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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.

Presumably if as the Times tries to keep suggesting with respect to the Michael Brown donation to the Lib Dems party members are somehow liable for their party's debts, Labour and Tory members are also liable in the last resort for their respective shares of £60 million.

So, even if the Brown donation is treated as something that needs repaying at some point the depth of pockets potentially needed by party members to pay off their debts are:

Labour: £23.4m amongst 200,000 members is £117 each
Conservative: £35m amongst 300,000 members is £117 each
and
Liberal Democrat: £1.1m debt plus, possibly, £2.4m Michael Brown donation, equals £3.5 million amongst 70,000 members is £50 each

On one of the last Daily Politics of last "season" they had Ken Clarke and a couple of others talking about school dinners. The whole issue is back on the menu this week as we hear of parents delivering non-school dinners to their children in schools to get round the supposedly more healthy food on offer inside.

The thing that struck me about Ken Clarke's argument was that he said "we must allow choice" in school dinners. That it would be wrong to impose a healthy diet essentially to the exclusionon of other less healthy choices that the kids voted for with their taste-buds.

Well, I cannot remember ever having a choice at school (and I had three meals a day there until I was eighteen). And I'm pretty damned sure that Ken Clarke's grammar school twenty and more years before mine would not have offered a choice. I am sure we had one dish, or a plated salad if ordered, or a specific and usually unappetising looking thing if you had a registered special dietary requirement (and in all that time I don't remember one person being adversely affected by the seeming plethora of allergies we hear of nowadays).

I realise that nowadays there are more kids allowed to decide for themselves not to eat meat and so on, and sure, they should be catered for. But what's the problem with one vegetarian and one meat based choice and that's it? Since when did eight year olds understand what was good for them enough to be offered some range of different foods every day?

Further to the previous confusion over who is going to stand in for Vince Cable tonight at a Labour fringe event on taxation policy and transport funding it turns out that organisers have managed to get none other than the next leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell to champion the new Lib Dem tax plans at the event.

Eat your heart out Evan!

News reaches me of moves at long last by Lib Dem led Oxford City Council to get more private sector landlords' properties licensed to ensure a basic decent standard:

BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | Licence plan for more landlords:

There is a "widespread" problem of sub-standard conditions in rental properties across Oxford city, a councillor claims.

With more than 1,000 complaints last year Councillor Patrick Murray wants more residences licensed.

This is something I fought for not far shy of ten years ago now when I was on the council. In some predominantly student areas of other cities quality has been driven up by voluntary schemes run by organizations such as UNIPOL housing which we tried to whip up some enthusiasm for in Oxford ten years ago. But to little avail. And why should they - in some cities, students have a choice, and the difference between being licensed and not being licensed could be the ability to let your property at all. Here in Oxford the market is so tight it's nearly always a landlord's market.

Patrick knows, and I know, that there are some scummy shitholes out there that get in under the wire of compulsory licensing. If you want to provide boarding kennels for animals you've got to get them licensed. If you want to feed us kebabs at three in the morning you've got to get licensed. Yet if you want to house people, you can more or less do as you please. I've seen bare wires, broken bogs, even still some outside privies. And as to what passes as "furnished" the thought even for me, slob as I am, of sitting let alone sleeping on some of the fleabitten stuff turns my stomach. And in Oxford students often end up taking whatever they can get.

However, there is a market mechanism for achieving a similar outcome. Let's use Land Value Tax instead of Council Tax. Council Tax falls on the occupier. Land Value Tax on the owner. Council Tax combines the value of the location and the property to produce a taxable value, Land Value Tax just acknowledges the value of the location.

So a landlord offering a scuzzy shithole in an in demand location is going to have most of his income taken from him in tax unless he bucks his ideas up and produces a property which people are actually going to pay a premium over location value to rent. It would also prevent those landlords not renting out part of their properties to avoid the current compulsory system as they'd be losing out on income from the bit that is theirs, the property value, whilst still having to pay the tax on the location value.

Oh, and of course, it would promote the redevelopment of some sub-standard housing into dedicated single person housing more appropriate for the student and young professional market, taking some of the heat off family housing.