In Westminster and town halls across the country, revolution is brewing. It threatens riots, possibly on the streets, certainly in cyberspace. Riots of protest, perhaps, and definitely a riot of information.
For a glimpse of the tumult coming your way, call up the website of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM). In a few mouse clicks you can find details of every supplier paid more than £500 of taxpayers’ money by the council.
From April to June this year, for example, it coughed up £460,425 to a firm handling ground maintenance and landscape construction, £15,745 to Legoland, the theme park, and £1,500 to an Islamic trust.
Good value or waste of money? For the first time taxpayers who foot the bill can see the detail, demand answers and decide for themselves.
“At the last budget meeting the council leader wanted to make it as open as we could how we are spending money,” said Peter Brown, chief accountant of RBWM, which is Conservative-led. “So we started to do that. Now we’re looking at extending it further to include payments — allowances and expenses — made to individual councillors.”
The council is even working towards publishing individual invoices from its suppliers in the belief that voters deserve to know exactly what they are paying for. Transparency, they hope, will foster competition and efficiency.
Others are also experimenting. In Barnet, north London, the Tory local authority wants to provide public services on a “no frills” basis, after the manner of a budget airline. Dubbed “easyCouncil”, it will deliver a basic service to everyone with the choice of paying extra for faster, more comprehensive options.
In Yorkshire, two small rural councils are sharing a chief executive to save money. In Essex, the council is setting up its own bank to help local small businesses.
Such bold local initiatives are now moving centre stage. Forget stale arguments about Labour “investment” and Tory “cuts”: whoever wins the next election is going to have to get tough. Instead, a different divide is opening up as the country faces a financial reckoning.
After years of Labour central diktat, the Tories are making grand claims of devolving power and giving it to local people. Although the ideas have been mooted before, they are suddenly gathering momentum.
Last week David Cameron, the Tory leader, made headlines when he said that, if elected, he would cut the pay of government ministers to show a lead in tackling Britain’s ballooning debts. “With the Conservatives the gravy train will well and truly hit the buffers,” he said.
It overshadowed a more profound promise. The would-be prime minister confirmed that under the Conservatives “every item of government spending over £25,000 will be published. Online. In full. No ifs, no buts”. All public sector salaries over £150,000 will be published, too. Cameron is also committed to transparency on MPs’ earnings and expenses.
Two days later George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, re-emphasised the pledge to publish spending details and went on to lay out plans to give local authorities more freedom from central government targets and control. “We must reinvent what government actually does,” he said. “This is not just a cost-cutting exercise. It is about ... making local government powerful again.”
On the same day the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a right-wing pressure group, delivered a similar message at the launch of a report into how to save £50 billion in public spending. Cuts alone will not rescue Britain from its dire public finances, said Miles Templeman, director-general of the IoD. “What the country has to accept is a different culture,” he said, “one where the government tries to do the minimum, not the maximum.”
Times of crisis make radical change possible. Think 1979 and the Thatcher revolution. A survey this weekend suggests voters recognise that spending cuts are unavoidable: in a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times, 60% of people said spending cuts should be used to tackle the budget deficit, compared with 21% for tax rises.
Is a tipping point at hand? Is a new age of radicalism dawning?
AFTER the last election a group of new Tory MPs wrote a pamphlet called Direct Democracy, an Agenda for a New Model Party, which espoused ideas for decentralising power. No one took much notice.
Last year Douglas Carswell, MP for Harwich and Clacton, and Daniel Hannan, a maverick Tory MEP best known for his recent attack on the National Health Service, wrote a book called The Plan, which included proposals for self-financing local councils, local referendums, “open primaries” for the selection of would-be MPs and locally elected “sheriffs” to oversee the police. It all seemed too daring for the mainstream.
Not any more. Open primaries, where any local resident can vote on the selection of a party election candidate, are happening. The Tories picked their candidate for the Totnes constituency in Devon using this method. Earlier this year Cameron had said he favoured directly elected commissioners to lay down local priorities for police. Now both Cameron and Osborne are proposing more local power.
With his comfortable upbringing and privileged education, Cameron is not a natural radical. But a number of factors are colliding to propel bold measures onto his agenda.
