Local Government

The Ups and Downs of Robert Jenrick

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Chris Game

When I joined INLOGOV in 1979, to launch its first undergraduate degree, I was, at best, passably fluent in spoken and written ‘academic’. As for ‘professional local government’, though, I’d barely have trusted myself to speak or write a decent-length paragraph.

Forty years on, thanks to the demanding but rewarding incentive for INLOGOV academic staff to become passably bilingual, I have the nerve to open this blog with the extreme generalisation that, in my personal experience and taken collectively, local government officers and councillors are a pretty fair, credit-where-it’s-due crowd.

Unfortunately, when it comes to those ministerially responsible for the sector, the past decade’s bunch just haven’t been that creditworthy.

Eric Pickles (2010-15) would openly attack local government, its personnel, and, as a former council leader himself, just couldn’t stop interfering in local issues – bin collections, council newspapers, spending on biscuits, anything.

Sajid Javid (2016-18) virtually flaunted his boredom with the latter part of what became a Housing and Local Government portfolio, then publicly blamed the whole sector for the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy, in seeking apparently to absolve his central government chums.

James Brokenshire (2018-19) had perhaps the best pedigree – son of Peter B, a council chief exec and Audit Commission director – and most instinctive positivity towards local government. Indeed, exactly a year ago he was advocating a revolutionary ‘New Deal’ between central and local government – for about five minutes until it disappeared down the gap between May and Johnson.

However, ask local government people for the best of the bunch, and my guess is that they’ll talk most warmly of Greg Clark (2015-16), who made clear both his interest in and commitment to decentralised government and, had the Treasury permitted, to serious devolution of powers from Whitehall.

There were others, of course, but none, I’d bet you, would seriously have even contemplated: (1) acting unlawfully and (2) overruling his own Government’s advice, in order simultaneously (3) to benefit financially a substantial funder of his own party, (4) to the immediate and substantial financial cost of an individual local council. Until Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick looked initially a typical Johnson-Cummings neophyte appointee: youngest Cabinet member, but at least feigning an interest in his assigned brief and an eagerness to learn.

That his sole ministerial experience was at the Treasury would have concerned some, and he seemed an unduly swift convert to unitaries and elected mayors for all. But, come February and having survived the PM’s two post-election cabinet reshuffles, he was doing OK, both the local finance settlement and his extension of councils’ audit deadlines receiving general approval. His personal Covid opened promisingly too, as an impressively early choice to front a Downing Street press briefing.

There followed a tricky patch with his lockdown travel confusions – doing ‘a Cummings’ (twice), thinking apparently that ‘stay at home’ meant interchangeably at any of his several domiciles.

Come mid-April, though, he was announcing an initially well received doubling of Government Covid funding to councils to £3.2 bn, and that “local government would have the resources they need to meet this challenge”. “Unwavering” backing to do “whatever is necessary”, echoed Local Government Minister, Luke Hall, to fellow MPs.

Except they wouldn’t. For within weeks the Minister changed his mind – or had it changed for him – telling MPs that the second £1.6 bn grant was to compensate councils for income losses as well as an unspecified list of direct Covid-related costs, and that, if they thought what they were doing was guaranteed funding by central government, well, forget it.

Bad – except compared with the next chapter. To summarise: Jenrick has publicly admitted “acting unlawfully” and showing “apparent bias” in overruling the Government’s own Planning Inspectorate’s advice and approving a highly controversial £1 bn redevelopment project, thereby saving, by 24 hours, a billionaire tycoon and major Conservative Party donor an estimated £30-50 million due as a Community Infrastructure Levy to Tower Hamlets Council.

Whereupon the beneficiary – businessman and newspaper/magazine publisher Richard Desmond – donated a further £12,000 to the party, a good day’s business satisfactorily concluded. Well, not quite. Rather than release relevant documentation, Jenrick allowed his own – though not ministerial – planning permission to be quashed.

