LOCAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND

LOCAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND

Evelyn Sharp

Since the end of the war three attempts have been made to reorganize local government in England. The first failed completely; the second was halted half-way through; the third is going on now. In Scotland and Wales, where local government is separately administered by the Secre- taries of State for those countries (in Wales only since 1964), the story is much the same though the details are different; attempts at reorganization have failed, and new ones are being made now.

This is the subject of my talk. Why we in Britain want to reorganize our local government system; why we have so far failed; what the under- lying issues are. I shall speak mainly in terms of England, though up to three years ago my story applies equally to Wales. As I am a member of the royal commission now engaged in the third attempt to get local government reorganized in England, I cannot speculate on what the outcome will be; and anyway it would be a very rash man who would do so at this stage. Certainly I have not as yet the faintest idea what conclusions the commission will reach; still less, of course, what the Government will do with them when it gets them. That is always the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question for any commission.

THE EXISTING SYSTEM

I am sure that most readers are familiar with the local government set-up in England. (In Scotland, which some may know better than England, the set-up is a little different.) But just in case some are confused about it-as indeed many people at home are confused-here is a very brief description.

London has always had its own arrangements, and they have been drastically rearranged very receatly. I will come to them later.

Outside London there are two systems: one for the larger towns- supposedly for those with a popdation over 75,000, though some smaller ones have managed to join the club-and one for the countryside, including most of the smaller towns. The first have the one-tier system: a single elected council, the county borough council, for all local government purposes. In the countryside, there are two tiers dividing the functions between them: the county council, and below them county district councils of widely varying sizes including many small, ancient

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boroughs as well as some quite large modem ones. It is important to remember that, in England, “borough” signges a town which is part of an administrative county. It is only a “county borough” which is wholly independent of any administrative county.

To complete the picture there is, in the rural areas, yet a third tier of local government-the parish council. These cover the villages, and sometimes represent very few people indeed. They have only minor executive functions, mostly concerned with the amenities of the village; but they have an important role in making the voice of the village heard about what it wants-even more about what it doesn’t want. Ncver forget the parish councils. hlany people hold that it is only at this level that democracy still really functions, and that whatever may happen to the rest of local government, parish councils will always be an essential part of the pattern in rural areas.

As for the functions of English local authorities, the list reads, I think, not very differently from the Canadian one-except that education is included and has not since early in the century been handled separately by school boards. Taking first the functions that are exercised by county councils as well as by county borough councils, these are, mainly: police and fire; education; local health, welfare, and the care of children; town and country planning; main roads. The remaining functions, exercised by the county district councils as well as by the all-purpose county borough councils, are: sewerage, refuse collection and disposal, clean air; water (though many local authorities have been compelled to join together in ad hoc boards to make big enough units for this purpose-and in some areas big private companies still operate) ; housing; general development to implement the plans; minor roads; recreation; libraries; and a host of other things too numerous to mention. Incidentally, the county district councils also share in some of the county council functions by a system of “delegation”; hence some of the confusion in English local government outside the county borough.

But if this list sounds familiar, the emphasis is different-as one would expect in a crowded and heavily industrialized country. In particular, land planning now looms very large, as also does traffic. Indeed, the scale on which these two functions have now to be handled has had much to do with forcing the need for reorganization. Also, public housing is far more important in England than in Canada; about half the houses being built are built by local authorities.

In every type of authority-county councils, county borough councils, county district councils-there is a wide range of size and, therefore, a tremendous disparity of resources. This is due to a number of factors. One, of course, is simple geography, and the way the popul a t’ ion is distributed. Another is that our forefathers, when they set up the present system, were pushed around quite a bit-as we too have been in our

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generation-and had to concede status to some pretty small places with very loud voices. And the third is that there has been remarkably little change in the organization of local government since the present pattern was established over 70 years ago, although the population has increased by half as much again, and many towns have long since overflowed their local government boundaries.

A ~ M F T S AT F~ORGANIZATION

The First Attempt The first attempt at reorganization was started before the war ended.

