Councillors: Engage more and engage differently, but not at the expense of the basics

28/01/201301/02/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Karin Bottom, Catherine Mangan and Thom Oliver

This month saw the ‘Communities and Local Government Committee’ release its report on the role of the modern councillor. Focusing on the impact of the Localism Act (and associated developments in recent years), Clive Betts MP, Chair of the Committee, suggested that local representatives are now spending less time in council and more in the community. As a result, they now shoulder the majority of responsibility for ensuring that that their local communities have the tools to make the most of the localities in which they live. While the Report’s findings held few surprises, it did suggest that those we elect to be the local democratic voice of our communities must embrace this challenge and meet it head on. This position resonates with early findings from an INLOGOV project concerned with local engagement and the role of the local representative.

Firmly grounded in the belief that councillors’ responsibilities and remits vary, the current climate suggests they require a more nuanced and responsive skill set than ever. In this sense, elected representatives must be outward looking, open to new ideas and welcoming of new approaches, but they must take care not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Instead, our research suggests that what councillors need to do is integrate new learning into their existing repertoire of behaviours, while at the same time being more dynamic and responsive in their increasingly frontline role.[i]

For respondents, one of the main challenges they felt they faced was engagement. Whereas it is natural for all councillors to ‘do engagement’, a variety of approaches were evident in our research and for those who had moved into executive positions, the role shift was accompanied by community activities having to be curtailed. Respondents were very clear that the Localism Act was beginning to have an impact, for example in the mediating role that has now been allocated to councillors: this meant developing skills as a community organiser and ultimately being on top of a great volume of information while managing a number of resources and contacts. This form of community engagement, though hard, was thought to have clear rewards: a number saw the benefits of having shared aims and a deeper understanding of the people they represented, which in turn provided greater insight into the experience of being on the receiving end of council services; in contrast others thought wider community engagement created opportunities to lead opinion and ultimately change behaviour, for example one councillor worked with environmental groups to shape the ward’s attitude towards refuse collections and recycling.

Our interviews also surfaced information suggesting that that the majority of traditional communication methods continue alongside a slow evolution to greater online engagement and use of social media. While one councillor referred to sending regular email shots and creating a web page to articulate local information, activities and updates, another described how Facebook had enabled him to engage with people – often young people – who generally chose not to participate in politics and local policy conversations. Finally, a number of councillors explained that twitter enabled them to aggregate opinions en mass, engage in debates and learn information they would otherwise be unaware of, while some with cabinet responsibilities stated that this particular medium was unique in that it enabled them to keep on top of their portfolio while also providing opportunities to build and consolidate relationships they would otherwise not have had time to address..

One factor that was evident in almost every interview was that councillors always needed to be aware of the bigger picture: different methods worked in different situations and knowing a ward’s story or the history behind a particular community group could make the difference between successful and unsuccessful engagement. Just because a particular approach might work in one instance, there is no assurance it will work in another, despite apparent similarities. So, while councillors may see their responsibilities increasing and their community role broadening, it is vital that they maintain depth in their representative activities: if they don’t, potentially successful initiatives run the risk of failing.

The authors are grateful to the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, for providing funds to assist in this research. With thanks also to NLGN for their contribution to this work. For further information about the research project, contact Karin A. Bottom: [email protected]

Karin Bottom is Lecturer in British Politics and Research Methods at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham. Her core research areas comprise parties (particularly small and the BNP), party systems and party theory. She is particularly interested in concepts of relevance and how national level theories can be utilised at the sub-national level.

Catherine Mangan is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV. Her interests include public sector re-design, outcomes based commissioning and behaviour change. Prior to joining INLOGOV she managed the organisational development and change work for a not-for-profit consultancy, specialising in supporting local government; and has also worked for the Local Government Association, and as Deputy Director of the County Councils Network. She specialises in adult social care, children’s services and partnerships.

Thom Oliver is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes Business School. He completed his PhD, exploring the representative role of councillors on appointed bodies, at INLOGOV in 2011. He currently lives in Bristol and has recently rejoined INLOGOV as an Associate. Follow his Twitter account here, and read his own blog here.

[i] Research to date provides initial findings from interviews in three councils (one London Borough and two Metropolitan). Interviews comprised a broad mix of age, seniority, roles and experience. Approximately equivalent numbers of men and women were interviewed.

