It’s been 30 years coming, but Clause 38 is still really bad news

14/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

Sometimes you hear “All things”, but the ancient proverb and the modern Guinness advert agree that it’s “Good things come to those who wait”. Unfortunately, bad things do as well, and for local government Clause 38 of the Local Audit and Accountability Bill is a bad thing that’s been waiting to happen for 30 years and now finally has.

Full badness details will follow, but first, please excuse some personalised scene-setting. The LAA Bill is through the Lords and should get its Commons Second Reading later this month. Its main and originally entire purpose, embodied in Clauses 1 to 37, is to complete the Audit Commission’s abolition and introduce from 2017 a new regime for local authorities and other public bodies to appoint their own auditors. Yes, it is controversial, but a controversy best pursued by more knowledgeable others.

The sole concern here is Clause 38, one of two added by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and the DCLG long after MPs’ scrutiny of the draft Bill had been completed. It comprises Ministers’ intention to turn the Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity from guidelines with which councils are currently recommended to comply, into a statutory document with which they must comply.

There are several wrongs here, quite apart from Ministers’ extraordinary Humpty Dumpty attempt – “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean” – to label it an exercise in ‘localism’, because it seeks to protect the interests of local newspaper publishers against those of elected local authorities. The story starts, though, in the adventitiously appropriate year of 1984.

Then, as now, Ministers were in a lather because a handful of mainly London councils were doing things they didn’t like: some admittedly dubious, but most provocatively ‘political propaganda on the rates’ – when the phrase, unlike when their successors use it today, at least made literal sense. The then Pickles, Patrick Jenkin, played to his party conference audience by announcing what would become the Widdicombe Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business, designed to do a hatchet job on those pesky Labour boroughs.

It didn’t work out quite like that – partly, I like to think (as one of the researchers), because of the Committee’s commissioning and use of an extensive programme of independent research, and partly through refusing in its main report to deliver the censorious denunciations of local government practice for which Ministers were apparently looking.

That main, research-based Widdicombe Report, though, was preceded by a quick-and-dirty, research-free interim report on local authority publicity. The Committee members didn’t want to play, and used the opportunity to rehearse their views that local authorities were more than a sum of their services, and had a duty to inform the public both of their own functions and on local government matters generally.

They delivered a divided report, but the majority verdict calling for a prohibition of publicity designed to support a political party was enough for Ministers to produce a statutory political publicity ban, based not on content, which was Widdicombe’s concern, but intent – indeed, possible intent: any material which appeared designed to affect, “or can reasonably be regarded as likely to affect”, support for a political party, cause or campaign. Remember those conjectural words; there’s more coming up.

The only constraint on the Government in the 1983-87 Parliament were the Lords, and here they removed “likely to affect”, and a good deal else besides, and refused to agree to any code of practice being more than advisory. But the reprieve was short-lived and by 1988 there was a new Act with an even more restrictive definition of legitimate publicity, embedded in a Code of Recommended Practice to which authorities were required to “have regard”.

There have been various interim revisions of the Code, but none that have changed its fundamental character: a set of recommended principles and ultimately voluntary practices, written and scrutinised as such, with none of the forensic drafting rigour that would have been brought to a document intended for legal enforcement. But change “have regard” into “must comply” and you change everything, and that’s what the Government is doing in Clause 38.

I’ll look first at the Publicity Code itself, then at the proposed means of enforcement. The Code’s most recent revision in 2011 was driven jointly by the Newspaper Society – arguing (without much support from hard evidence) that council publications, rather than the internet and broadband, were the crucial threats to local newspapers’ sales and advertising revenues – and a receptive Eric Pickles, two of whose favourite hate taunts are ‘propaganda on the rates’ in the form of ‘town hall Pravdas’ or council newssheets.

Up front in the Code are seven key principles: that publicity by local authorities should be lawful, cost effective, objective, even-handed, and appropriate, should have regard to equality and diversity, and be issued with care during periods of heightened sensitivity.

Even here there are examples of the real slackness and imprecision with which the Code is, and will remain, littered. What do ‘have regard’ and ‘care’ mean? How tall does sensitivity have to grow? And another of those conjectural phrases we saw earlier: objectivity is infringed by “anything likely to be perceived by readers as constituting a political statement, or being a commentary on contentious areas of public policy”. Whether or not you think it reasonable for a political body to make a political statement or an observation on a contentious policy, what kind of yardstick is the likely perception of all, or most, or some, or a vexatious handful, of your readers?