The Government-then a coalition government-felt that local authorities were in no shape to tackle the enormous jobs of housing and reconstruc- tion that lay ahead. But they intended nothing very radical; just to bring the boundaries up to date and make them match the spread of popula- tio,n. A commission was set up to do this, but after making an intensive review of the whole country the commissioners came to the conclusion that they could not make a good job of local government unless they could propose some rearrangement of functions, as well as changes of boundary. They suggested a plan for this. Essentially what they wanted was to give more powers to the wider ranging county councils, bringing many of the autonomous county boroughs within their overall jurisdiction. By this time we had a Labour Government, and the Minister of Health, Mr. Aneurin Bevan, agreed that a more radical approach was needed, but did not agree with the precise plan proposed by the commission. Unable to persuade it to alter the plan, he dissolved it. So ended the first attempt. A pity, perhaps, since the commission’s plan would certainly have produced a great simplification. But by now, only twenty years later, it would have been out of date. Which only goes to show how difficult it is to produce a local government organization which will stand for long in this world of fast-moving change.

Nevertheless, although the Minister dissolved the commission, he wanted to see local government reorganized, and he set the department to work out a new plan. But before this could come to anything the Government had run into rough water, and an election severely reduced their majority. No government with a small majority tackles local government; as Damon Runyon would have said, there’s no percentage in it.

The Second Attempt In 1951 a Conservative Government came to power, but it was some

years before it faced the local government problem. Eventually it had to. The strait-jacket of the system was becoming unbearable. County boroughs, hemmed in by the counties, needed more room to house their overcrowded and growing populations; many of them were living in abominable slums. But the counties surrounding the county boroughs

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would not, as a rule, allow them to spread outwards. There was war between the counties and the bursting county boroughs embedded in them; the towns strove to overflow into the countryside, while the counties furiously defended it and got a lot of popular support-and Government support too-in the process.

At this point I should interpolate-for those who may wonder what the Government was doing-that efforts were being made to meet the housing needs of the crowded cities by building government-financed new towns well out in the countryside. It was-and is-national policy that the very big towns should not be allowed to spread any wider; and round these towns green belts were established in which any building was strictly controlled. That is why the counties were able to prevent the big towns from spreading. But the new town program was not big enough; only round London did the Govenlment have anything like an adequate program. And anyway, new towns could not meet the needs of people whose work tied them to the old ones. That is why the old towns were struggling to spread.

This struggle of the county boroughs to spread out into the countryside was not the only source of trouble. Indeed, so far as this was concerned, the Government was, as I have said, of two minds. Another facet of the war between counties and county boroughs-and the one which, in the event, sparked off the second attempt at reorganization- was that some of the boroughs, several of which by now were bigger than many county boroughs, were trying to break free of the counties. That is, they were trying to become county boroughs, which they could do, if they had a population not less than 75,000, by promoting a private bill in Parliament. But every time they were shot down, and not only because of county opposition. The Government took the view that such changes should not take place piecemeal; some counties might be ruined if their larger boroughs broke free.

Finance, of course, was a great part of the trouble. A county which loses territory to a county borough, or in which a borough achieves the fully self-governing status of county borough, loses part of its tax base- and, as a rule, a more than usually valuable part. The Government may make up the loss, or part of it, by grants, but that is never the same thing.

There were other troubles in local government, apart from the fights between counties and county boroughs. In some parts of the country, whole collections of towns and villages have coalesced, as populations grew, into huge spreads of solid building; what Englishmen call conurbations but Canadians call metropolitan areas. These need coherent planning and a program of redevelopment to deal with their congestion, their squalor, their out-of-date road systems, their growing traffic and shopping chaos. But they are governed by a mixture of authorities of different types and sizes, largely independent of each other, and some owing


allegiance to counties with little interest in the conurbation, except to prevent its growing any bigger.

Increasingly central government has been taking over the local government job. Gas and electricity, once municipal preserves, were nationalized soon after the war. So were the hospitals, some of which had been run by local authorities. In other spheres, central government is more and more tending to lay down what local authorities should do. In some it is creating-or threatening to create-ad hoc combinations of authorities to administer services which individual authorities are too small to handle effectively on their own. For many years there has been growing uneasi- ness about increasing centralization, voiced not only by the local authorities themselves, but also by some university professors of government who keep a sharp eye on the encroachments of the state.