The bonfire of the quangos has thus far only smouldered

25/01/201325/01/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Katherine Tonkiss and Katharine Dommett

Quangos, non-departmental public bodies, or arm’s length bodies (ALBs), as they are variably termed, are a category of public organisations that operate with a degree of independence from ministers. These bodies have become an established feature of government, created to deliver policy, offer expertise and regulation (among other functions). Yet despite their proliferation they have been widely condemned by the political class and are subject to frequent reviews and culls. In reality few attempts to address the number and significance of bodies have, thus far, yielded much success. Indeed, hitherto the bonfires of quangos have smouldered rather than raged.

In this light David Cameron’s call in 2009 for the existence of ‘each and every quango’ to be justified in accordance with three tests appeared little more than a restatement of established political rhetoric. However, building on the Conservative manifesto commitment, the Coalition Government moved quickly to ‘reduce the number and cost of quangos’, conducting a review in the summer of 2010. After just five months in government 902 quangos had been surveyed and 200 bodies scheduled for abolition, 120 for merger and 176 for substantial reform. This early pace signalled a clear determination on the part of the Government to shrink the size of the state, informed by their desire to reduce ‘the cost of bureaucracy and the number of public bodies’, ‘to increase accountability’ and to achieve ‘efficiency, effectiveness and economy in the exercise of public functions’.

Two years on, the recently published Public Bodies 2012 report provides an overview of this reformed quango landscape. But what level of success has been attained? Each of the Government’s objectives is assessed in turn below, evaluating progress thus far and identifying future challenges to the reform agenda.

Are There Fewer Quangos?

The implementation of the reform programme was rapid, despite occurring in a period of relative instability (given budget and staffing reductions, as well as widespread civil service reform). Public Bodies 2012 states that since 2010 the number of NDPBs has been reduced by 220. While this denotes substantial progress on this objective, most bodies abolished thus far have been smaller advisory bodies and many functions have survived, being transferred into departments, executive agencies or merged into the remit of other bodies. Accordingly, while the numbers of arm’s length bodies is reducing, the scope of government is not necessarily shrinking.

In addition, a number of new bodies have been created by the coalition. Public Bodies 2012 notes that nine new bodies have been created since 2010 – six independent monitoring boards, the National Employment Savings Trust, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility and the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. However, the scope of Public Bodies 2012 is limited to NDPBs only, and this prevents a wider appreciation of changes in arm’s length bodies more generally. For example, some new executive agencies – such as the four created in the Department for Education, the Legal Aid Agency, the proposed National Crime Agency – and also other organisational forms such as the Office of Tax Simplification (an ‘independent office of the Treasury’) are NDPBs in a new form. The overt focus on numbers of NDPBs therefore misses the wider question of where functions of government are located – and many are remaining at arm’s length.

Have They Saved Money?

The belief that inefficiency and poor governance was rife within public bodies provided a key motivation to not only abolish but also reform ALB governance. In embarking on the reform programme, the Cabinet Office publicised anticipated savings of £2.6 billion by 2015 and ongoing savings of between £800 and £900 million a year after the Spending Review. A third of the initial saving (£0.9billion) was predicted to come from the abolition of two bodies, the Regional Development Agencies and Becta, yet the rest was based on imprecise and often incomparable data from departments. For example, some estimated reductions were based on spending review requirements, whilst others focused exclusively on savings from ALB reform.

This lack of consistency led an NAO report to argue that the Cabinet Office did ‘not yet have the means to confirm the removal of £2.6 billion from administrative budgets’ or to check that this money was the result of savings rather than cuts. In its response, the Government highlighted that this figure incorporates wider efficiency savings from bodies that will continue to exist, but acknowledged that the cost of reform was still unclear. Indeed, the projected savings stemming from reform have recently been reviewed, and Public Bodies 2012 puts administrative savings at £401 million in the year 2011/12.

Furthermore, in calculating the money saved, little attention has been directed to the costs of transition, failing to consider the difficulties of, for example, disposing of assets and addressing redundancy costs. While the NAO has estimated transition to potentially cost £830 million, Public Bodies 2012 estimates the cost of reform to be between £650 million and £800 million. This wide variation in estimates again highlights the challenges faced by the Cabinet Office in demonstrating that efficiencies are a direct result of the public bodies reform agenda.

Are They More Accountable?

