After more than 40 years of studying local government, George Jones and John Stewart look at what has happened in the past – and where the sector is going in the future.

As we enter a new year, after more than 40 years of studying local government, we have been reflecting on a) has local government a future? and b) why should anyone now want to be a councillor?

 Sometimes, our answers have been pessimistic. Sometimes, optimistic. On black days, we feel local government has become so enfeebled that there is no worthwhile role. People have better things to do with that scarcest resource of all – their time – than become a councillor. 

But, perhaps there are new, challenging tasks for councillors – shaping the development of their localities, and improving the wellbeing of the communities and people they represent.    

In our quest for answers, we want to look at what has been happening to local government over the past 40 years, contrasting then and now. There are six aspects:

The words 

In the past, we talked of local government. Now, the word is local governance.  

This switch signifies a reduction in the status and power of the elected council. Once it was seen as the clear government of a local area. Now it is as about one governmental institution among many varied kinds at the local level.

The agenda

In the past, the local authority had a distinct, separate organisational identity, with a clear set of responsibilities, mainly about providing services. This agenda was simple – service delivery through its own employees. 

Now the local authority is not separate. It is tied up with others in partnerships. The key word is ‘interdependence'.

There are pathfinder partnerships, local strategic partnerships [LSPs], local area agreements [LAAs], multi-area agreements [MAAs], and many others. 

There is now no clear set of responsibilities, but an amorphous fluid range, involving leadership and exercising influence, but not deciding. 

Some of the old services remain, but new tasks have been taken on – economic development, place-shaping, sustainable services, climate change, social cohesion, and promoting democracy.  

The agenda is more complex, tackling the intractable wicked issues normally involving other organisations.

The focus

In the past, the local council had a clear focus on its own area and responsibilities. 

Now, the local council has to look wider. It becomes entangled with others in partnerships – with other local authorities, even sharing staff, and with LSPs to other public bodies, the arms of central government, quangos, private firms and to voluntary and independent organisations.

These other entities often have different boundaries and lack a commitment to the local council's familiar territory.

The recognition

In the past, the local authority and its area were widely recognised by the public. The county, city, town and village had clear public identities, coinciding with localities which people understood and felt a loyalty to. 

This sense of belonging to an area was seriously undermined by 1972 reorganisation, which brought about many artificial local authorities. There is even less public awareness of the new unitaries, sub-regions and regions that central government urges local government to embrace.

The roles

In the past, councillors felt they were responsible to the public for the services of their local authority, which were their services about which they made decisions in committee and full council. 

They felt responsible and the public held them responsible. The council's own staff, officers and work people, carried out many of the tasks of the authority. The authorities were self-sufficient.  

But now, others provide and deliver what the council used to itself. 

Contracting out and outsourcing to others have left councillors with the roles of commissioning and collaborating, feeling they can no longer decide for local people and uncertain about the outcome.

Within councils, a formal two-tier distinction has arisen between those councillors with executive roles, who do decide, and the rest, often called the ‘back-benchers', although that word is being replaced by the term ‘front-liners', to make councillors feel more important. 

Their new role of ‘overview and scrutiny' usually involves monitoring and criticising others, after action and decisions have been taken, although some authorities have sought to concentrate overview and scrutiny not on the negative of criticism but on the positive of policy development. The Government still sees councillors as having a representative role, which seems to mean acting as a channel for the views of others. But that concept of the role is not as satisfying as the traditional role. 

And councillors lack the powers and resources to exercise real leverage over the others they are supposed to be influencing.

The public once knew where to pin responsibility for what went on in their localities, but now they do not understand this new governance. 

The responsibility

In the past, a councillor was a public person with real status in the locality – someone who mattered because he or she took decisions which affected the development of the area and the lives of its inhabitants, and was held accountable for them. 

Local government was an example of representative democracy, respected and valued. Now there are advocates of participatory democracy, who urge ‘double devolution' – devolving powers to ‘communities and individuals'. 

Communities secretary, Hazel Blears, is an enthusiast for this approach – and the new Comprehensive Area Assessments will judge councils on their participatory mechanisms. 

Ms Blears always says participatory democracy is not to replace representative democracy but to be a supplement. However, she does not make clear how this happy fusion is to be achieved. 

The history

Why have these changes occurred? Some might say because of events, pressures and forces beyond our control, economic, social and cultural.  

They are right, but only to some extent. Such explanations play down the role of central government. It has driven the changes with its policies and legislation, preferring to focus on local government rather than deal with its own weaknesses.  

The start can be seen in the 1970s, when the Labour secretary of state, Tony Crosland, told local government ‘the party's over'. 

Margaret Thatcher's Government brought in controls over local government expenditure and taxation, introducing ‘rate capping', the first time since the establishment of rates in the days of Queen Elizabeth I that central government had decided to fix the rate of the local tax. It imposed on local government compulsory competitive tendering, to diminish the use of direct labour by local councils. 

Her successor, John Major, carried on with her approach, widening CCT. 

Labour PM, Tony Blair, intensified Thatcherism, and added more rigorous inspection and targets. By the early 2000s, the New Labour Government, recognising its centralising had gone too far and was not delivering the expected outcomes, relaxed a few of its controls, but rejected the proposals of the Lyons' report to update and make fairer the council tax and maintained rate capping. 

Gordon Brown's current Government continues along the path set out by the Blair administration's phase two approach. A key question now is whether the current global financial crisis and the onset of economic recession will provoke further centralisation or decentralisation.

Our pessimism

In a pessimistic mood, we cannot see central government letting go. Local government has few friends in Whitehall. 

Only in the CLG are there civil servants and ministers who recognise the value of local government. In the rest of central government, the spending departments want to operate through their own regional and local arms, doing things their way, while the Treasury wants to control all taxes and expenditure. 

The Labour Party and its Government will continue to see local authorities as agents to deliver national policies. 
The Conservatives promise to freeze council tax and keep local government dependent on national funding determined by the Government, but allocated through an independent quango.

The Liberal-Democrats would replace council tax, but not local government's dependence on grant, with a local income tax. 

All would, therefore, keep local authorities dependent, like drug addicts, on their national fix of grant. 
Our crystal ball shows that local government will not obtain the powers, discretion and its own resources, to be genuine local self-government. 

Our optimism
Our optimism bubbles up when we look at the Local Government Act 2000. It gave local authorities the role of community leadership, with the duty to draw up a community strategy or plan, and the powers to promote the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of their areas and in their partnerships.

Scrutiny has been extended so local authorities can question other public bodies, which have to take account of the decisions of partnerships, where local authorities, as the only directly-elected bodies, have the potential to be in the driving seat.

The choice

There are three distinct paths for councillors to take. They are:

* to engage romantically in nostalgia for the good old days

* to do exactly what central government wants, to seek to maximise whatever grants and favours are flowing down for good behaviour – the detached behaviour of practical, if narrowly-focused people, content to be agents of central government

* to recognise the limitations imposed by central government, but not accept the need for them, and at every opportunity, seek to do what the council judges to be in the interest of its locality – and keep the flag of genuine local self-government flying by speaking out for local authorities ‘to be left to get on with it'. The behaviour of responsible, but visionary, people.

This last recommendation would have local councils deciding what areas and boundaries most suited their communities; forging voluntary alliances with partners they choose; deciding with whom to pool their budgets; drawing the lion's share of their resources from their own taxpayers; devising their own internal political management structures; and being held accountable for their spending and taxing decisions not to central government but to their own local voters. 

George Jones is emeritus professor of government at the LSE, and John Stewart is emeritus professor at INLOGOV