An examination of the issues, lack of reform and international comparisons are out of the way. So it’s time to get to the “meat” of local government and look in more detail at options for reform or, indeed, keeping things as they are.
Some of you will be waiting for the money stuff and the politics (i.e. number of councillors), but I’ve decided to look these separately:
Starting at the bottom and working upwards, here’s what could happen at community level – currently the responsibility of town & community councils (where they exist).
Here’s where the fun starts, but form rarely follows function – you need to decide what a community level of local government will do before you can decide how best to administer it or what type of council you need.
At present, town & community councils have no statutory powers or responsibilities – meaning they’re not required by law to provide particular services. They’re not even required by law to exist and can be abolished.
Deciding what services and powers would be better decided at the community level is dependent on several factors including:
- Capacity – The ability of the responsible body/organisation to make decisions effectively and objectively and also take responsibility for the delivery of particular services or the use of particular powers. In practical terms, this means having the right number of members, the right decision-making arrangements and suitably qualified support staff. I’ll be looking at the number electoral systems in Part IX.
- Finances – How much money the body/organisation would have to meet its services responsibilities, the management of that money and the tools available to them to raise additional funds (Part VII).
- Subsidiarity – What higher tiers of government deem to be suitable to be delivered as close to the community as possible. At community level – the lowest tier of local government – it’ll probably be the kind of powers that can make a noticable difference to a community but are less labour intensive, can be managed by a small number of suitably qualified staff and scrutinised either by the community themselves, a limited number of politicians (often voluntary) or a single executive decision-maker (i.e an elected mayor).
- Scale – The level of local influence the body/organisation has in their community as a combination of all of the above factors.
Plotting out the six options presented earlier, you can get a rough idea of where each option would sit:
The next question is how would that translate into specific policy areas?
The greater the capacity of the tier of government – scale, decision-making, financial resources – the more responsibilities they can take on.
As mentioned earlier, a 2018 Welsh Government commissioned review into town & community councils recommended they be responsible for what are described as “place-based services” – services that can be tied to a particular community and can vary from place to place to suit local needs.
If you include policy areas and services that straddle the line between people and place-based services (highways would be a good example), then it could look something like this:
The colum to the right demonstrates what’s probably the maximum you could realistically deliver at a municipal council level (if Wales adopted a similar system to Denmark, for example).
To the left, is the minimum you can expect a community meeting or community association to take on.