Government has sought to increase the accountability of ALBs by bringing them closer to departments and Ministers. In addition to the newly created executive agencies, the functions of 9 bodies have been transferred to executive agencies (which are said to enjoy far less autonomy from Government compared to other forms of ALB); and 16 have been transferred into departments. For the bodies that remain, a process of triennial review is being implemented whereby each body is subject to independent review every three years – serving to provide departments and Ministers with more awareness of their ALBs and thus improve the accountability (and efficiency) of these bodies.

However, the idea that moving bodies closer to the centre will increase accountability is not as clear cut as it seems. There is a risk that functions in, for example, executive agencies, will not be scrutinised to the same extent as those in NDPBs where triennial reviews occur. In reducing the length of the arm at which key functions are exercised, there is therefore a risk that formal structures of accountability, enhanced as a part of the reform programme, are bypassed.

Conclusion

The public bodies reform programme has represented a radical attempt to streamline arm’s length governance in the UK. The speed at which reform has been implemented and the numerous bodies abolished or otherwise reformed denotes considerable success over these first two years of reform. However, it remains unclear as to whether the reform programme will deliver on the government’s objectives to improve the efficiency and accountability of the arm’s length governance landscape.

The Government has committed to implementing a ‘benefits realisation framework’ which will enable departments to ‘better define, measure and optimise all forms of value created in consistent and credible way’, with a greater emphasis on improving the efficiency and accountability of the bodies that survived the cull. With these new developments, there is a possibility that the initial momentum of reform will be maintained, allowing the government to deliver greater efficiency and accountability across the public bodies landscape.

There remains, however, a broader challenge in terms of how public bodies reform is reconciled with wider civil service reforms. Public bodies reform was, in part, a centripetal process involving the transfer of functions back into departments. In contrast, the Civil Service Reform Plan clearly has a centrifugal logic that is based around pushing functions away from Whitehall and traditional bureaucratic structures, through emerging models of service delivery such as outsourcing and mutualisation. The next phase of public bodies reform will need to reconcile these contrasting logics in a way that delivers efficiency while still serving the accountability goal of public bodies reform.

This post was originally featured on the LSE British Policy and Politics Blog on 17th January.

Katherine Tonkiss (INLOGOV) and Katharine Dommett (University of Sheffield) are Research Fellows on Shrinking the State, a research project exploring public bodies reform in the UK, and drawing on historical and international comparisons. The project is led by Professor Chris Skelcher (Birmingham) and Professor Matthew Flinders (Sheffield). The authors acknowledge the financial support of the ESRC (Grant Ref. ES/J010553/1). The views expressed are those of the authors.

Local politics: An essential part of local government

24/01/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Philip Lloyd-Williams

I always struggle when local Councillors say to me that they are ‘not political’. For me politics is part of everyday life as well as life in local government. To some extent I cannot see that we can operate without it and perhaps it’s like the cod liver oil mother used to give me – it’s not very tasty but good for you.

Without decision makers who are motivated, steeped or just inclined to make choices about how we ration public goods based upon political values or beliefs, it would be impossible to make the tough decisions. So, as far as I am co concerned, local politics (and I include in that party politics as much as the power used by local action groups and activists to persuade and nudge for a decision that accords with their world view) helps us even if we don’t always like it. Perhaps of greater curiosity is why local Councillors and even some officials so readily dismiss the place of politics.

From my own experience it is often an unwillingness to accept that managing public services and budgets is difficult and calls for conviction, confidence and a willingness to take a risk. Having a belief in something or a conviction about how a place and its people should be governed is now less valued than data or empirical studies which are purported to have all the answers. There is possibly a link between extolling beliefs of a political nature with the fear some have of acknowledging the place of religious faith that individuals often hold true but keep to themselves for fear of rejection.

This unwillingness to accept or acknowledge the place of politics prompts me to think that we need to do more to teach, educate and celebrate the importance of the political and differences with our communities and public servants. Commonly, when politics is discussed it is perceived as a negative or worthless experience. We should strive to change this – through education at schools, induction and training programmes at the work place and with our elected officials on a daily basis. Not everyone is interested in politics, but we all need to surely acknowledge that it has an important place in how we govern communities and make decisions about the places people inhabit and the things that they experience.

I realise we can often feel let down by what appear as foolish or poorly motivated decisions by our politicians, but I am advocating that without the politics, our society, communities and culture are poorer and weaker. So, if you work as a teacher, manage a public service or are yourself an elected representative – make it your business to champion the good of local politics and what benefits it can bring to making the best of what we have.