[As a story that has unfolded quite quickly but in stages, there have been various accounts in the national and trade media. Rather than cite several, covering different sections of the story, I have picked one – not a natural choice, but one of the more recent and comprehensive]

The Conservative Party insists Government policy is not influenced by donations, and the PM insists that Jenrick “did the right thing”. However, he is currently the bookies’ 4/1 favourite to be the next Cabinet exit, overtaking long-time front runner, Priti Patel, and you could have got very much longer odds at any time over the past few months against anyone achieving that.

 

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

 

The success of Police and Crime Commissioners in drug harm reduction in the West Midlands

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Megan Jones

Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) were introduced in 2012, (2011 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act), representing one of the most radical changes to governance structures in England and Wales. PCCs are directly elected by the public and their statutory functions require them to (1) hold their own police force to account on behalf of the public, (2) set the policing priorities for the area through a police and crime plan and (3) appoint a Chief Constable.

They replace the former Police Authority committee style structure, which was criticised for their lack of visibility and accountability to the public and communities they were designed to serve. The emergence of PCCs was therefore a result of the failings of the previous governance mechanism and a political shift of focus from national to local governance.

In my research, I look at the impact that PCC governance has on drug policy, using the West Midlands police force area as a case study. Drugs policy, and specifically a harm reduction approach*, is just one area of policing and priorities that was used to explore the statutory role of PCC and more broadly, how the role can be interpreted or used wider than its statutory framework.

In August 2019, the latest drug-related death figures were announced by the ONS. They are now the highest on record, with 4,359 deaths in England and Wales recorded in 2018 (ONS, 2019). In the West Midlands, there is a drug-related death every 3 days (West Midlands PCC 2017a). Over 50% of serious and acquisitive crime is to fund an addiction and the cost to society is over £1.4 billion each year (West Midlands PCC 2017a). This topic often divides opinion and can be politicised. However, these debates rarely prevent the considerable damage caused by drugs to often very vulnerable people and wider society. The official national response is focused on enforcement of the law, criminalising individuals for drug possession.

By interviewing a number of key actors within the drug policy arena and as leaders in policing both within forces and PCC’s offices, I looked at how the PCC structure can enable a change in policy. This was combined with desk-based document study of public available document into the drugs policy approach taken in the West Midlands. Four key themes were explored: the statutory role of the PCC; the individual PCC; governance and public opinion; and the approach taken.

My results showed that the PCC role and this new form of civic leadership benefitted from: convening power and their ability to draw upon key partners from across the public sector, lived experience, and third sector. This is an informal mechanism of governance strengthened by public mandate. PCCs have the ability to prioritise by setting their strategic priorities in the police and crime plan. For example, in the West Midlands, the approach to drug policy has been narrowed to focus on high harm drugs (heroin and crack cocaine), thus ensuring ‘deliverability’. This means that limited resources available are more narrowly focused and can have a greater impact. The statutory role of a PCC allows work at pace and decisions to be made quickly, which means that trial and pilot new approaches and innovations.

Of course, there are limitations. PCCs vary across the country and often do not speak with one voice, particularly on drug policy. There are also huge advantages of a good working relationship between Chief Constable and PCC, demonstrated through the joint approach in the West Midlands.

Figure 1: Drivers to drug policy, derived from the findings

My research allowed me to concluded that three key drivers are optimum for delivery of a PCC-led harm reduction approach: using the levers at their disposal, such as the statutory functions, and informal governance mechanisms, such as convening power, which are able to provide the strategic and political coverage required to deliver at pace.

PCCs are unique in the landscape of UK governance and whilst weaknesses in mechanisms designed to reign in their power could be viewed as worrying, in the drug policy space this has allowed for the development of a new approach in the West Midlands, one that is evidence-based and has the ability to save lives, reduce costs and reduce crime.

The potential of PCCs is arguably still being explored, but their ability to test new approaches and work effectively with partners will be essential in other areas of policy, such as the response to serious violence and the potential for an increasing role across the criminal justice system.