The writing was on the wall, and reluctant though the Government was to grasp so thorny a subject, the time came when the Minister felt compelled to act. He called the representatives of local authorities to conference to see what measure of agreement could be reached. Agree- ment was reached, after a struggle; but not surprisingly it was hardly radical. It was also vague. The object was to provide what were described as “effective and convenient” units of local government, and regard was to be paid to almost anydung anyone could think of that might affect the question-including, not least, the wishes of the inhabitants. They proved, in the event-so far as could be judged from those who gave tongue-to want nothing so much as to be left alone.

The idea was still mainly to bring the old local government system up to date. But an advance was made in some directions. The minimum population for county boroughs was pushed up to 100,000. Smaller county boroughs could be reduced in status-in the actual event none were; smaller counties could be joined together; and, at the end of the line, the very small boroughs could, for the first time, be abolished as part of a general review of county districts by which their numbers were to be much reduced. Few things gave more offence than this-for these were ancient boroughs, and the English venerate anything very old. The most important innovation was, however, that in the conurbations a new pattern of local government was envisaged. The whole of the conurbation, including anyhng from a million to 2% million people, could be brought for some purposes-and planning was the one chiefly in mind-under one great local authority, an urban county council-what you call a metropolitan authority. Thus it was hoped that reorganization would, in these areas, produce a system capable of tackling the problems of congestion and bad housing common to all these vast concentrations.

The conurbations apart, it was all quite traditional, but it would, if firmly pursued, have resulted in a great reduction in the number of local authorities, and a great simplification of the pattern.

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Failure of the Second Attempt Unfortunately the procedure laid down for doing the job proved

intolerably protracted. Commissions were appointed, one for England, one for Wales, which were to review the two counties, region by region, discussing problems and possibilities with all the authorities. They were then to produce proposals for reorganization in each region as its review was completed, and present them to the Minister. If he approved them, with or without modifxations, h e was to present them to Parliament. It sounds reasonably simple. But every local authority, threatened by loss of temtory, loss of status, loss of identity, was given opportunity to object at every stage; and, naturally, object they did. Moreover, the Ministry’s technique for hearing the objections when the proposals reached it was to hold a public inquiry, at which nobody argued the case for reorganization; it was simply a way of collecting, publicly, all the objections. The inspectors who held the inquiries were not asked to make recommendations-only to record the objections and weigh them as best they could. At the inquiries the threatened local authorities, nearly always employing learned counsel to represent them, repeated everything they had already said to the commission, deploying every conceivable argument to demonstrate their efficiency and the disastrous consequences that would inevitably result if they were in any way diminished. It had seemed a good idea when we started to give the local authorities every chance to state their case; but I am afraid it proved a classic example of how not to do this sort of job.

Citizens rolled up to the inquiries to declare their devotion to their authorities-never previously much in evidence-and their horror at the idea of finding themselves transferred to any other. Everybody was sure that any change was bound to increase the rates. Inquiries went on for weeks and weeks-even months, and that wasn’t the end of it. When the Minister did finally make an order, threatened authorities sometimes challenged its legality and, though they did not succeed, gained another year or two of life as the case dragged through the courts. Finally the whole debate was heard over again in Parliament as members fought loyally for their constituents.

Still, with patience and determination the job could, perhaps, have been done. I say perhaps because of what happened in the smallest English county, Rutland. The commission proposed to amalgamate Rut- land with its big neighbour, Leicestershire. On any standards Rutland could not provide the whole range of county services, and for some of the most important it was dependent on its neighbours. It also happened to have some good independent grammar schools, which relieved the county council of some of the normal educational responsibilities. In short, things worked. The Rutlanders put up a tremendous fight. They were happy in their beautiful little county, and they feared that to


become part of a much bigger one might somehow change their way of life, and would certainly put up the rates. Meanwhile nobody could demonstrate that anything was going wrong in Rutland, or would go better under a bigger county council. The inhabitants raised a fund and launched a national campaign on the highly emotional theme of the little man threatened by the Whitehall bully. “I know it makes no sense,” said an experienced observer of the scene, “but every Englishman wants Rutland to win.” And win they did; the Government did not feel able to force the amalgamation through. At which every small authority plucked up heart.

Nevertheless, some things were done. Some small counties were joined together; some county boroughs were extended and got more elbow room; and in the great Midland conurbation of the Black Country, adjoining Birmingham, a mass of authorities of assorted shapes and sizes was reduced to five large county boroughs-though the commission felt unable to go the whole hog and propose bringing the entire area, together with Birmingham, under a new urban county council. Other fairly radical proposals were in the pipe line-and may yet be put through- when the commission was stopped in its tracks.

