Local government, the Oxford way.

Jock — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:36:48 +0000

After last night praising the way they do things in the US, with my example from Arlington, VA of how in local government it seems Americans are encouraged to innovate and compete one with another, we heard on Thursday in another one of these league tables in the UK that Oxford City Council gives 'poor value for money':

OXFORD has been revealed as one of the poorest value-for-money district councils in the country.

Oh dear! This is not a criticism from me of the current incumbents in the corridors of power at the Town Hall, nor actually of the previous ones necessarily either. It just seems that for as long as I can remember the City Council has swerved between basket-case and financial disaster scene.

Clearly the mechanisms available for achieving change are completely inadequate. When I was on the council the big idea was "zero base budgeting". Worthy initiatives and spending patterns and cross departmental transfers had grown into a complete mess over time so that realistically you couldn't tell what one particular service actually costs. I don't know how much of that has actually been done - I hear occasionally of one department or other going through a "thorough budget review". But they don't seem to have made much of an overall impact - certainly not on what we the citizens have to pay!

The buzzword bingo phrase of choice when I was there was "thinking out of the box" but that didn't seem to do much good either. Or maybe more accurately the box is so hemmed in by diktat from Whitehall that whatever they think has already been thought before and blocked.

What is the point of having 48 councillors if collectively they cannot make a difference? I'd say Oxford City Council was broke. If it was a corporation it would be in administration, if an individual it would have taken out an Individual Voluntary Arrangement long ago. And, though I don't hold them to blame, I wouldn't be surprised if all its board (ie the councillors) would have been barred from holding directorships. At the very least they have been merely overseeing decline for decades.

Soon, they will have had four "full time" and two "inter-regnum" Chief Executives in seven years. For even the most myopic that has got to be an indication that what they have to work with is so broken that it gives them no satisfaction to continue trying. Grandly they plan an urban extension, an olympic swimming pool, a Town Hall revamp or a unitary authority.

I suggest complete root and branch reform. Let's declare independence or something similarly radical. The council has to look, properly for once (it's been saying it will for many years), at what it needs to do and whether other vehicles could deliver some services more efficiently. Those vehicles may be democratic local structures or they may not be in all cases.

Take leisure facilities. I wonder what proportion of people in the city use the council's leisure facilities that cost us collectively so much - they're run down, dowdy, lack investment and are far eclipsed by some of the private facilities that in some cases cost little or no more to join. Yet every other year everyone gets to vote for who should run them in amongst a package of all sorts of other things more relevant to their comfort living in the city. Why do local authorities run leisure facilities? Well, partly it stems from the days when houses didn't have baths. The Public Health Acts created an obligation to provide public baths. Everything to do with personal hygiene and nothing to do with discretionary leisure spending.

Housing is hardly democratic either. We are always told by the Defend Council Housing campaign that local authority owned housing is the most democratic structure because you can vote to change your ultimate landlord. Well that too is utter tripe. Twenty per cent of the city's housing stock approximately is local authority owned. Those voters cannot outweigh the other 80%. The party that might offer them a better deal cannot win power through their votes alone, or on a manifesto that only deals with housing issues. And now that Westminster, under Labour of all parties, has the end of council housing firmly in its sights, it would be better to work out a more democratic mechanism for managing housing before we are forced to hand over that huge asset to some third party over which we have no say at all.

When Housing Benefit costs so much to administer, it means that all that extra money cannot be going to actually doing something about housing, but into the administration. Six years ago IBM did a deal with Arizona state authorities to handle all their transactions on a fee per transaction basis which cut costs overnight by seventy percent leaving the authorities all that money to spend on real projects. I'm not saying that's the answer here. Just that if you are prepared to look, there are alternatives.

Oxford is one of the wealthiest district councils in the country by asset base. It is shameful that our structures are in the state they are and only radical change - from a blank sheet of paper, is going to make a significant impact in my opinion.

Jock's Place - Local government, the Oxford way. - Comments

Local government, the Oxford way.