Philip’s doctorate from the University of Aston was on the role of local authority officials as ‘makers of democracy’. His career has given him extensive experience of working with elected representatives in local government as a Solicitor. He is an INLOGOV Associate Member and contributes to its Management Development programmes.

On silos and why we thought joint commissioning was a good idea

23/01/201323/01/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Stephen Jeffares

I heard it again – in a discussion on last Tuesday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Nick Herbert’s piece about the civil service – the problem is that silos remain .

Most of us have never seen a silo in real life, although those who have spent time on farms know that it is a really big tank or pit for storing grain or animal feed. But we learn on our MBA courses and from our management textbooks about the curse of the silo mentality. They say we need to drive silo working out – we need to work across boundaries, we need to collaborate, work in partnership. So much of what is wrong with how we do public policy is blamed on working in silos.

Couple this with the popularity of separating those that steer from those that row and we find an increased importance placed on commissioning. For several years consultants have dined out on their ability to tell us that commissioning is not the same as procurement, for procurement is just one important aspect of the complex but vital process of commissioning. But, they tell us, the worst thing you can do is commission in a silo. No no. We need to commission jointly, with others. Why? Well, two reasons. First, because the world is complex and cannot be solved by the efforts of one department or organisation alone. Second, all the reform and hollowing out of the last decades has meant our public services are fragmented in terms of budgets and decision making capacity. So joining up how we commission is a no-brainer.

Is it any wonder, then, that we ended up with the marriage of the concepts of joint and commissioning. But as a compound: ‘Joint commissioning’. It is rather an ugly and unwieldy pairing. But both concepts are viewed as desirable and essential, therefore joint commissioning is the solution. Nowhere was joint commissioning seen as more desirable or essential as in health and social care.

People’s needs for support or treatment do not neatly divide across how we organise health services and care services. While not everybody requiring acute health treatment requires social care, many with long term chronic illnesses require both. Nowhere is this more apparent in what happens when older or vulnerable adults are discharged from hospitals. So, often, it makes sense that within localities decisions and priorities should be commissioned jointly, and over the last decade, structures and practices have been aligned in the name of joint commissioning. However, such reforms can be expensive, destabilising and reveal profound professional tensions.

Various changes occurred over the last 10 years in the name of joint commissioning, with localities introducing social care partnerships, pooled budgets and, in some, full blown care trusts. The structures imposed depended on the discretion of local authorities, the PCTs and the Council. Some chose to share chief executives. Service users and carers might have seen no difference, or perhaps were confused by the change in logos and livery. The staff involved in the change, with their strong professional identities as occupational therapists, district nurses, social workers, care home managers, were told that this was an opportunity to work differently. In some cases, the changes were symbolised by lifting and shifting to a single site, to new purpose built office locations – no more NHS or Council badges – there’s a new ID card in town, swinging from a fresh corporate lanyard.

But to what avail? The shift to joint commissioning means that we also have to be interested in evaluating. Not just the processes, but the outcomes. With further integration on the horizon, the question on everybody’s lips is what good this has brought. Was it worth the effort? The answer to the question has to go further than populist or political expediency: did it save money or did more people get seen sooner?

To answer the question we need to start by asking – what do you want from this joint commissioning? When you explore the ambitions for these joint arrangements in literature and in conversation with professionals, not one but a whole range of competing aspirations arise. In a project funded by the SDO and led by colleagues at HSMC, I had the opportunity to do just this – to capture the range of aspirations for joint commissioning. A full report of the research and the findings, published earlier this month, can be found here.

In terms of what joint commissioning meant to different people, four broad points of view emerged. Yes, predictably, there were timely aspirations about productivity, saving money, efficiencies. In contrast, though, there were those who focused on implications for people, service user and carer involvement, personalisation, choice. A third set of aspirations focused on what comes from partnership – the development of synergies, the benefits of closer working, joint location; and a fourth set revolved around aspirations and implications for professions – developing professional empathy of the challenges faced, but also concerns for maintaining professional identity and autonomy.

And it’s here that we get to the problem of motherhood and apple pie – so often an issue in public policy. Read off a list of 40 aspirations for joint commissioning – synergy, empathy, cost saving, choice, user involvement, and we’ll say yes to all, all of the above please. But spend some time in conversation with people working in joint commissioning arrangements and it soon becomes apparent that there are different priorities that can easily conflict, either implicitly or explicitly.