For it was not only the procedure that was causing difliculty. That could have been endured. What finally broke the second attempt was that it was becoming apparent that what was being achieved-what could be achieved-was not radical enough. At the end of it all there would still be county boroughs; larger, but still hemmed in by the counties. They would have got some elbow room but it would not have lasted them for long. For, since the mid-fifties, population growth in Britain had taken a sharp upward turn. The dimensions of the housing problem were increasing alarmingly. So were the dimensions of the traffic problem, as Britain woke up to what was coming in the way of motor cars, and the chaos threatening the towns. Planning the physical environment of this fast-growing population-its place of employment, transport, housing, recreation-needed an ever widening scale; and no longer did a local government organization based on a division between town and country seem adequate. Nor was it only in this sphere-the physical environment- that central government felt the need for bigger units of local government than anything envisaged under the reorganization going forward. In several of the major services-police, fire, education, health and welfare- rising standards and technical developments were demanding bigger units.

The Third Attempt So the work of the English Local Government Commission was brought

to a halt (the Welsh commission had already come to grief, having made proposals which the Government had felt unable to accept); and the Government embarked on the third attempt. A royal commission was


appointed “to consider the structure of local government in England, outside Greater London, in relation to its existing functions; and to make recommendations for authorities and boundaries, and for functions and their division, having regard to the size and character of areas in which these can be most effectively exercised and the need to sustain a viable system of local democracy.” The commission in short was to produce a fully worked-out plan for a new local government structure for the whole of England, and it was asked to do this, if possible, within two years or as near as it could manage. This time there was to be no piecemeal approach; no dragging round the country talking to every local authority; no prolonged debate. So far ten months have gone.

A corresponding commission was appointed for Scotland. In Wales, the Secretary of State is working out his own proposals.

LONDON

Before coming to the various suggestions which have been made to the royal commission, I must turn back and look at what happened in London. For here local government has been reorganized. At the end of the last century London was given its own system of local government: a county council-the London County Council, always known as the L.C.C. -in which, unlike the provincial county councils, most powers were concentrated, together with 28 metropolitan borough councils, with the ancient and wealthy city of London in the centre exercising relatively minor powers below. But London had long since outgrown the L.C.C. area, which covered a little less than three million people, and by the mid-fifties was a huge sprawling town of some eight million people or more. This Greater London included, in addition to the county of London, the whole county of Middlesex-where a number of large boroughs lived uneasily, and some unwillingly, with a county council of normal pattern; three county boroughs; and considerable parts of four or five other counties. In short, Greater London had no coherent system of government. The question was, did it need one? If so, what should the pattern be, and where should the boundary be drawn?

The Government thought this a job for a royal commission. This was more than rearranging areas and functions. What had to be done was to think out the whole system of government appropriate to so vast a town, enclosing within it many old and still recognizable communities, and including a quarter of the whole population of England. Moreover this was the capital city. And it did not make it any easier that the L.C.C.- which had established a great reputation as a powerful and independent authority, and which had fine achievements to its name-wanted no inquiry. For many years the L.C.C. had been under strong and apparently unshakeable Labour control; any proposal either to break it up or to


widen its boundaries by bringing in the generally Conservative suburban areas was bound to raise a storm.

So a royal commission was appointed, and within three years it re- ported. I will not recount the detailed recommendations. Very briefly what they came to was that Greater London was an entity and did need a coherent local government system. This should consist of 52 boroughs (including the city of London as one) in place of 85 existing boroughs and urban districts. These new boroughs were to be the primary units of local government. Above them there should be a Greater London Council -the G.L.C.-to administer certain services over the whole area, notably overall planning, traffic control and main highways, house building outside the area, fire, ambulances, main drainage, refuse disposal, and the larger parks and open spaces. Education was to be shared between the G.L.C. and the boroughs, the G.L.C. being responsible for the standard of education throughout Greater London, and for the cost, the boroughs for running the service. The police force was outside the scope of the inquiry since in the metropolitan area it has always been under the direct control of the Home Office. So was water supply, which has for long had its own authority for Greater London.