To repeat: in a voluntary code, already overseen by numerous laws, auditors, and the Advertising Standards Authority, these vaguenesses are merely irritating and a potential get-out. In a statutory code, they can cost potentially serious money.

Probably the code’s most contentious provisions are that, where councils do publish “newsletters, newssheets or similar communications”, they should not be issued more frequently than quarterly, or “seek to emulate commercial newspapers in style or content”.

The majority of council newspapers are now quarterly, although even a monthly publication – an appropriate and cost effective frequency, one might argue, for keeping residents fully informed of service developments and changes, consultations, forthcoming council business, councillors’ surgeries, traffic orders and planning notices – could hardly be said to be emulating the style of commercial newspapers, whatever that might be guessed to mean.

What we have, then, is one more example of Ministers’ typical modus operandi in their dealings with local government. They see something they don’t like being done by a few London boroughs on their proverbial doorstep – in this case, distributing a weekly newspaper (Tower Hamlets) or fortnightly magazine (Newham). Then, instead of letting residents decide for themselves whether they approve of how their money’s being spent, they outlaw it with ill-prepared legislation applying to every principal and parish council in England – in the name of localism.

Which brings us to the enforcement debate. Clause 38 allows the Secretary of State to direct one, some or all authorities to comply with part or all of the Code, whether there are grounds for believing they are currently breaking it or not.

How, though, do you judge either compliance or non-compliance with a code as casually drafted as this one? Even in the apparently straightforward case of council publications, there’s no definition even of ‘newsletter’ or ‘newssheet’ or when either metamorphoses into a newspaper, let alone of what emulating commercial newspapers in style and content entails.

“Contentious issues” – like HS2, a third runway at Heathrow, large housing developments, cuts to police and fire services, hospital closures, welfare reforms – are, well, even more contentious.

At present, if an authority feels it or its residents would be severely adversely affected by a government policy, it can “have regard” to the principles of the Code, but still judge the matter sufficiently important for it to explain its opposition in a way that will certainly be perceived by at least some readers “as constituting a political statement, or being a commentary on contentious areas of public policy” – because that’s what it’s intended to be.

LGA Chairman, Sir Merrick Cockell, picks HS2, and specifically the cross-party 51M alliance of 19 local authorities opposed to it, as a topical issue that highlights the almost laughable irrationality of the Government’s proposals. The authorities have already challenged the Government’s policy in the High Court, may carry on the fight in the Supreme Court, and will surely petition Parliament for amendments to any eventual legislation. Yet, if they attempt publicly to explain their case and how they’re spending residents’ and taxpayers’ money, they would in future risk being individually and/or collectively prevented, on the grounds of infringing the Code.

It seems that, after nearly 30 years’ waiting, Pickles and his colleagues are about to achieve what their Thatcherite predecessors never quite managed: the power to gag any council’s questioning of any Government policy. It would have been bad legislation then, but in today’s hugely different political climate, it looks, if anything, even worse.

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

If I asked you to describe a 21st century public servant, what would you say?

10/10/201310/10/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Catherine Mangan

I read with interest the recent announcement from Birmingham City Council that they did not intend to recruit a replacement chief executive, but would instead create a ‘lead officer’ role. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable not to have a chief executive at the head of a council. Now, with councils debating what their role is, and the need to seize an opportunity to make savings, more and more councils are making the decision to remove the chief executive post entirely.

Arguments about whether this is a good idea or not have been much debated in the local government world, but I’m interested in what this says to those seeking a career in local government, and the wider public service. If the very pinnacle of public service, a council chief executive, is no longer a relevant role, what does this mean for the wider workforce? As the ‘how and what’ of local government changes, so too must the workforce. How can public servants ensure they remain relevant, and ready for the future challenges? What does a public servant in the 21^st century look like? How do those of us who provide development support to the workforce best work with them to give them the skills to achieve?

These are questions we will be exploring through a new knowledge exchange project in partnership with Birmingham City Council, funded through the ESRC. Over the next year we will examine the recent literature, carry out interviews with key stakeholders and create an on line resource to support public servants seeking support and development. We aim to address key questions such as:

What is the range of different roles of the twenty first century public servant? As people’s roles expand to encompass the whole person in a system, they can no longer dispense professional judgement in isolation. They need to be negotiators, brokers, story-tellers and resource weavers. Perhaps no longer a social worker but a care navigator.

What are the competencies and skills that public servants require to achieve these roles? What do you need to be good at to be an effective family support worker? Probably an ability to empathise, engage, motivate and inspire. Along with the skills to get things done. What might that look like in a professional development plan? How do we best support people to develop those roles and skills? Skills for the 21^st century public servant may not be those that can be developed through traditional training; we need to think imaginatively about supporting peer learning, sharing knowledge about what works; facilitating networks of learning.

And as the career path becomes more complex and less certain; with roles spanning organisations and sectors, how can central and local government better support and promote public service as a career?

We are looking forward to exploring the ideas and issues raised by these questions, and want to hear what those of you working in or supporting the public sector have to say. If you’d like to know more about the project, or contribute in any way, contact us. We’d love to hear your views.

Catherine Mangan is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV. Her interests include public sector re-design, outcomes based commissioning and behaviour change. She is currently leading the 21st century public servant project, in partnership with Catherine Durose and Catherine Needham. She can be contacted about the project via email, or on Twitter – and you can join the conversation: #21CPS.

The managerial-political interface: strong relationships prosper in difficult times

09/10/201308/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Andrew Muter

The Chief Executive’s leadership position in Local Government operates in a different context to simple hierarchies. We all manage at the political interface – what some have termed a grey area between the hurly-burly of big P Politics and the general management of the organization. And the relationship at the core is that between the Leader and Chief Executive.

Much has been written and said about these relationships over the years. In particular, Simon Baddeley’s research has provided a fascinating insight into the way that Leaders and Chief Executives describe the way they work together. One of the recurring themes is the way that strong leadership relationships are under-pinned by shared reflections about the way the partnership works. It’s the ability to describe, express and check-back on what is happening that helps to define the relationship and build trust.

The Leader / Chief Executive relationship can come under the greatest of strain even in the best of times. Where trust hasn’t been built, or is undermined, the consequences are huge. So you might have expected that the impact of the harsh financial climate for local government over the last five years would have placed an increasing strain on that crucial interface between politics and the organization.

I doubt that the answer is so simple. In fact, it’s perhaps more likely that strong relationships will prosper in difficult times. The pressures of shrinking resources, transformational change and spiraling demand call for leaders to raise their games. This is a test for the relationship but it’s also an opportunity for synergistic co-leadership.

In our pre-recession world, the managerial-political interface was sometimes illustrated through the development of policies. The dividing line was that although the development and discussion of policies engaged senior managers and politicians, it was the politicians who decided. In today’s world, this may be no less true. But choices have narrowed and the pace and direction of change is relentless and unforgiving. Political and managerial careers may not have been planned around this destination, but we are where we are.

That relationship between Leaders and Chief Executives has been tested in this grave new world. Local government’s performance in handling the reductions in finance, showing that we are fleet of foot in comparison with almost every other area of public service, suggests that we might be optimistic about the resilience of our political and managerial leaders.

In a recent meeting I watched a Leader and Chief Executive of another council explaining how they were planning to deal with the challenges ahead. Their explanation was clear, compelling and seamless. The tone and content of their sentences melded with one another into a seamless narrative. They had not rehearsed their approach – they had lived it, breathed it.

In time, we may have a new academic analysis which sheds light on the stresses and strains of leadership during the austerity years. Here’s hoping it shines a light on strong and successful leadership relationships forged in the heat of battle.

Andrew Muter is the Chief Executive of Newark and Sherwood District Council.

Relational leadership, group dynamics and personal identity

08/10/201308/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Kim Ryley

There is a general consensus from researchers that many of the skills and behaviours of leadership can be learned and acquired. But recent research in the United States and Britain, on the particular challenges facing public sector leaders over the next ten years, has revealed not only the need for a new skills set, but also the importance of these being underpinned by a particular personal mindset and attributes. Indeed, these explicit values, attitudes and behaviours appear essential to operating effectively in the emerging new environment – not least in generating the support and loyalty of others that will be necessary to shape the development of that environment.

It is already clear that the leaders of our public services must prepare for the future on the basis of dramatic, fundamental and irreversible change. The complexity, scale and speed of this paradigm shift requires an unusual degree of adaptability, tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, and the courage and resilience to take responsibility for inventing the future without the benefit of any clear blueprint to follow. The adaptive challenges involved in this are not the same as previous technical problems – they cannot be fixed by experts!

In this context, leadership is not simply about creating shared intellectual understanding. Rather it is about engendering the trust necessary to persuade and motivate people to let go of what is now expendable. Overcoming the emotional resistance involved in this is about overtly challenging the beliefs, identities and feelings that will obstruct the extensive innovation necessary to thrive in the “new normal”. That is why leadership of change is so difficult – it threatens people’s sense of professional identity and self worth.

Fundamentally, the new leadership approach is about changing behaviour, through the distribution and acceptance of loss, so that people can, themselves, make the changes necessary to adapt to the new reality that is now emerging. Whole system leadership of “place” in local public services means acting in conjunction with politicians, partners, staff and local communities to create cohesion around what needs to be done, through shared identity and purpose, and a new sense of reciprocity or “neighbourliness”.

Tomorrow’s public sector leaders will be those who feel compelled to connect with others, As well as being politically astute, they will understand the dynamics of power, be able to read other people’s behaviour, and have the credibility to secure co-operation beyond their formal authority, Like a good Buddhist, their role will be to break through the illusion of constancy by inviting uncertainty, to challenge the status quo – and to change behaviour. But, doing this will depend on them being able to demonstrate that they live the values that drive them.

The changing views of local authority leadership emerging from research surveys of council chief executives by SOLACE in the UK, and of city managers by IMCA in the United States, rate highly the ability to manage complex inter-relationships and inter-dependencies. Indeed, performance is likely to be evaluated increasingly in terms of expert use of the enabling skills necessary to create new alliances, as well as to facilitate and operate in (formal and informal) networks. These include conflict management, negotiation, problem solving and communication. The challenge for leaders in this collaborative context is to be both authoritative and participative.

What the new research also shows, however, is that successful leadership in this context will depend on behaviour and individual attributes which engage and instil confidence in potential collaborators. These attributes include being:

Open Minded
Flexible
Positive
Patient
Persistent
Decisive
Risk taking
Reflective
Accessible
Accountable
Friendly
Trustworthy
Unselfish
Honest
Respectful
Empathic
Attuned to others
Ethical
Committed/Passionate
Consistent

For leaders of complex social systems, relationships and relatedness will be primary, all else will be derivative. The new research has illustrated what skills public sector leaders need in future to be effective. But it shows also that they are extremely unlikely to actually be effective unless they also pay attention to how they exercise those new skills – and keep their attitudes and behaviours under constant observation, as others will.

Kim Ryley is a recent Past President of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and a Trustee of the Leadership Centre. He has 14 years experience as a Chief Executive in four upper tier local authorities. Kim is currently a freelance Leadership Development Consultant and Director of Torque Leadership Associates Ltd.

Keeping the door open to new ideas on leadership: Why the public sector may be leading the way

07/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Ian Briggs

In 1981, Ralf Stogdill published with Bernie Bass a taxonomy of leadership research. To scholars of leadership this Magnus opus has performed two vital functions: firstly, it has been invaluable in keeping open cathedral doors in a gale; and secondly as a work of undoubted scholarly value that it is has served to demonstrate how often confused and misplaced a great deal of leadership research in the past has been.

What is not always adequately reflected in the literature and in much of the teaching of leadership is that many of its core concepts are often based in the struggle to better understand how politicians operate. This has, at times, been lost in translation when it is applied to occupational, industrial and military settings.

Until comparatively recent times much teaching and learning of leadership as a topic has been done through trying to better understand the key characteristics of those who in history have been seen to be successful. This has led to students digesting biographies of the ‘great and the good’ – even today in military settings it is not unusual to be encouraged to read about Alexander the Great and extrapolate from his great achievements how campaigns can be led today.

It is therefore hardly surprising that we are socialised into thinking that to be an effective leader one has to be ‘charismatic’ – this is a term that is loosely banded about to describe an engaging individual who can illicit the support and followership of others. And lest we forget there is still a huge industry out there promoting these ideas, which seem to remain highly attractive to current and budding politicians.

At the forefront of our current understanding of leadership practice, we find the words ‘transactional ‘and ‘transformational’ regularly appearing. In current lingua franca, transactional is taken to mean ‘poor’ and transformational is applied to those who are seen as being effective, ‘with it’ and engaged with current trends. However, many students of political science may recognise these terms as being applied to political leaders; where transactional political leadership is …”vote for me and I will make you better off through reduced taxes” and transformational is…”vote for me and I will do my level best to create a better, fairer world”. But returning to Stogdill’s great taxonomy we can also see that leadership as an issue, a topic and as a matter of scholarly understanding is defined by having sudden leaps of understanding with longer periods of plateaus and stagnation.

I think now we are potentially at a point where that next great leap of understanding is rapidly approaching – and it may be arising from the world of current politics and wider society. Recently we have seen a senior Minister avoiding a critical leadership issue – stating that the decision whether to allow the wearing of the hijab as a clinician or nurse should be a matter for local agreement. I thinkthat should be something where a politician can demonstrate clear leadership and stand in the ground where opinion is firmly divided. Is it ducking the issue to say this is a matter for local agreement, or it is a reflection of the changing expectations we have of those who we elect to stand in this ground?

As I write this I am preparing for some sensitive work that is attempting to reconcile differences of expectation where senior politicians are giving political oversight to what are referred to as megaprojects – think aircraft carriers, HS2, locating nuclear power generation sites and the like – many of these megaprojects being right at the heart of concern for local government and local people as well as parliamentarians. But it would seem that those drawn from professional sources that operate in the role of programme and project managers are at times failing to understand the political pressures placed upon elected representatives. Politicians, too, are failing to grasp the challenges inherent in megaprojects. What is abundantly clear is that whilst some see a leadership issue at the core of such challenges, there is not one clear off the shelf leadership model that fills the gap.

It is at that crucial, pivotal point where political aspiration comes into contact with managerial competence that we need to explore a new language of leadership. Perhaps both sides of the equation are doing what they should do; politicians are articulating social aspiration and managers and professionals are applying well known, tried and trusted mechanisms of project and programme management. However, they need a ‘Babel fish’ (with due respect to Douglas Adams and that most useful of all managerial textbooks – the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) to fully understand each other and each other’s roles.

Perhaps we need to develop a new model of leadership, one where the long term success (or otherwise) of leadership can only be judged by those who will step into the shoes of the leaders of today, a model of leadership that accepts that quick wins are just not possible and that we have to encourage leaders to think beyond the immediacy of the delivery of milestones and concentrate upon how they pass on their leadership much like we as humans do when we pass on our DNA!

But Stogdill’s taxonomy reveals that where we have enjoyed in the past great leaps forward in our understanding of leadership, it seems to have corresponded well with periods of plenty and economic growth. If we are to face another six years of austerity the question remains: from where are the resources to come from to help us capitalise upon the learning we need to engage today? It could be that when the fourth edition of this taxonomy appears we will have a new chapter that offers clear explanations of the ‘pivotal role of leaders in meeting social expectation’ drawn from how we managed to deal with complex, wicked problems of new high speed rail, aircraft carriers for the new age, new environmentally friendly towns and how we managed to generate new sources of energy. But, unless someone throws a bit of money towards us to help research this phenomena then that chapter will take a little longer to write and the current edition will continue to hold open the cathedral door in a gale.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

“Birmingham City Council Bans New Payday Lending” – that’s Birmingham, Alabama, of course

08/08/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

I was reminded recently, as the Archbishop of Canterbury was skirmishing with Wonga, and Plymouth City Council banning payday loan advertising on bus shelters and city centre hoardings, of an internet headline from a couple of years ago: “Birmingham City Council Bans New Payday Lending”. It naturally got my attention, if only for the few seconds it took to realise that, regrettably, it simply had to be the ‘other’ Birmingham, the one in the southern American state of Alabama.

Our Birmingham is its country’s second largest city; theirs is 100th. Our council serves a population nearly five times theirs, with a revenue budget, even after cutbacks, nine times the size. Yet, as both it and Justin Welby are all too aware, it is only the much smaller council that has the legislative and zoning powers to create that kind of headline. Ours has to confine itself to worthy but more modest initiatives, like this week’s announcement that it was joining the growing list of councils planning to block payday loan websites on public library computers.

Money lending, usury – the charging of extortionate (or, in some cultures, any) interest rates – and their regulation are as old as religion, predating by millennia Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In the US all 13 states in the original 1776 Union adopted usury laws specifying maximum annual interest rates of between 5 and 8%, and, while most states significantly relaxed these maxima in the early 1900s to enable mainstream banks to compete with ‘salary lenders’ or ‘loan sharks’, state-regulated usury limits remained the basis of consumer protection law until the arrival of the modern-day payday loan industry in the 1980s.

In fact, the US industry is a two-pronged one – payday and auto title loans – although the prongs are essentially similar: small, short-term high-interest loans, secured on the borrower’s next pay cheque or car value, and repayable in full on the next payday or after two to four weeks. Non-repayment or rollover can quickly create a debt treadmill amounting to, in the US, a three-digit annualised percentage interest rate (APR), and here a four-digit rate like Wonga’s ‘typical’ 5,853%. Between 1985 and 2002 this hitherto fringe part of America’s financial services industry mushroomed into more than 25,000 loan stores, outnumbering McDonald’s and Burger Kings combined, and frequented by a sixth of all households.

As in this country, these numbers are the industry’s most powerful self-justification. Loan stores claim theirs is a necessary service, extending credit to low-income households, for whom the alternative would be even less scrupulous door-to-door loan sharks. They’re more convenient and less bureaucratic than banks, while the extortionate APRs are an incentive to repay on time and actually applied in only small numbers of cases. In short, they are unfairly vilified.

As last week’s YouGov poll showed, they are not all wrong. Few of the UK respondents (7%) said they’d consider taking out a payday loan themselves. But well over half (56%) agreed there would always be times when some people needed to, and a quarter (24%) felt loan companies offer a useful service. The really big figures, though, were on the other side. 88% thought they encouraged people to get into more debt, 89% that they exploit the most vulnerable in society, and 90% that limits should be introduced on the amount that payday loan companies can charge.

This capping of APRs was the key power reluctantly conceded by Ministers to the new Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) when it takes over regulatory responsibility next April from the ineffectual Office of Fair Trading (OFT), but which they don’t want actually used. Apparently, they consider it ‘overly simplistic’ to suppose that lower interest rates are in borrowers’ best interests. So, to mangle the old cliché, it’s a case of Britain possibly or possibly not doing tomorrow what America was doing yesterday – or, in that most federal and diverse of nations, what some parts of America were doing, along with Canada, France, Germany, Japan and numerous other countries.

The 50 states, not surprisingly, responded in varying ways to the payday lending explosion. The most restrictive require all licensed short-term lenders to comply with the same state usury laws and APR limits as banks, which amounts in practice to a ban. No payday lender in Georgia, for example, can loan less than $3,000 at more than 16% APR. Other states, slightly more subtly, exempt short-term lenders from usury laws but cap APRs at around 36% or lower, which, unless they’re permitted to charge an additional fee, makes it similarly almost impossible to compete with the banks.

There are about 18 of these restrictive states, but considerably more around the permissive end of the spectrum – like Alabama, whose state law allows payday lending up to $500 for up to 31 days, at an APR of up to 456% for a 14-day loan of $100. But note: 456%, not 4,560%, as it could be here. Permissive in this US context does not generally mean that anything goes. Americans culturally are highly critical of predatory lending practices, and states have plenty of regulatory instruments available short of APR-capping: restrictions on loan terms, fees, rollovers, multiple loans, and much else besides.

Moreover, if city councillors feel their state legislature is heedless of the detrimental proliferation of short-term loan businesses in their particular city, then, as in Birmingham, they can take the law into their own hands – in this case by imposing a moratorium on the establishment of any new loan businesses, while devising new zoning ordinances limiting the number of such businesses in any given area.

More surprising, for a nation with such a deep-rooted suspicion of almost anything emanating from Washington, is that the federal government too has entered this previously almost exclusive preserve of the states. So spooked was the US Congress by the 2007-08 financial crisis and Great Recession that it established a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a powerful regulatory federal agency with a jurisdiction covering pretty well all financial products and services in the US, including payday lending. True, the Bureau can’t cap interest rates, but it has plenty of other powers to control abusive lending. At present, therefore, in this important and increasingly controversial policy field, not only do America’s states have far more regulatory powers than our local governments, their national government easily trumps ours too.

Our councils, at least the more pro-active ones, recognise the urgency of the problem, want to intervene, but can do relatively little. The Coalition behaves almost as if there were no problem, let alone an urgent one, also does relatively little, and slowly. The only fast movers seem to be the branches of Money Shop, Cheque Centre, Cash Generator, Kash Kwik, Loans 2 Go, and the like, rapidly taking over our high streets.

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

Public institutions and governance