The article by Aditya Chakrabortty on the goings on at Barnet council (Outsourced and unaccountable: this is the future of local government, 16 December) could have been written, to a greater or lesser extent, about any major council in England. Those of us struggling to make local government work when central government has reduced its funding so massively are familiar with the “Barnet graph of doom”, which in 2012 predicted that we would collectively be staring at a financial black hole of around £19bn by 2020 unless things changed. Up and down the country in city, town and county halls, “commissioning” is seen as the salvation to our problems. It has its place; but only if councils retain the ability to monitor its results and bodies like the Care Quality Commission, for example, have enough teeth to make sure that firms and organisations deliver according to agreements.
Clearly, we need major reform both of local government finance and structures before we even consider devolving any more powers from Westminster. We could start by adding some bands at the top end of the council tax and repatriating the business rate. How about looking at local income tax or allowing local councils to retain a couple of percent of the income tax residents already pay to the Treasury? Then let’s scrap those county and district councils that still exist in England and replace them with unitary authorities, thus reducing at a stroke the number of officers needed and particularly the number of councillors, many of whom, from my experience, often sit on both councils anyway.
There’s no easy answer to the problem. It may just boil down to those of us who can afford it being prepared to pay a little more for the services that we value. I wouldn’t bet on that happening in a hurry.
Cllr John Marriott
Lincolnshire county council
• Aside from a feeling that Aditya Chakrabortty seems stuck on a vision of local government that harps back to the 1970s, I have three main issues with his piece. One is his binary view of commissioning, in-house or outsourced. In truth, we have a varied mix of providers, some in-house, some charities, some private-sector and some joint ventures. All are united by a clear definition of the service outcome and a drive to secure value for taxpayers.
Second is his failure to understand that by commissioning services we create contracts based on the quality of service residents receive. Capita’s response to losing some calls was to commission extra phone lines. It now answers more calls than ever, with a higher satisfaction rating than the in-house service.
Thirdly, Chakrabortty seems dismissive of saving of £1m a month. Every penny we save on human resources is money we have for social care or child protection. I know which Barnet residents want us to prioritise. This may be why 53% of residents were satisfied with the council in 2010 and 75% are now.
Cllr Daniel Thomas
Deputy leader, London borough of Barnet
• Due mention should also be made of Barnet’s obsession with increasing its population, although only with the right sort of people that consolidate the political structure of the borough. But for transport, the result is unsustainable congestion from more and more cars. The borough’s cabinet has a “roads, roads, roads and roads” transport policy, to match those aspirations. And Barnet has now granted the UK’s most remarkable planning consent, at Brent Cross on the North Circular Road.
Barnet expects over 29,000 extra cars a day in the Brent Cross area, and the shopping centre expects wealthy new shoppers arriving overwhelmingly by car, even though the transport assessment claims it will increasingly be by bus. That fiction will be obvious only after the shopping centre has opened and the developer has moved on.
All is not lost though, because the borough has a shortlist of new developers, and the cabinet accepted a report that the winner will be announced at a property exhibition in the south of France next spring. Apparently, this is the way that local government now works, the modern way.
John Cox
London
• The government’s attitude towards the impact of its further round of cuts to local government, which by the end of 2016 will have amounted to £4 in every £10 previously spent, is not only dismissive but insulting to everyone who will feel the consequences. It is of course those most in need of public services who lose the most.
The attitude appears to be that if local authorities have managed to survive despite four years of eye-watering austerity, they can easily cope with yet more deep reductions in spending. This reminds me of a Ukrainian tale of a man who sold his mule with a guarantee that it would continue working without having to be fed for at least a week. The mule was duly bought, worked for a week without food – and then dropped dead. When the buyer complained, the mule’s original owner pointed out that the guarantee had run out. If the coalition’s measures are not a sign of their ideological objection to sustaining public services, I do not know what is.
David Blunkett MP
Labour, Sheffield Brightside
• The true cost of outsourcing local authority services? Supply teaching is an interesting example. This £500m-a-year business is run almost exclusively by private companies like Capita and Hays. One of the last council-run supply services is in Sefton, Merseyside. Last financial year, schools spent £1.6m on this service and less than £58,000 in administration costs – less than 3.6% of total costs. A private supply agency will cream off anything between 30% and 50% of the fee for supply teachers paid by schools.
Sefton Supply Service pays the full national rate for all its teachers and enrols them into the teachers’ pension scheme. Private providers pay teachers up to £60 per day less than the national rate and do not enrol teachers into TPS. So where exactly does schools’ money go? Last year the chief executive of Capita earned £2.2m and that of Hays was granted a pension contribution of £199,000. Another supply-teaching provider, Teaching Personnel, made £7.5m in profits on an income of £50m. A recent survey by one of the teaching unions found that 69% of its supply teachers had seriously considered leaving teaching in the last year.
Richard Knights
Liverpool
• Now that Barnet council has 300, rather than 3,000 employees, may we assume that Barnet council will have 90% fewer councillors?