The Government acted promptly; local government in Greater London was reorganized by Act of Parliament very much on the lines which the commission had recommended. These provisions were not politically unwelcome to a Conservative Government. The main modifications the Government made to the commission’s plan were the substitution of fewer and larger boroughs-only 32, a slight reduction of the area to cut out some of the fringe boroughs and urban districts which were screaming at the prospect of becoming part of London, and the inclusion of education as a borough service except in the old L.C.C. area. Nobody could face splitting that up for education, and a special committee of the G.L.C. was constituted the education authority for the area.

The bill was bitterly fought both by the L.C.C. and by the Labour Opposition in Parliament. The L.C.C. was, as I have said, a great local authority which had for years been controlled by Labour, and Labour supporters could not bear to see it merged in a quite different kind of authority, which would not have some of its important powers-e.g. the main house building responsibility, and the health, welfare, and children’s services-all of which were to go to the boroughs. But the bill became law in 1963, and the new authorities were elected in the spring of 1964, to take over power a year later.

It had been a temble scramble for the Ministry, but a much worse one for the local authorities. Nobody who has not been involved in an operation of this kind can have any idea of the amount of work it entails: sorting out the exact distribution of functions, staff, and property; arguing about transitional financial arrangements so that no area should suffer too


sharp a rise in rates-a mass of detail. It is a nice question whether once you have decided to reorganize local government it is better to take a running jump at it, or give yourself time to get it right, and everyone time to see where they are going. If you give yourself time, the inevitable opposition to whatever you are doing may build up and wreck the ship. There is a lot to be said for doing it fast and hoping that you can right the mistakes later on, but some of the local authorities are pleading to the royal commission that in any future reorganization more time should be given.

It is too soon to express any opinion on the success of the London reorganization. Some people think that the area is still too small-it cannot accommodate all its growing population, But eight million people make a big enough authority in all conscience; and the growing population is to be distributed all over Southeast England and even further afield-too far for any single authority to encompass. Some people think that the functions have not been rightly divided; and there may be somethmg in this. If it proves so, this could be amended, in time, though it will not be easy once the parties have dug in. Some of the boroughs, all of which were formed by amalgamations of the old boroughs and districts, have no real unity. Shotgun marriages, some of them were. But at least it is certain that the new pattern makes a great deal more sense than the jumble that preceded it.

EVIDENCE TO THE ENGLISH ROYAL COMMISSION

I come back now to the English Royal Commission, busy studying the local government problem in the rest of the country, and to the evidence it has received. Nearly 2,000 bodies and individuals have submitted their views, including many of the existing local authorities as well as their representative associations. It is quite impossible for me to give any picture of all this evidence, which includes an infinite variety. The out- standing feature is, however, the wide body of support there is for radical change.

At this point it may be useful to mention the number of English local authorities of different types, since this is the background to the Com- mission’s work. Outside London there are 45 county councils, 78 county borough councils, and over 1,100 county district councils-with several thousand parish councils at the grass roots in the rural districts. It is fairly generally agreed that these numbers, other perhaps than the parish councils, must be drastically reduced. But what kind, what shape, what numbers of authorities should be put in their place?

The Region or Province At one end of the scale some people are arguing that anything from

a dozen to twenty big regional-or provincial-authorities should be

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established for some purposes, notably for economic and land planning and for traffic and transportation, with varying numbers of authorities below for the general run of local government services. When the Labour Government returned to power in 1964, having pledged itself to secure a better economic balance between the different regions of Britain, it set up eight regional councils in England to advise on the economic planning of their regions. But these councils are not elected; they are appointed by central government, and include university professors, businessmen, etc., as well as some people from local government. They are serviced by officers of central government. Their function is purely advisory, and there is a good deal of doubt about what exactly they are supposed to do. The Liberal Party, and some others as well, would like to replace these councils by elected regional councils, with executive functions. Others believe, however, that at this level central government is necessarily involved in the decisions that have to be made-decisions about the level of public investment to be afforded in each region, the extent and kind of employment to be encouraged in the region, the main tr&c pattern, port and airport development, and so on. Those who think this way doubt whether there is scope for elected regional councils. They think that at this level the real need is for a dialogue between central and local govement and that this may require an appointed body like the existing regional economic planning councils. Not everyone thinks that we need regional authorities at all.

One question the commission will have to answer is whether regional authorities are needed for any purposes; and if so what kind of authorities -elected or nominated-for what purposes, in what regions. There is no clear regional pattern in England.

The City Region Next is a view, fairly widely held, that whether or not there are

regional authorities, the pattern of local government should be based on what is called the “city region,” of which perhaps hrty to forty could be iden&ed in England. This would mean that big cities, or whole conurbations, or, in some places, groups of cities, would be put together with a wide ring of surrounding countryside, under one big authority for some purposes; certainly for planning, major house building, main mads, traffic, and police-perhaps also for education and some other services which are thought to need big-scale organization. On this basis you would get, for example, the whole solid urban mass of Birmingham and the Black Country (about two and a half million people and at present under the control of seven county boroughs) included, under one major authority, with something like half the surrounding counties. This might produce a total population under the city region authority of over three million. The same pattern would apply to Greater Manchester and its surrounding


countryside, to Greater Liverpool and its-and so on. Some parts of England, of course, are not under the influence of such great urban centres; but in most there is a biggish town to which people from the surrounding country go for shopping, higher education, entertainment, etc.-some of them for work. These towns, with wide surrounding rural areas, would make the units, srnaller than those referred to above but still very much bigger than the present ones. In some parts of the country, the Government plans to build new cities, or to double or treble existing ones; and these again might form the centres of new, large local government units.

The argument is that such areas, town and country together, need unsed planning of their employment, housing, traffic, and general services; for as population grows it must be distributed in a planned way if we are to avoid repeating the congested, over-large towns which today cripple life in so many cities in Britain. This is supported by the further argument that in any case we need much bigger authorities for many purposes, if they are to have sufficient resources and be able to attract the highly qualified staff they need for all that they ought to do.

The city region proposition has, on the whole, the solid support of the Government Departments. None of the Departments wants to see any of the services with which they are concerned (with one small exception- ambulances) transferred from local to central government. Nor do they want to see ad hoc authorities set up for their purposes. Not police, not education-national services though in a sense these are. But, to a man, the Departments want bigger authorities-much bigger ones-for all the major services. Most of them think in terms of a minimum population of about half a million. It is the Ministries of Housing and Local Govern- ment and of Transport, with this responsibility for dealing with the physical environment, which particularly want the city region to be the basis of a new local government organization. The others on the whole- the Home Office for police, fire, and the children’s service, the Ministry of Education for education, the Ministry of Health for health and welfare-simply want size, which city regions would provide.

This proposed pattern is different from the one that has been adopted for London. There the intention was that the boroughs-the lower tier of government-should be the primary units of local government. The personal services-housing, education, children, health and welfare, as well as a good deal else-are with the boroughs. In the city region, as it is being put to the Commission, most if not all of these services would be with the upper tier-with the city region authority. The lower tier authorities, if there were any-and the Government Department have shown small enthusiasm for having any-would have relatively minor functions. No other city region is anything like the size of London, and that makes a difference. But I suspect that if we were doing London

LOCAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 277 again now there might be a good deal of pressure to put more of the functions with the G.L.C., huge though its population is.

The city region, it will be realized, would result in the disappearance of most existing local government boundaries. The new boundaries would be determined simply by reference to the influence of cities; the boundaries between city regions would be the watersheds between the sphere of influence of one city or group of cities and the next. It would mean wiping the slate clean and starting again. Some people think there would be a better chance of getting through Parliament a plan which upset almost every existing local authority than one which only upset some. But that is by the way.

The Local Authority Views Coming now to what the unfortunate local authorities think about it

all, many of them, of course, simply want to be left alone, or, at worst, combined with a neighbouring authority to provide a rather larger unit. Some, however, are prepared to become part of much larger units. Both the Commission of County Councils and the Association of Municipal Corporations (which represents both county boroughs and boroughs) are now willing to contemplate fairly radical reorganization, producing substantially bigger authorities and involving the disappearance of many of the smaller ones; both are thoroughly alarmed by the threat of increasing centralization and by the centrally appointed regional economic planning councils. But both, naturally, look at it from the point of view of their own experience. The County Councils Association want to keep the pattern of county councils for some services, district councils for others; but they would be prepared to see fewer and larger counties, and many fewer and much larger districts. They would include within the county organization most of the existing county boroughs41 except the giants-so allowing for the planning right across town and country. The Association of Municipal Corporations, on the other hand, want to see the county borough system-the all-purpose authority-eff ectively re- tained; but they would envisage that town and country should be included together within new county boroughs, and they accept that the major planning issues must be handled over a much wider scale. For this they would envisage anything from twelve to twenty elected provincial councils.