PCCs have a number of levers at their disposal, and are able to use informal and formal governance mechanisms to foster real change at the local level and drive forward evidence-based policy.

Megan Jones is the Head of Policy for the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner and is a former INLOGOV student, studying on the MSc Public Management programme. She tweets at @MegJ4289.

 

What Do We Miss out on When Policy Evaluation Ignores Broader Social Problems?

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Daniel Silver and Stephen Crossley

With local government funding being stretched to breaking point over the last decade, it is more important than ever to know whether investment into policy programmes is making a difference.

Evaluation draws on different social research methods to systematically investigate the design, implementation, and effectiveness of an intervention. Evaluation can produce evidence that can be used to improve accountability and learning within policy-making processes to inform future decision making.

But is the full potential of evaluation being realised?

We recently published an article in Critical Social Policy that demonstrated how the Troubled Families programme evaluation remained within narrow boundaries that limited what could be learnt. The evaluation followed conventional procedures by investigating exclusively whether the intervention has achieved what it set out to do. But this ‘establishment oriented’ approach assumes the policy has been designed perfectly. Many of us recognise that the Troubled Families programme was far from perfect (despite what initial assessments and central government announcements claimed).

The Troubled Families programme set out to ‘turn around’ the lives of the 120,000 most ‘troubled families’ (characterised by crime, anti-social behaviour, truancy or school exclusion and ‘worklessness’) through a ‘family intervention’ approach which advocates a ‘persistent, assertive and challenging’ way of working with family members to change their behaviours but, crucially, not their material circumstances.

Austerity, mentioned in just two of the first phase evaluation reports, was not considered as an issue that might have had an impact on families. Discussions of poor and precarious labour market conditions, cuts to local authority services for children, young people and families, and inadequate housing provision are almost completely neglected in the reports. Individualised criteria such as ‘worklessness’, school exclusion and crime or anti-social behaviour were considered but structural factors such as class, gender, and racial inequalities were not; nor were other issues such as labour market conditions, housing quality and supply, household income or welfare reforms.

The first phase outcome of ‘moving off out-of-work benefits and into continuous employment’ did not take into account the type of work that was secured, or the possible impact that low-paid, poor quality or insecure work may have on family life. Similarly, the desire by the government to see school attendance improve did not necessarily seek to improve the school experience for the child, and there is no evidence of concern for any learning that did or did not take place once attendance had been registered. Such issues were outside of the frames in which the policy had been constructed and so were considered to be outside of the boundaries of investigation for the evaluation. The scope for learning was therefore restricted to within the frames that had been set by national government when the programme had been designed.

So what can be done?

While large-scale evaluations of national programmes will still take place, local councils can add to these with independent, small-scale evaluations. These can adopt a more open approach that examined what happened locally and contextualise the programme within the particular social problems that residents experience.

A more contextualised form of evaluation can broaden the scope of learning beyond the original framing of a policy intervention. Collaboration between councils and participants who have experienced an intervention through locally situated programme evaluations can explore people’s everyday problems and the tangible improvements that have been delivered by an intervention (and what caused these outcomes to happen). Such an approach with ‘troubled families’ would recognise the knowledge, expertise and capabilities of many families in dealing with the vicissitudes of everyday life, including those caused by the government claiming to be helping them via the Troubled Families programme. Analysis of the data can be used to identify shared everyday problems and narratives of impact that show improvements to people’s everyday lives. By building up a picture about what approaches have been successful, an incremental approach to improving policy and culture within local institutions can be developed – based on the ethos of learning by doing.

In addition to learning about what works, we can also develop our knowledge of what problems have been left unresolved. Of course, no single policy intervention can possibly solve every dimension of our complex social problems. This does not necessarily mean a failure of the intervention, but rather that there are broader issues that need to be addressed. Knowing about these issues can produce useful evidence to find out about social needs in the local community that are not being met, and which the Council might be able to address or use the new knowledge to inform future strategies.

Evaluation is often seen as a bolt-on to the policy-making process. But re-purposing evaluation to learn more about social problems and the effectiveness of tailored local solutions can create evidence and ideas that can be used to improve future social policy.

 

Daniel Silver is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham. He previously taught politics and research methods at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on evaluation, social policy, research methods, and radical politics.

Stephen Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University. He com- pleted his PhD from Durham University examining the UK government’s Troubled Families Programme in August 2017. His most recent publications are Troublemakers: the construction of ‘troubled families’ as a social problem (Policy Press, 2018) and ‘The UK Government’s Troubled Families Programme: Delivering Social Justice?’, which appeared in the journal Social Inclusion.

Wider opening of schools during covid-19

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Cllr. Ketan Sheth 

Education impacts society and is a measure and driver of our progress as a community.  A good education keeps us physically and mentally strong and plays a key role in the betterment of our socio-economic environment and the communities in which we live. Education is the ultimate pathway of success, providing the support that enables each and everyone of us to keep growing our knowledge and ourselves across the whole of our lives.  That is why education is given the highest status in today’s world. The delivery of our education service, however, has been heavenly impacted at all levels by Covid-19.

We are now starting discussions on easing the Covid-19 lockdown by reopening schools in a bid to restart our economy. The concern is that this might become a breeding ground for a second wave of Covid-19 cases.  Indeed, many parents may decide to keep their children at home, as it is possible that the rate at which the virus spreads may increase when schools open. It is therefore possible that the decline in the number of people infected may be affected. I say ‘possible’ because analysis of international trends suggest there are no definitive indications that opening schools accelerates infection. Schools have not yet been shown to push the reproduction rate (R) above one.

Many of our families and the communities in which we live have actively helped reduce (R) over the last 5 to 6 weeks. As a result the number of hospital admissions of Covid-19, in some communities, has now stabilised. Because of that, the reduction of the reproduction rate has slowed since mid-April, but it is still under 1. This has led to the debate on balancing the needs of the economy and the safety of our communities. In this case, that means our children.

The role of local government is to know and understand its communities and their children. Local government delivers services to local residents every day and is the vital ingredient to finding the best community solution.

As Covid-19 shows, pandemics are not technocratic. They are complex, creating social and behavioural challenges. Parents, teachers, and children are grappling with the threat of contracting the infection, often while dealing with personal loss. Effective management mechanisms between national and local government are therefore critical. We need to strengthen local responses and systems, and respect and build the capacity of local government to manage the policy response from health to the economy, to social protection. Investment in local government will be key to successful recovery and long-term resilience.

Thinking and acting locally will help to ensure that the spread of Covid-19 is curtailed and our communities protected. As far as opening schools goes: this needs to be managed locally and to be responsive to local concerns and needs. A locally crafted step-by-step approach is demanded, setting a code-of-conduct that ensures the highest standards of hygiene, and ensuring all school operations, break times, and classroom divisions meet carefully set social distancing guidelines.

For government to work effectively in the worst of times, it needs to have well-oiled systems, practices and resource flows.  We need to reflect on, and respond to, our population’s needs and changing realities quickly, intelligently, and always with the wellbeing of our communities at the forefront. Anxiety will linger over infection rates, but if we work together at a local level in the communities where we live, we can be agile, and creative, in our services. Together we can do it locally.

 

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Cllr. Ketan Sheth is a Councillor for Tokyngton, Wembley in the London Borough of Brent. Ketan has been a councillor since 2010 and was appointed as Brent Council’s Chair of the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee in May 2016. Before his current appointment in 2016, he was the Chair of Planning, of Standards, and of the Licensing Committees. Ketan is a lawyer by profession and sits on a number of public bodies, including as the Lead Governor of Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

Covid-19: Is Government Really “Led By The Science”?

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Jason Lowther, Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham (not representing the views of the university)

In the midst of the EU Referendum campaign, Michael Gove famously commented that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. No longer. Fast forward four years, Gove (and every other minister) is sharing press conferences with professors and claiming to be “led by the science”. But with the UK topping the European tables of Covid-19 deaths, what does that actually mean? And is “science” the only type of knowledge we need to make life-saving policy in the Covid crisis?

