In the previous piece, I looked at governance at the community level. Today, it goes up a level to counties and regions.
In practical terms, this could either retaining the current system of unitary authorities and just changing boundaries (if deemed practical):
It could also mean returning to a form of two-tier local government. Or, transforming the city regions and corporate joint committees into a more formalised tier of regional government and mixing and matching beneath it.
Once again, I’ll be looking at the financial issues, the reform process, and political/electoral implications in later parts:
This was discussed in more detail in the above links, but in short:
- The failure to introduce many of the Williams Commission recommendations and its related reforms (i.e. Leighton Andrews’ white paper).
- The challenges of austerity/budget cuts, with duplication of local government services across different unitary authorities being considered inefficient.
- Competing views on whether the size and number of local authorities is an issue, which has stalled the process of reform at the Welsh Government & Senedd level.
- Collaboration results in a large number of quasi-autonomous regional bodies making it increasingly difficult to determine who’s accountable for what. It’s led to ever more complicated working relationships between regional bodies and unitary authorities.
- The influence of local government officers over policies and decision-making has increasingly made councillors’ roles partly redundant. Wales has a relatively high number of councillors per head; it’s unclear whether this is necessary given the introduction of a Cabinet system and the increased influence of officers.
- Perennial problems in improving diversity in local government – particularly increasing and maintaining numbers of women, disabled and young councillors.
- The decline of the local print press has led to a lack of local government reporting and an increasing reliance on public relations management by councils to inform the public of their work.
- Low turnout in local elections, a high proportion of uncontested seats and the continued use of first-past-the-post (despite councils having the option to switch to STV).
Have there been any moves to address these?
I’ve gone into more detail on this in Part III, but to summarise:
The Local Government & Elections Act 2021 introduced some limited reforms in response to the Williams Commission, but it was mainly window dressing.
The biggest change had nothing to do with the Williams Commission: the introduction of city regions and Corporate Joint Committees (CJCs). The aim has been to provide a platform for the unitary authorities to collaborate in certain policy areas – particularly economic development and public transport. This hasn’t gone as far as the combined authorities and metro mayors in parts of England despite some calls for Wales to follow suit to improve accountability.
Local government reform has fallen off the Welsh political agenda since Brexit, though increasing cost pressures and demographic changes (impacting social services and housing in particular) mean that it might not stay off the agenda for much longer.
What are the possible options?
This is partially dependent on what reforms we may decide to make at the community level.
If you want another opinion on this, I recommend a piece by Lyn Thomas (A Cardiff Voice) – published in August 2011.
The broad choices I’ve selected are:
- Special Purpose Boards – Instead of having a single council, several directly-elected specialist boards covering a specific policy or service would be set up (i.e. school boards, planning boards, health & social care boards). One example would be school districts used in most of the United States and the special districts in California.
- County Commissions – Each member of the executive (Commissioner) is elected separately and come together to form a single board (Commission) to run services in a particular area. It’s used in the US states of Texas, Ohio and New Jersey (amongst others).
- Unitary Authorities – What we have now. All statutory local government functions in a given area are undertaken by a single council makde up of councillors elected to represent wards. An executive body/Cabinet is usually selected from amongst the council’s members. As used in Scotland (Part IV) , Ireland (Part IV) and parts of England.
- Counties & Municipalities (Two-Tier) – Statutory local government functions are split between a higher tier (county councils) and a lower tier (municipal/district councils). This is what Wales used between 1894-1996 and is also used in Germany (Kreise & Gemeinden), parts of Canada (Part IV), Sweden, Norway and some traditional counties of England.
- Combined Authority – Groups of unitary authorities voluntarily pool responsibilities in certain policy areas to deliver them regionally, usually led by a directly-elected Mayor. This is currently used in several English city regions including Greater Manchester, Liverpool, South Yorkshire & West Midlands. It’s also similar to how the regional assemblies work in Ireland (Part IV).
- Regional Authorities – A devolved regional tier of local government with specific powers would be established above the unitary authorities and run by a separately-elected assembly and/or directly-elected executive. This is similar to the Greater London Authority which has the London Assembly and the Mayor of London. It’s also similar to Dutch provinces, the voivodeships of Poland, prefectures of Japan, regions of France and Italy and the regional councils of Denmark (Part IV).
As a demonstrator of the differences it could look something like this:
