Mess, muddle and tribalism – English local government

 

A proposal for an enlarged greater London, which would take in the surrounding counties, should re-open a debate on local government reform. But it probably won’t.

 

The London Society, according to its website, was founded in 1912, by a group of eminent people who were concerned about the lack of planning in the capital. 

 

They included architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Beresford Pite, Socialist early town planner and architect, Raymond Unwin, and painter and designer Frank Brangwy. They met, no doubt, in a wood-panelled room in St James’s, fugged with cigar smoke, to discuss infrastructure-related issues of the day, including, housing, roads, railways and the barely feasible and dangerous idea of a channel tunnel – one had been started in 1882 but abandoned, for fear that it would provide an invasion route.

 

It is highly probable  that these top-hatted bastions of Edwardian society (were any women included, I wonder?) would also have discussed the highly topical issue of the governance of the capital city.

 

With the arrival of county councils in 1888, more or less the whole country, including Ireland, was covered by elected local government, much to the disgust of author and designer William Morris, a founder member of the Socialist League, who advocated revolution, not gradualist reform. Urban and rural districts had been set up 1894.

 

The London County Council took over, from1890, the responsibilities of the London's Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1899, London's parish vestries and local boards of works were replaced by borough councils. London’s democratically-elected local authority was an extraordinary creation of the Victorian laissez-faire, but reformist, era of Disraeli and Gladstone. By the early twentieth century, it was lighting and paving the streets, providing gas and water supplies, constructing sewers, clearing slums, building flats and houses and running tram systems, libraries, art galleries and public baths.

 

In the 1890s, 'Progressives' (who were neither Liberal nor Conservative) were elected to prominent positions on the LCC, including the remarkable John Burns, a former docker, who went on to become an independent Labour MP and president of the Local Government Board. The Progressives were influenced by the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and by the branch of Socialism that accommodated municipal reform.

 

Councils acquired powers to build houses through Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. The LCC duly established a housing of the working classes branch, in its architects' department, whose work was influenced, stylistically, by the arts and crafts movement. It built some beautiful housing estates, not for the poorest but for waged artisans – for example, Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith and Totterdown Fields in Tooting. You can still see them today.

 

Lord Salisbury, who had been Conservative prime minister when the LCC was formed came to regret his creation. He said of the LCC, in 1894, "It is the place where collectivist and socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms". It was for similar reasons that Margaret Thatcher summarily abolished the LCC’s successor, the Greater London Council, in 1987.

 

Frankenstein’s monster

 

The London Society’s concept, launched for discussion, of a new Greater London, enlarged to include all of the surrounding counties, including, Essex, Kent, East and West Sussex and Buckinghamshire would not be Greater London at all. In effect, this Frankenstein’s monster, would be a de facto south-east England region. The concept of regions run by mayors with executive powers seems weird to me. It would be like reverting to Saxon times, when the country was divided into parcels of land led by warring chieftains.

 

We’ve been here before. The idea of splitting England into regions, each with elected assemblies, was tried by Labour in 2004. it failed at the first hurdle when the north-east voted no, in a ballot that Labour had complacently expected to be a shoe-in. In some ways, that was an early expression of the disaffection of the ‘red wall’. The right-on, lifestyle-based politics of New Labour never took root in the north-east, even though Tony Blair’s constituency was in County Durham.

 

Don’t get me wrong. Personally, I think that we should adopt English regions, but that their governance should be a list-based PR system, as used to elect the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies – the radical and welcome innovation of New Labour in 1997.

 

Counties and districts would be scrapped. Each region would be made up of unitary authorities, with consistent powers and responsibilities. The danger, under this model, is that south-east would be home of the national capital and by far the wealthiest region. So why not move the national capital to Birmingham, with a brand new, state-of-the-art circular chamber? For the majority of MPs that would be quite convenient.

 

Don’t worry, it will never happen. France, Germany and Spain managed to create rational tiers of regional and local government which work, with little fuss. Here, when one government gets in, it scraps the reforms of the previous one and adopts changes which are blatant gerrymandering, as in the last great local government re-organisaton of 1972, masterminded by Conservative environment secretary, Peter Walker.

 

Walker’s reforms created the beginnings of the dog's dinner that we have now – a mish-mash of unitary authorities, counties and districts, with separate and sometimes overlapping responsibilities, with combined city regions, performing some strategic functions, but not uniformly, layered on top of them.

 

This weird lash-up has nothing to do with devolution or localism, despite what Westminster politicians say – it's rule from the centre by proxy. It’s therefore a solution that can survive changes of government. The current status quo kind of works, albeit in a ramshackle, round-the-houses sort of way and it creates lots of dramas, like our national football team, as it lurches from tournament to tournament. The English seem to like that way of doing things. How else can you explain Boris Johnson?

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.