Making policy is difficult and complex – particularly in a crisis, and especially one caused by a virus that didn’t exist in humans six months ago but has the potential to kill millions. The information we have is incomplete, inaccurate and difficult to interpret. Politicians (and experts) are under huge pressure, recognising that their inevitable mistakes may well cost lives. My research has shown that even in more modestly stressful and novel contexts, policy makers don’t just use experts to answer questions, but also their public claims to be listening to experts are useful politically. Christina Boswell identified the ‘legitimising’ and ‘substantiating’ functions of experts. Listening (or at least appearing to be listening) to experts can give the public confidence that politicians’ decisions are well founded, and lend authority to their policy positions (such as when to re-open golf courses).

Covid-19 is a global issue requiring local responses, so the spatial aspects of using experts and evidence are particularly important. Governments need to learn quickly from experiences in countries at later stages in the epidemic, including countries where historic relations may be difficult. Central governments also have to learn quickly what is practical and working (or not) on the ground in the specific contexts of local areas, avoiding the vain attempt to manage every aspect from Whitehall. My research shows that the careful use of evidence can help here, developing shared understandings which can overcome historic blocks and enable effective collaboration. But in Covid-19 it seems central government too often is opting out of building these shared understandings. Experience in other countries has sometimes been ignored. Vital knowledge from local areas has not been sought or used. Instead of transparently sharing the evidence as decisions are developed, evidence has been hidden or heavily redacted, breaking a basic principle of good science and sacrificing the opportunity to build shared understandings open to critical challenge.

What counts as “evidence” anyway? Different professional and organisational cultures value different kinds of knowledge as important and reliable. In my work with combined authorities, I found that bringing mental health practitioners into policy discussions had opened up a wide range of new sources of knowledge, such as the voices of people with lived experience. And, carefully managed, this wider range of types of knowledge can lead to better decisions. The Government’s network of scientific advisory committees, once we finally were told who was involved, seems to have missed some important voices. The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, argued that expertise around public health and intensive medical care should have been in the room. I would also argue that having practical knowledge from local councils and emergency planners could help avoid recommendations that prove impossible to implement effectively. As Kieron Flanagan has noted recently, we learned in the inquiry into the BSE crisis that esteemed experts can still make recommendations which are impossible to implement in practice.

Making a successful recovery will require government quickly to learn lessons from (their own and others’) mistakes so far. Expert advice and relevant data should be published, quickly and in full – treating the public and partners as adults. Key experts for this phase (including knowledge of local public health, economic development, schools, city centres and transport) should be brought into the discussions as equal partners – not simply the “hired help” to do a list of tasks ministers have dreamt up in a Whitehall basement. Then we can have plans that are well founded, widely supported, and have the best chance of practical success. Our future, in fact our very lives, depend on it.

This post was originally published in The Municipal Journal.

 

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Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

England’s over-centralisation isn’t just a governance issue now – it’s a public health emergency

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Jessica Studdert

The concentration of power at Westminster and Whitehall has long frustrated those of us who engage closely with the structures of governance and compare it to decentralised norms across much of Europe. Now, as with so many facets of the Covid-19 crisis, the pandemic has exposed national vulnerabilities and left us grappling with the consequences. The grip on initiative that rests in SW1 is one such weakness, which is impacting how our system is responding to the virus, in turn perpetuating the public health emergency we find ourselves in.

A degree of national direction is clearly needed in the midst of a serious pandemic. People look to the Government for leadership and reassurance. Those in positions of power certainly feel personal responsibility for leading the response. Measures to implement service strategy nationally, such as through the NHS, or to use national heft for international procurement buying power, are certainly necessary. But time after time during the unfolding crisis, the centralised instinct has clouded decision-making, with terrible results.

The structures for the top-down approach to the pandemic were set early on, when the Government chose not to deploy the existing Civil Contingencies Act which set out clear roles, responsibilities and resources for all local and national public bodies. They instead rushed the Coronavirus Act through Parliament, which gave the Executive a greater level of unchecked power and no defined local role. This has had ongoing consequences for the coordination of an effective response. Leaked findings from an internal Whitehall review found that local emergency planning teams believe their abilities have been compromised by a controlling and uncommunicative approach from the central government machine, which persistently withholds data and intelligence.

The centralised response isn’t just structural, at times it has felt deeply instinctive. There has been a repeated preference for big, bold flashy schemes over smaller, sustained but potentially more impactful measures. In the early weeks of the crisis much media attention focussed on the new Nightingale hospitals, yet we are now seeing tragically how that time and resource could have been better invested in the more targeted shielding of hundreds of care homes. When faced with the need to quickly implement testing for Covid-19, the Secretary of State for Health reached for a high-profile 100,000 target and set up new large processing sites. This triumph of tactics over strategy directed the systemic response to focus on numbers over priority need and overlooked existing networks of local lab capacity. Even as attempts are made to set up contact tracing at scale to support the easing of lockdown restrictions, the Government seems to have more confidence in a new mobile app than it does existing local public health teams. This is despite the latter’s expertise in tracing the contacts of people who have highly infectious diseases and clear evidence from countries who have successfully managed their lockdown transition.

The formal power exercised at the centre is in direct contrast to the informal role for local authorities, which is having devastating consequences for their very viability. Because councils’ response has no statutory footing in the context of an emergency, they are left exposed to the whims of a few individuals making decisions in Westminster. At the start of the crisis, the Secretary of State for Local Government told local authorities to spend “whatever it takes” to protect their residents. Councils had immediately set about providing relief to shielded groups, protecting wider vulnerable groups and implementing public safety measures, all while ensuring essential services continued as usual. Rather than support these efforts, Government then rescinded this early clear backing, querying councils’ honesty over their cost assessments and leaving many facing a financial black hole.

The double standards central government imposes on its local counterparts is nowhere more apparent than when it comes to local government finance. An emergency on the scale of a global pandemic has required state-led responses on a scale inconceivable only months ago, and with widespread public approval. Central government spending has snowballed to accommodate unprecedented employee furlough schemes, emergency business support measures, not to mention the enormous costs to the NHS. The Chancellor has the leeway to respond to this through a number of different measures – incurring public debt, raising taxes, freezing public sector wages and reducing public spending, a combination of which he is reportedly considering.

Local government has no such room for fiscal manoeuvre. Councils are legally required to balance annual budgets and have only narrow revenue-raising powers through council tax and business rates which are themselves subject to centrally imposed controls. With a shock to their budgets of this scale they are at the mercy of decisions made by a few in Westminster. These have so far resulted in a couple of ad hoc cash injections of £1.6bn each, and a bit extra cobbled together earmarked for social care and rough sleepers – so far massively short of the estimated £10-13 billon shortfall councils collectively face.

It is no way to run a country. It never was, but in the context of the crisis the contradictions of our top-heavy system of governance are laid bare. The rumblings of discontent from Mayors in the north of England at their regions being side-lined, and from councils over plans to fully reopen schools in the absence of clear local test, track and trace infrastructure, suggest the popular tide is beginning to turn against blanket centrally-imposed measures. As local government is increasingly being seen as better placed to protect their residents, particularly in the context of a Government that is increasingly mis-stepping, there may now be an opportunity for a deeper discussion about how our country should be run in the interests of everyone.

Jessica Studdert is deputy director of the New Local Government Network (NLGN), a Londonbased think-tank. She leads NLGN’s thought leadership and research, and contributes strategic oversight of the organisation. Prior to joining NLGN, Jessica was political adviser to the Labour Group at the LGA. She led policy there, working closely on public service reform and devolution. Previously she worked in policy roles in the voluntary sector for a street homelessness and a childcare charity, and she began her career at the Fabian Society.