Joint commissioning, like so many policy ideas, is what Cornwall and Eades call a ‘buzzword that has become a fuzzword’, one that clouds rather than clarifies understanding. The turning point for our research was when we asked our respondents, those working in joint commissioning across England, to prioritise differing (competing?) outcomes. They rank ordered them using a tool called POETQ. We found two things. First, that everybody is unique, that everybody had a different take on what was more important. But second, and perhaps most importantly, there were patterns. Taken as a whole we found five distinct viewpoints (page 87 of the report) on what they thought joint commissioning would achieve. The technique allowed us to cut through the nebulous language that collects around policy ideas. It also challenged our assumptions that people think according to their professional group or position in the hierarchy. These insights then guided the remainder of the project and our visits to our five case study localities.

The current reforms that focus on integrated working and the creation of Clinical Commissioning Groups are in some part a shift in emphasis and in some part a renewal of language. If there is one thing I have learnt from spending time thinking about joint commissioning, it is that we need to accept that public policy labels activity and coins and fosters policy ideas. Some of these ideas are old wine in new bottles, or existing bodies in new raincoats. But not everybody involved has the same memory or associations. For some these approaches are genuinely new. Therefore whatever approach we take, we need to ensure that it allows us to unpick and clarify these policy ideas and their associated meanings: this should be our first priority. While we cannot easily predict what will be the next big idea, what we can be sure of is that analogies like ‘silo mentality’ run deep and will shape new policy ideas yet to be coined and fostered. But when the next big idea appears on the horizon we needn’t shy away from nebulous language or accept notions without question. Assisted with tools like POETQ, next time we’ll be ready.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the INLOGOV blog, the University of Birmingham or National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

This research is discussed at greater length in the article Beyond the Berlin Wall?, by Helen Dickinson, Stephen Jeffares, Alison Nicholds, and Jon Glasby, published in Public Management Review. The article can be viewed here.

Stephen Jeffares is a Roberts Fellow in the College of Social Sciences based in INLOGOV, Institute for Local Government Studies. His fellowship focuses on the role of ideas in the policy process and implications for methods. He is a specialist in Q methodology and other innovative methods to inform policy analysis.

Neighbourhood governance: Community empowerment or containment?

21/01/201303/10/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Madeleine Pill

In the UK, the deprived neighbourhood has long been a site and scale for intervention and action, giving rise to a variety of forms of neighbourhood governance to achieve a range of purposes. The four predominant rationales for neighbourhood governance are defined by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008): the empowerment of citizens and communities (the civic rationale); partnership to take a holistic approach to an area (social); government through new forms of representation and participation (political); and management in terms of more effective local service delivery (economic).

The relative emphasis upon these rationales changes over time due to policy shifts, exacerbated given central government’s hand in the instigation and operation of neighbourhood-targeted initiatives. Initiatives have increasingly stressed the civic rationale in terms of encouraging neighbourhood-level ownership of problems and of attempts to resolve these. This, paired with the need for deficit reduction, is demonstrated in ‘Big Society’ policy rhetoric. Its amorphous bundling of approaches seeks the transfer of responsibilities for services to local communities and third sector agencies. Its promotion of social enterprise models contrasts with the neighbourhood management approach of influencing other service providers rather than engaging in direct service provision.

The associated shift to ‘small government’ heralds the end of central government-led initiatives targeting deprived neighbourhoods which have left a heritage of varying types of neighbourhood governance infrastructure. How is this infrastructure affected by changes in its governance context?

An evaluation of neighbourhood management in the City of Westminster, delivered through a third sector organisation, the Paddington Development Trust, enabled exploration of these issues. The findings show that the Trust was recognised as delivering an effective form of neighbourhood management which emphasised community involvement and the civic rationale of neighbourhood governance, but which absorbed large amounts of officer time and was resource intensive. The Westminster approach to neighbourhood management was a product of New Labour strategy and of a genuine desire to tackle the problems of the most deprived wards in an otherwise affluent local authority.

While funding was provided, the City Council sustained a strong commitment. But the approach was contingent on the prevailing ethos and funding regimes and remained relatively detached from mainstream services. It proved easy to decouple the deprived neighbourhood infrastructure from ‘normal’, mainstream service delivery with the advent of the coalition government in 2010. As neighbourhood initiatives have been largely instigated by central government, it is unsurprising that the principal purposes of neighbourhood governance have been imposed, with additional funding offered as an incentive. In reality, once funding ends, the ability of neighbourhood governance to be sustained, despite the rhetoric about ‘capacity building’ towards neighbourhood empowerment, is very much in doubt.