Ben Ross
Burgess Hill, West Sussex
• Aditya Chakrabortty’s article on the problems experienced by people in Barnet are minor compared with the problems that can be anticipated in the future. By outsourcing its procurement and legal departments, Barnet has, in effect, lost control. It appears to have no means of independently managing and monitoring its existing contracts. More importantly, how will it negotiate new contracts when the current ones expire. There will be no in-house expertise and costs will inevitably rise.
Alan Innes
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
• Until actual power is restored to local authorities to make decisions about their own futures, it will be difficult to attract strong political leaders with the necessary vision, creativity and energy to drive our cities forward. Being a cypher of Whitehall, acting to the diktat of Eric Pickles, is not an attractive career option. The bland prescriptions of Sir Bob Kerslake, expressed in modern civic-management speak, fail entirely to take account of the excessive centralisation and resource starvation that have crippled our cities over the past generation. It is a nonsense that a city of a million souls should have less control of its destiny than a French village. Birmingham can become great again, but first Whitehall must remove the shackles.
Roy Boffy
Walsall
• I suppose I should have known better, but I fully expected Saturday`s Guardian to include news of an angry reaction from Labour leaders to the announcement by the local government minister, Kris Hopkins, that the “latest round of multibillion-pound cuts” to local authorities’ funding was a “fair financial settlement” (Council leaders say breaking point is near, 19 December). What can possibly be “fair” about a settlement that sees over 90% of the councils facing cuts in their spending of up to 6.4% being under Labour control, whilst the ones receiving increases are over 90% in Tory hands? The situation is worsened, of course, by the fact that the figures are more likely to be nearer the 8.8% average, as suggested by the group representing local government heads, making a total of 40% cuts since the coalition took office.
Admittedly, Hilary Benn did accuse the government of cutting funding for “socially deprived cities in the north” disproportionately, but that barely merits the term “opposition”. Why can’t the Labour leadership realise that it is, above all else, unfairness that annoys and antagonises the British people, and that these cuts are just another example of the government’s discrimination. There can’t even be many Tories who honestly believe that rich areas like Wokingham should be getting a better deal than impoverished urban areas further north, but still Labour’s reaction is muted. Such stifled reaction goes some way to explain why Labour’s lead in the polls, after almost five years of unjust and prejudiced government, is only by a slender margin, rather than the double digit one it should be. Why aren’t Ed Miliband and company at least as angry as they were over a misguided tweet recently, or perhaps even more so? This is about people’s quality of life deteriorating, about inequality increasing, and children’s futures being jeopardised. Let’s see some anger and passion.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
• Congratulations on your editorial (20 December) which, unusually for national media, digs deeper to explain just how iniquitous and absurd the system of council funding has become. Please carry on. Rarely does media coverage of council services seem to get much beyond Jeremy Paxman’s “councils are the people who empty your bins”. But in my experience canvassing on the doorstep, dull and perverse as it may seem to national journalists, many ordinary voters rate council services above national government services as the ones that matter more in their day to day lives.
Tim Bell
Nottingham
• The way the council tax has been run does indeed reveal a wider rot in the governance of Britain from which no political party can be exonerated. It seems to have been beyond the comprehension of law-makers that £72.40 a week jobseeker’s allowance is too low to tax. Much spin is devoted to raising the threshold for the payment of income tax while the robotic council computers are churning out summonses to the magistrates court adding up to £125 costs to inevitable council tax arrears making it even more difficult to collect; then the bailiffs are sent in. Tens of thousands of these Christmas cards will have been sent out last week ready for when the courts open on 5 January.
Supreme court judges commented on Haringey council’s 2012 consultation of benefit claimants about how they would like to be hit with the council tax in April 2013. “Their income was already at a basic level and the effect of Haringey’s proposed scheme would be to reduce it even below that level and thus in all likelihood to cause real hardship, while sparing its more prosperous residents from making any contribution to the shortfall in government funding.” Sooner rather than later the more prosperous residents, like MPs and councillors, must also wake up to the fact that taxing £72.40 is grotesquely unfair.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty
• Eric Pickles’ decision to send in commissioners to run key functions in Tower Hamlets is a welcome move (Eric Pickles sends emergency takeover squad to Tower Hamlets, 18 December). What is needed in Tower Hamlets is honest and open government – something which has been in short supply in the borough in recent times, culminating in the shambles of May’s mayoral election, with allegations of electoral fraud and mismanagement.
There are those who seek to present government intervention in Tower Hamlets as an attack on local democracy. They are wrong.
For those of us who believe that the result of the mayoral election should be re-run, the intervention is the beginning of attempts to restore faith in local democracy and council decision-making.
In February next year an election court will decide whether the current mayor and the council’s returning officer have a case to answer over misconduct in May’s mayoral contest.
The future of democracy in our borough and across London is at stake. We are pleased that Eric Pickles recognises that what has gone on in Tower Hamlets is unacceptable and that intervention is the only cure.
Andy Erlam
Tower Hamlets Election Petition