One thing is clear. Planning, together with tr&c and transportation, is the joker in the pack. Everyone agrees that planning involves some decisions that must be taken over very wide areas, areas that include both town and country. It also involves an enormous amount of detailed work in the planning of towns and villages, the handling of individual proposals for development, the preservation of buildings of quality and of the countryside, local traffic management, etc. Some decisions are on


a national scale; some on a regional or city region scale; some are purely local. How does one devise a local government system to meet this situation?

QUESTIONS TO BE RESOLVED

It will be seen from this brief account that the royal commission has some tough questions to resolve. Persuasive though the argument is for very much bigger authorities-whether regional or city region-putkg town and country together does raise difficult questions. What would this mean for the rural areas, especially where the town is so big that it will be the dominant partner? Conversely, what would it mean for the towns, where the rural interests predominate? Can a local authority be too big? Can it become too remote from its citizens? Is there a dichotomy between efficiency and democracy? Might an authority with one get beyond the grasp of the ordinary councillor-one of perhaps thirty to forty miles across-or more? Would such an authority simply be run by the very few-the dedicated politicians-who could and would give it the whole of their time? Would that be a good or a bad thing? It would certainly change the character of English local government.

Behind all the debate lies the question what one means by local government and what the role of the elected councillor ought to be. The interests of the Government Departments seem to be concerned mainly with securing units big enough to administer services with maximum efficiency, and to secure local government officers of high quality. But the importance of local government lies in its meaning for self-government: in the extent to which people, through their elected representatives, can govern themselves. Otherwise, why not have the French Prkfet system and be done with it? On this line of thought some people who have worked in and with local government feel it important that the elected representative should be in close contact with the administration of the services-particularly the personal services-which he cannot be if the authority stretches very wide. On the other hand you can argue that the proper role of the elected representative is to settle policies and priorities, leaving most of the casework to the officers. That, in short, you can reconcile efficiency with democracy.

The one certain thing is that, in the very big authority, the role of the councillor would be very different from what it is in England today. He could not know so much of what was going on; he could not take the same part in settling individual cases; he would become more like a 3lember of Parliament-debating policies, and dealing, as far as he could, with the grievances of his constituents. This may well be the way things ought to go, now that the scope of local government is so wide, and the services with which it deals so complex and often requiring such specialized knowledge. But it is a big plunge.


Another question is, if you do have very big authorities for some purposes, what do you have below them? 0 x 1 this, those who are urging big authorities are none too clear. It seems difficult to contemplate that in an area of a million people or more-in some cases a very wide area- there should be no representative institutions nearer to the ground, especially where there have been genuinely local institutions in the past; but how do you divide responsibilities without bluning them? This is a problem in our county organization at present, where responsibility for some services is shared between county and district councils; there can be frictions between the two, and confusion for the public. Two-tier local government has disadvantages. In any event, if almost all the major responsibilities are to be concentrated in the bigger authority (and that is the way much of the evidence tends) is there a worthwhile job at the local level-at any level above the parish? There is much to be said for having all local government responsibilities-or almost all-concentrated in one authority, for having one authority responsible for the whole welfare of its citizens. But if you go that way, can you contemplate such very big authorities as are implicit in the city region concept? If you conclude that for some purposes what you need is true regional-or provincial-authorities, then you must envisage a lower tier of authorities for many-probably most-purposes.

So there it is-as I said, some tough questions. And all the time one remembers the history and the furious passions that any proposals must arouse.

PROCEDURES OF LOCAL AUTHOIUTTES

Whatever may happen about the organization of local authorities, there is pretty general agreement that their procedures need to be changed; and the bigger the authorities become, the more necessary this is. English local authorities have far more councillors than Canadian ones-they may number over a hundred, and all of them are organized in committees: the planning committee, the housing committee, the education committee, the finance committee, and so forth. Too often these committees themselves try to function as executive or administrative bodies-to grapple with the hundreds of cases coming to the authority for decisions, doing work which ought to be left to the officers under general direction.