Herein lies the paradox of the centralised approach to neighbourhood initiatives in the UK: commitments to localism, devolution and community empowerment are largely dependent on central government resource provision. While community empowerment is an important part of the policy rhetoric, in practice a ‘strategy of containment’ operates whereby residents in deprived neighbourhoods have relatively little control.

A full account of this research is available in my recent article with Nick Bailey: ‘Community Empowerment or a Strategy of Containment? Evaluating Neighbourhood Governance in the City of Westminster. Local Government Studies. 38 (6), 731-51.

Madeleine Pill is a Research Fellow at the Cardiff School of Planning and Geography. Her research focuses on critical governance studies exploring the scope for and limits to community action at neighbourhood level and she teaches on the MSc Regeneration Studies.

You couldn’t make it up – except DCLG just did

18/01/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

Did you see manager Arsène Wenger’s explanation of Arsenal’s feeble performance against Manchester City last Sunday? While most players are galvanised by home supporters and see playing at home as an advantage, Arsenal’s apparently are scared by theirs. “They have a great desire to do well, so maybe they’re a bit too anxious that they don’t respond completely to the expectation level of the crowd.”

A strong bid, certainly, for this week’s You-couldn’t-make-it-up prize, were it not for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), who, not satisfied with inventing their own measure for disguising the severity of their grant funding cuts to councils, have now disguised it still further by double-counting. If the whole grant-slashing exercise weren’t so serious, the ineptitude really would be laughable. Ridicule aside, it can only serve to validate and reinforce the allegations of unfairness that core city leaders in particular have been making.

Nick Forbes, Newcastle City Council leader, kicked off in November, writing personally to David Cameron to complain about the ‘unfair’ impact of funding cuts on councils like Liverpool with cheap housing and therefore a low council tax base. Then on December 19th, local government finance settlement day, the leaders of all seven English core cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield – wrote jointly to Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, demanding an urgent meeting to address the “looming financial crisis” their authorities were facing.

The scale of the potential crisis was illustrated by reference to the ‘Jaws of Doom’ graph – Birmingham’s version of Barnet Council’s now famous and similarly apocalyptic ‘Graph of Doom’, produced by the London borough to shock residents, but particularly Ministers, into realising that by 2020 councils would be facing a £16.5 billion shortfall, with no money left for anything apart from children’s services and adult care.

The ‘Jaws of Doom’ graph appears in Birmingham City Council’s budget consultation document (p.8) and does indeed resemble the gaping jaws of a crocodile, attacking from stage left, but unable to swallow the monstrous £600 million budget deficit for which the council estimated, last October, it was heading – and now, following the finance settlement, closer to £625 million.

This is on top of the £275 million of mainly ‘efficiency and transformational’ savings, including a 25% staffing cut, already made over the past two years, and that have brought the council to the point where the Labour administration, elected last May, claims further efficiency savings are no longer enough. The severity of the reductions in government grant will necessitate significant cuts in front-line services. Hence the budget consultation: outlining the Council’s proposed four-year savings programme, and seeking residents’ views on detailed service cuts for 2013/14, and on alternative council tax scenarios – a further freeze, a limited increase of under 2%, or a larger increase requiring referendum approval.

One question, however, that the consultation document neither asks nor, judiciously, attempts explicitly to answer is: IS IT FAIR? So I thought I’d have a go.

Are Birmingham and urban councils generally, or Labour councils, or the most deprived areas, being particularly harshly treated by these grant funding cuts? Or was Pickles right, when he insisted in his finance settlement statement that “overall the average spending power reduction for councils in 2013/14 is expected to be limited to just 1.7% per household”, and that “concerns that the poorest councils would suffer disproportionately are well wide of the mark”?

Well, let’s start right there, with that phrase ‘spending power’ (SP) reduction – used by Pickles and his civil servants in preference to the ‘grant reductions’ quoted by council leaders and measured by the ‘Jaws of Doom’. Are they different? You bet. SP was introduced in 2010/11, when the new Government announced its intention to cut central government grant funding of council revenue spending by an unprecedented 28% in cash terms (nearer 40% in real terms, allowing for inflation) over four years, with 21% ‘front-loaded’ in the first two years.

To disguise the savagery of that front-loading, and to make before-after comparisons more difficult, the DCLG first restructured the whole grant allocation system, and then created ‘revenue spending power’ – a measure Ministers claimed that, by including council tax receipts, certain specific grants, and NHS social care funding, gave a fuller picture of a council’s overall financial position. Fuller, yes, but not full. If it really was a full, rather than politically beneficial, picture that Ministers wanted, they could have included income from fees, charges and investments. These, however, are income sources that tend to decline in a recession and whose addition to SP would emphasise, rather than de-emphasise, councils’ grant dependency – so nothing like as helpful as the DCLG’s contrived measure, which could instantly reduce a 28% grant cut to a 14% cut in spending power.

You’d think this was sufficient, but this year, it seems, they’ve really over-egged the pudding by double-counting council tax support in two separate elements of SP. Sadly, at the time of writing, the Department was refusing to help Local Government Chronicle journalists with their enquiries into how the double-counting occurred, and whether it was intentional or accidental. Either way, Pickles’ claim of an average 1.7% spending power cut in 2013/14 was clearly wrong and should have been about a percentage point higher.

Having changed the system and invented new terminology, Ministers’ next rule is always to describe funding reductions in overall percentages, not cash. This fools no one who gives a moment’s thought to how grant funding works, but then there are plenty who don’t.

Formula Grant – the general grant allocated in the annual finance settlement – is calculated in four blocks, the two key ones being Relative Needs, to compensate for areas’ differing service needs, thereby broadly reflecting economic and social deprivation; and Relative Resources, reflecting the strength of an area’s council tax base and ability to raise its own revenue. In combination, these two elements mean some councils are much more reliant on central government grant than others. The more deprived the area, the greater is its need for council services, the lower its council tax base and tax receipts, and therefore the higher the proportion of its revenue spending that needs to be funded by central grant.

Overall in 2012/13, 27% of councils’ revenue spending is funded through council tax. But that proportion ranges from averages of 16% and 22% among Inner London and metropolitan boroughs to over 50% among shire districts. Even neighbouring councils’ grant/tax ratios can differ considerably – like Birmingham’s 84% grant/16% council tax and Solihull’s 67%/33%. What can be presented, therefore, as a uniform 10% grant cut across the country means for Birmingham a budget cut of 8.4%, for Solihull one of 6.7%, but for some shire districts barely 2%. Not so uniform after all.

The reforms to specific or targeted grants have hit councils in deprived areas relatively harder still. Some grants specifically conceived for deprived communities, like the Working Neighbourhoods Fund and area-based grant, have been run down or scrapped altogether. In contrast, the Council Tax Freeze grant to councils agreeing to follow the Government’s tax-freeze policy comprises a 3.5% addition to a council’s existing tax revenues, so benefiting most those with higher tax bases. Likewise, the New Homes Bonus Scheme, funded by top-slicing the central grant to all authorities by equal proportions, benefits disproportionately those in the south, where the bulk of the building is.

Obviously, there have been and will continue to be numerous other technical changes in the grant funding system, with criss-crossing impacts on different kinds of councils. Even a year ago, though, the Audit Commission’s Tough Times report was clear that “there is a strong link between local deprivation and the scale of funding reductions”, with “deprived areas in the north, the midlands, and inner London [experiencing] the greatest cuts”.

There have been several comparisons of the scale of funding cuts across individual local authorities, among the most accessible being the Guardian newspaper’s analysis and interactive map. English local authorities were found to be facing, on average, a cut of £61 a year per person in the total central government funding they would receive between 2011 and 2014, but the range extended from over £250 per person in Hackney, Liverpool and Knowsley to North Dorset’s £2.70.

The severity of cuts correlated closely with the Government’s own Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), examples including Liverpool – IMD 2nd, funding cut 2nd (₤252); Manchester – IMD 4th, funding cut 5th (₤210); and Birmingham – IMD 13th, funding cut 16th (₤166). Of the 30 councils facing the severest cuts, 28 are currently Labour controlled. All of which suggests – returning to Pickles’ other bluster from his finance settlement statement – that “concerns that the poorest councils would suffer disproportionately” are not so wide of the mark after all, and certainly not as wide of it as his own 1.7%.

Chris 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.

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The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham