What would a game-changer look like for local government? We all know that councils are running out of money, and while I have a certain amount of faith in the ability of many parts of the sector to stagger on until the end of the decade, I am not sure we can go much further without something going seriously wrong.
There are really only three ways that an institutional disruption could go. One is to transfer substantially more power and funding to councils. Another is to take power and funding away. A third is to re-base the entire local government finance system.
The first approach would mean devolving a number of services that are only accidentally centralised to combined authorities: things like courts, prisons and perhaps even tax collection.
But this probably does not go far enough. The most radical decentralisation would be a system in which local government commissioned the entire primary care budget and had to co-pay for hospital admissions, immediately creating a huge incentive for prevention.
The second would involve taking social care into the NHS, creating a sustainable local government system with a stroke of a civil service pen. However, we would also have created some of the weakest councils in the rich world.
Finally, we are going to have to revisit the basis of local government finance. The current system has become so absurd and so manifestly unfair that it cannot simply be patched up for much longer.
If some form of game-changer is starting to look inevitable, the form of that change is not.
We need to kick-start a national debate, that is not currently taking place, about the role of the local in British politics. And councils need to prefigure what an eventual devolved settlement should look like by starting to build new governance structures locally.
If you don't build the locality of tomorrow, someone else will impose it upon you.
Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network (NLGN)