Inside the Cameroons’ HQ in Westminster, the Tory leader and Osborne have adjacent offices. Flitting between them once again is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy, a bald fortysomething with a penchant for trendy trainers. Hilton has recently returned from living in California, land of local referendums and cyber-innovation, and is receptive to spreading such ideas here.
At the same time, the scale of Britain’s financial problems have made it clear that mere tinkering with spending is not enough.
“The UK is facing a fiscal crisis of historic proportions,” claims the TaxPayers’ Alliance report.
A gap between government revenues and spending of £170 billion or more this year means that “this is arguably the worst fiscal position apart from the second world war”, according to Graeme Leach, chief economist at the IoD. On present forecasts, just paying the interest on Britain’s rising debts will amount to £60 billion a year by 2014 — which is what we currently spend on education and more than half the cost of the NHS.
The IoD and TaxPayers’ Alliance last week suggested more than 30 radical savings, including scrapping the NHS programme for a central computer system; abolishing child benefit; freezing public sector pay (except for armed forces in combat zones); halving spending on consultants; and reducing the size of the civil service by 10%.
At the launch of the report, David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, said: “Three months ago we couldn’t have had this meeting. Three months ago both main parties were in purdah about the need for cuts.”
Now that pretence has evaporated. In Davis’s view the public recognises that Labour’s high-spending centralised control cannot continue. “This is about a big UK cultural question,” he said. “You can make an unpopular argument and be popular. People have a hunger for truth.”
Others go further, arguing that the way to generate public support for change is to enable people to make Google-informed choices.
In the internet age that is what they expect and do every day, says Carswell, who was a Tory policy adviser before becoming an MP in 2005. “I have seen the change in the four years I have been an MP. For example, parents who have children with special needs come to see me aware of what they could get and what they are not getting. That’s the internet,” he said.
“Put it another way: I can go on to Spotify or iTunes and choose what music I listen to. I don’t have a BBC radio producer deciding for me. If I can have that choice, why can’t I have it over more important things?”
More local decision making, accountable to local voters, is the answer, he suggested: “The days of one-size-fits-all public policy are going. Look how diverse our community is. Is it not right that you have different public policy solutions to certain things in different areas? Isn’t it a good thing that you have different priorities in Norfolk to south London?”
At present, local authorities get most of their money from central government and have little discretion over how to spend it. To get a flavour of Whitehall’s control freakery, you need only look at a body called the Improvement and Development Agency for local government.
It has set out “198 national indicators for local improvement” and demands that “every local strategic partnership” reports back on all 198 indicators, especially those showing “community engagement”.
The irony is, say critics, that communities feel disengaged from local politics because they know so much is dictated from the centre.
FOR all that “localism” and spending transparency are the Tories’ big ideas, will any of the rhetoric translate into action?
History indicates scepticism. For a start, politicians have promised efficiency gains and quango bonfires for years, all to little avail.
In addition, next week Goran Persson, a former prime minister of Sweden, will visit Britain to talk about how he rescued his country from huge debts in the 1990s. One of the key lessons was that budget problems cannot be palmed off onto local authorities. In Sweden, central government “cheese-sliced” 11% off budgets across the board.
Another risk is that ceding power from the centre could allow local authorities to pursue policies opposed to those of the government. Different levels of service in different regions could also cause public discontent.
The Tories claim these are no deterrents to their localism agenda. Osborne tried to ram home his commitment by saying: “Hearing [about decentralisation] from the person who hopes to be the chancellor is significant.”
Philip Hammond, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “The test is not whether we like [the outcomes], but whether local people do. The test is: can you get a robust system of accountability?”
Quite how the Tories would make accountability robust and where they would set the limits of local government powers are not yet clear. Like many other issues, including welfare, education and family breakdown, the party still has its own hard choices to make.
However, Carswell is convinced that the tide of social change is running in favour of localism. “The internet has transformed everything,” he said.
“If you have a consumerist electorate familiar with choice in the private sphere, it is going to start to demand that in the public. Politicians are playing catch-up.”
Your Comments
Order By: