, against a charge which it had not occurred to me to put, viz, that his White Paper on local government was insufficiently dynamic and revolutionary. David Wood in The Times had described it as 'far less radical' than Lord Redcliffe-Maud's Royal Commission ón Local Government. The Times leader could find only 'traces of the radical thesis' in the proposals of the Conservative government. Tony Crosland for the Labour Opposition denounced it as 'a muddled compromise' and when Mr Walker presented his Bill the following November, The Times talked of a 'counter-march in the direction of the status quo.' Nobody seemed much interested in whether the new super-councils would be remote from the people they were to govern.

It is difficult now to remember the appetite for radical reform which then consumed respectable political circles. Even the admirable John Mackintosh wrote of the Redcliffe-Maud plan: 'there is a strong case for rapid action . , The most important reason for speed is the damaging effect of uncertainty on the abler local government officials' — as though town clerks would suddenly droop and dwindle if deprived of the immediate prospect of administering Humberside or Selnec. The Times again produced the remarkable proposition that 'much more important than which [scheme] is chosen. . . is that a decision be made and that the long and arduous period of transition be started without delay.' Any solution would do, so long as it was new and instant and big. For, after all, 'there is little dispute about what is wrong with the present struc ture. The units are too disparate and most of them are too small.' Calls from backwoodsmen for the saving of small authorities could be 'disregarded.' Mr Ronald Butt thought that it would be a great pity if the Conservatives 'allowed themselves to be deflected by the inevitable local dogfights.' Well, they weren't. Only Dame Joan Vickers voted against her party on the second reading of the Bill, and that not because she thought the proposed new units were too big but because she wanted Devon to be ruled from Plymouth (where her constituency lay) rather than from Exeter. So far as I can recall, the national press was united in accepting the need for sweeping national reform and for bigger authorities. Only the dear old Daily Mail pointed out that some of Mr Walker's counties 'have more than a million people living in them. Others are 60 miles wide. Not much "local" about that.' What were the chances of getting personal service from these 'new monsters? Bigness may be best for planners and officials, but what about us?' For once, an old piece of work that I do not shudder to re-read.

To judge by the clamour, you would have intagined some deep-rooted and longstanding pressure for reform of local government. Not so. The burgeoning of the whole disastrous process can be followed in the Diaries of Richard Crossman, who was Minister of Housing and Local Government between 1964-1966: Tuesday, 21 September, 1965 The day of my speech to the Association of Municipal Councils annual conference at Torquay . . . I had previous agreed with the Department that I would speak on two topics: local government press relations; and the ethics of the councillor. However, yesterday I suddenly decided that I would add a third topic, the reform of local government . . . I came to the conclusion that I should propose a committee of inquiry with very great authority and with terms of reference that instructed it to lay down the principles of local government reform. I rang up Harold to tip him off that I was going to do this and he liked the idea. There was a great rush to finish before I caught the train. . .

At Torquay, Crossman got a standing ovation and the next day dawned bright: Wednesday 22 September 1965 A glance at the newspapers this morning proved that I had done quite well. The 'White Paper on the Land Commission was released yesterday and I had knocked it off the centre page of The Times. Once again I was forcing the pace and had made a definite advance in Government policy without consulting my Cabinet colleagues.

Looking back a year later, after being switched from the Ministry, Crossman described this as 'one of my few big successes', achieved `by going down to Torquay and addressing the AMC during the August [sic) holiday in a speech the Dame would never have allowed me to make if she had been there.' The Dame was Dame Evelyn (now Baroness) Sharp, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry and Crossman's bugbear. Crossman may have broken free of the Dame in the decision to set up the Royal Commission, but when the membership was announced, there she was, newly retired from the ministry but neatly installed within her old stamping-ground alongside Sir John Maud, shortly thereafter Lord RedcliffeMaud, Vic Feather, Sir Jack Longland, and T. Dan Smith, 'the Labour boss of Newcastle who is a great personal friend of the Dame.' Among Dan Smith's other attributes was a passionate belief in bigness, in comprehensive redevelopment and the beneficence of the bulldozer. What were Crossman's reasons for launching out so abruptly and capriciously upon this enterprise? Like any Minister, the itch for publicity and glory undoubtedly; his own idiosyncratic delight in novelty and the hatching of ingenious contrivance also. But there is a grosser reason. For some time, Mr Crossman had been troubled by the activities of the Local Government Boundary Commissions, impartial bodies which had the task of continuously reviewing the boundaries of boroughs and counties to take account of population changes. Unless the wealth of the new suburbs is brought into the municipal kitty, city centres are starved into decline; the collapse of many American cities may well be due to the lack of efficient machinery for such continuous review. But inevitably these boundary changes have political consequences, bringing batches of Tory voters to overwhelm Labour rotten boroughs. Labour party officials estimated that the Commission's proposals for Lancashire, then on Crossman's desk, might cost the party up to 20 seats. At that time Labour still had its paper-thin 1964 majority, and the date of the next election was still uncertain. The beauty of setting up a Royal Commission was that it offered a plausible excuse for shelving the work of the Local Government Boundary Commissions and for winding up the Commissions themselves. Crossman deployed this argument with his usual energy, and the Royal Commission sailed through Cabinet. The Dame had been 'appalled' by the Torquay speech 'because she was convinced it would destroy her dear Boundary Commissions, she also felt that I must have deliberately waited until she was on holiday and done it when her back was turned. Of course this second part was true.' But she was right on the first point too.

Alas, even after the 1966 election had been won, there was another nasty problem looming for the Labour Party in the shape of the Parliamentary Boundary Commission. Here it was not a case of the existing constituencies having their political complexion subtly altered; the constituencies themselves would be liable to be split, merged and generally cut about. The result of this was feared to be a further loss of seats for Labour. But, under an all-party agreement of 1958, the recommendations of the Commission were to be implemented automatically by the Home Secretary of the day laying orders before both Houses.

If Roy Jenkins had remained Home Secretary, this no doubt would have happened. But when he swapped offices with James Callaghan after the devaluation in November 1967, matters took a different turn. Or, as Crossman put it in a gloriously pregnant passage: 'when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary he was very sanctimonious and difficult about the issue and the advantage of the change from Roy to Jim is that Callaghan is a much more adaptable and realistic politician. The Prime Minister and I had always said that we couldn't possibly let the recommendations be implemented.' This chicanery was all the more baroque in view of the fact that Transport House had no objection to the Boundary Commission proposals going ahead. Sara Barker, the redoubtable National Agent, believed that they would cost Labour little and would be convenient, particularly in London, where they would align borough boundaries with constituency boundaries. The mere thought of permitting any measure which might, even theoretically, damage Labour's election chances was, however, anathema to Crossman and Sir Harold.

With almost psychic timing, Lord Redcliffe-Maud came to the rescue. His report was published in June 1969, just in time to offer a lovely excuse for delaying the Parliamentary constituency changes until this far-reaching reform had been completed: 9 June 1969 It was fascinating to see Harold's draft. I had seen the the original official's draft but this was very different, committing us to approve Maude in principle and, instead of saying that we can't legislate in this Parliament, leaving things open. Speed, speed first and foremost and with the speed the commitments.

It is clear that the Prime Minister's view is largely influenced by the issue of the Boundary Commission.

12 June Harold and I always agreed that the real let-out on the Boundary Commission would be Maud. 22 July This afternoon George Thomson's Committee on Local Government met to consider the Maud report for the first time and for Ministers to give their departmental reactions. You might have thought that this would be an important meeting but unfortunately the local government issues all got submerged by the Boundary Commission.

13 November My only big committee was Tony Crosland's local government to deal with the Maud recommendations, the biggest administration-shattering proposals put forward in the last five years. . . It's staggering how little serious discussion there has been of the basic principles.

This morning Mr Crosland most skilfully steered us through the subjects he had selected in a six-page paper. We resolved each question with a simple yes or no and in an hour he had got just what he wanted . . .

So much for there being any serious discussion of a major reform. It just shows you that once a Royal Commission has reported on modern institutions, and once a Minister has been given charge, the timetable fixed and Whitehall alerted to get it through, serious discussion ceases altogether. At least it did in this case.

The royal commission had been set up largely to save one batch of Labour seats; it was to be implemented to save another. In June 1970, Labour was thrown out. But it was too late. The reform of local government on grandiose lines had entered the bloodstream of conventional thought. Anyone who did not wish to be considered a backwoodsman closely related to Alderman Foodbotham now subscribed to a certain set of views: that the existing system was unworkable, that it was' breaking down under the strain of the 'conflict' between town and country and specifically the conflict between county council and county borough, that local authorities should be reshaped to conform with 'social geography', that they should, as far as possible, consist of 'city regions' which would 'integrate' centres of population with 'interdependent hinterlands' and 'travel-to-work areas.'

The precise form in which these principles were to be expressed was open to debate. Should they be single-tier authorities? Should there be planning regions or provinces on top of the main authorities? The Redcliffe-Maude report contained a majority and a minority view. The Labour government, the Tory White Paper and the Tory Act all modified these proposals. The ideal social geography of city regions foundered upon the real geography of England and Wales, in which 'units' of population of the suitable size and shape kept on turning out to have no proper city to centre upon — or two cities — or a city that belonged emotionally and economically to another unit. But what did not founder, what -indeed was the only principle that survived undiminished into the Heath-Walker Acts, was the principle of bigness. Some of the new authorities were big in area, like Highland and Powys; some were big in population, like,Greater Manchester and the West Midlands; some were both, like Strathclyde and Devon. Redcliffe-Maud himself proposed that the 124 counties and county boroughs in England outside London should be reduced to 61 new units. What is not generally recognisedis that Mr Walker reduced the number of county authorities further, to 45, thus further increasing the size of the authorities rather than somewhat watering them down, as popularly supposed. Anything Labour Could do, the Heath government could do bigger. What was the compelling argument behind such a dramatic change, altering a familiar landscape (scarely changed since the Middle Ages) beyond all recognition in some parts of the country? Redcliffe-Maud recorded that 'the movement of opinion in favour of large authorities is impressive'. Opinion? Whose opinion? 'No government department suggested to us that an authority with a population as small as 100,000 should be entrusted with a major service.' So it was the servants of national government who were to dictate the shape of local government, not the ratepayers, not even the town halls, but Whitehall. True, 'the County Councils Association also believed that in future local authorities responsible for the range of services now controlled by county councils should have a population of at least 500,000.' Which, by a curious coincidence, happened to be the size of population administered by an average county council. On the other hand, associations representing the boroughs and urban district councils inclined towards a system of provincial planning authorities — which would give them room to breathe and might leave them with more powers than if the county councils immediately above them were to be made all-powerful. Government departments were against provincial authorities for converse reasons — because provincial authorities might encroach upon the' authority of Whitehall. The Department of Education and Science and the County Councils said that an education authority could not hope to be efficient with a population of less than 500,000. The boroughs, on the other hand, thought that smaller authorities were quite capable of providing an efficient service. The Ministry of Health said that local health and welfare authorities should have a population of upwards of 200,000. The Home Office said much the same about child care. But the Rural District Councils Association claimed that an authority with a population of 60,000 was adequate for these. And so on. The big authorities said that, on the whole, taking one thing with another, big authorities were more efficient; no they weren't, said the small authorities. Well, they all would, wouldn't they? It was all subjective. Even the apparent exceptions to this flow of unsubstantiated opinions turn out to be scarcely more firmly based. Both the main report and the note of reservation by Sir Jack Longland (himself the chief education officer of Derbyshire, a sizeable authority) placed much weight on the 'Enquiry into efficiency of local education authorities' carried out by HM Inspectors for the Department of Education and Science. This enquiry found that the best authorities tended to be those with the larger populations. Although this, too, was a subjective judgment, surely some weight should be attached to the opinions of experienced and impartial inspectors?

Alas, not when you consult Annex A of Appendix 11 and examine the first four factors which the Inspectors were told to take into account in forming this judgment: number and quality of senior administrative staff, adequacy of specialist advisory staff, encouragement of modern educational methods, willingness to experiment. These are naturally the factors which would tend to swell with the size of the bureaucracy, making it a more splendid and imposing organisation; but they have no necessary bearing on the quality of education provided by the schools under the authority's sway. By these criteria, a direct-grant school or public school administered by a gouty ex-wing-commander as bursar with the occasional services of a lady typist would score zero.

Indeed, had the inspectors tried to form a judgment about the quality of education supplied they would have faced an almost impossible task: how to make allowance for the difference in economic and social circumstances between, say, Dorset and Wolverhampton; how could you fairly say that one authority was 'performing' better?

Equally, at no point does the report or any of its successors seriously attempt to argue why, say, an old people's home or a cottage hospital could not be administered by an authority with a population of less than 200,000. The advantages of intimacy and familiarity are nowhere considered. Loyalty is brushed aside in a couple of paragraphs.

Yet the mere flow of business submerges any impulse to rational argument: the patter of evidence and report and white paper and green paper creates a false impression of mental activity. Little by little, first the problem and then the solution is taken for granted. All that is then required for action is the sudden shove of political exigency. It was worth paying a few counties for 20 good Labour seats.