This is a big subject and I have not room for it here. Involved in it is the question whether local councils should not be organized with a small management board functioning as the executive, leaving the majority of councillors to fill the role of back benchers. There is also the question whether councillors ought not to be paid-and whether there ought not to be fewer of them. And finally there is the question whether authorities


do not need more of a general manager type as their chief officer, and less of a legal clerk which is what they normally have now.

This whole subject is of paramount importance in the context of reorganization. It would be appalling to contemplate very big local authorities, with enormous responsibilities, struggling to do their work as many local authorities do it now. Already several local authorities are studying their procedures (including the G.L.C.), and one or two are experimenting with new arrangements along lines I have sketched. Mean- while the associations of local authorities have set up a committee to report on the whole subject; their report is expected shortly. The chairman of the committee is, as it happens, also chairman of the royal commission; and there is no doubt that what they have to say will be of great importance to the work of the commission.

FINANCE

In all of this discussion I have said nothing about finance; yet that is a key question. In Britain the only independent source of income available to local authorities (apart from rents of properties, houses, etc.) is the rates-a tax on property. But rates are a much criticized tax-they have been for years, but the criticism is sharpening because being related (in the domestic field) to the value of a man’s house, they bear very little relationship to his ability to pay. The poor pay a far higher proportion of their income in rates than do the rich. Rates can bear very hard on those with large families who need larger and often more expensive houses, and on the old who may find themselves occupying houses beyond their means but have small chance of finding more modest ones. Recently the Government has taken steps to reduce the burden of rates on householders, and especially on the poorest, but rates are still an inelastic tax.

Meanwhile local government expenditure, now amounting to about 22,500 million a year in England and Wales-nearly a third of all public expenditure-is increasing at the rate of something like 10 per cent a year, as expenditure on education, on roads, on the police, on health and welfare, and so on, goes up and up. The rates now meet only about a third of this; Government grants rather more; the rest comes from rents, etc. The proportion of local authorities’ expenditure borne by the central government, moreover, has continually to be increased; which means, of course, the increasing dependence of local authorities on the Government.

A method has been devised of distributing most of the money given by central to local government by reference to formulas relating to population and to the special needs of each authority, judged by such tests as the number of children of school age, the number of old people, etc., and also relating to the poverty of the area, judged by its ratable


value. Thus, central government is not directly involved in the expenditure of the individual authority-the grants are not related to expenditure; and the dependence of authorities on government grants does not mean that the Government supervises the expenditure of each authority-they can spend what they like, provided they feel able to raise from the rates whatever they need over and above the Government’s general grants. But in fact they can’t push the rates too far; and so dependence on grants does mean that they have little room to manoeuvre. It also means a diminishing sense of responsibility.

Obviously, if British local authorities could be given other sources of revenue, and sources which would expand as personal incomes expand, they would have far greater scope, as local authorities do in many other countries. Whether any government will, when it comes to the crunch, feel able to face this-with the British economy always, it seems, under strain-I do not know. As it is, the Government keeps a tight control over the capital expenditure of every local authority. This has nothing to do with the burden on rates; it is a facet of the postwar planning of the economy and, in particular, of public investment. And this, I think, is bound to continue, though it would be possible to give local authorities- if there were fewer of them-greater freedom in determining their own priorities in capital expenditure. Whether it would also be possible to give them other sources of revenue is much more difficult to say, but clearly the creation of fewer, bigger, and ex hypothesi more powerful authorities-if that is the outcome-would be bound to raise the question.

Whether the Government and particularly the Treasury have yet faced this is not clear. The Treasury is all for fewer and larger authorities, but more because they will be, it is thought, more manageable, than with any idea of giving them greater freedom. Perhaps this will be, in the end, the test of what the country really wants in local government. For years successive governments have been talking of finding other sources of money for local authorities-a local income tax, a sales tax, etc. But with the country divided into hundreds of authorities, as it is at present, there was small danger of their really having to do it. It was not practicable. If much bigger authorities emerge from the work of the royal commission, some local tax to supplement the rates becomes, technically, more feasible. But a new and elastic source of taxation, locally variable, could prove a problem even tougher than the one confronting the commission. Taxes really hurt.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND

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