Tory councillors are tied to a despotic idea that the market knows best

Max Caller, the independent inspector of Northamptonshire county council, has told the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, that the council is a dead parrot. It has, in the immortal lines of the Monty Python sketch, ceased to be. Instead, in 2020, arise north northants and west northants.

Never mind the geographical oddity (why not east and west or north and south?); never mind the lack of socioeconomic logic in the proposal or the lack of community identification with the new designation. Caller, who is a citizen completely above suspicion with a tremendous track record in local government, hasn’t told Javid the whole truth.

He has written a report that says Northamptonshire employs “many good, hardworking, dedicated staff who are trying to deliver essential services to residents who need and value what is offered and available. The problems the council faces are not their fault.” Hooray, and so say all of us who care about local government.

But this means the fault at the council lies with councillors. Or, to rephrase, the fault lies with the Tory councillors who have been in charge for many years and who were the worst combination of being incompetent and captivated by ideology. But Caller only implies that; he doesn’t say it.

Caller says Northamptonshire lost tight budgetary control and “appeared to abandon strong and effective budget-setting scrutiny. Instead of taking steps to regain control, the council was persuaded to adopt a ‘next generation’ model structure as the solution. There was not then and has never been any hard-edged business plan or justification to support these proposals, yet councillors, who might well have dismissed these proposals for lack of content and justification in their professional lives, adopted them and authorised scarce resources in terms of people, time and money to develop them.”

But he does not point out that what afflicted Northamptonshire Tories was ideology of a kind that Javid has, at least until recently, enthusiastically espoused. Ideology that has also been in evidence in Buckinghamshire, another tottering Tory county.

That ideology embraces “new public management”, a doctrine in vogue since the 1980s, a fundamental principle of which is that markets know best and the state a burden to be shrunk and diminished. Another of its principles is that public services should be devolved, pushed as far away from the centre as possible, which is why for decades we’ve seen the odd marriage of economic liberals and “localists”.

All councillors worth their salt are localists, in the sense they believe they are doing a good job and deserve power and resources to carry on. All councillors, including those on the left. The Local Government Association’s Labour group has just produced a wishlist for what should happen were Labour to win power at Westminster. Give us freedom, they cry, so we can build houses, improve social care, better coordinate schooling – and give us the cash as well.

The report’s authors have a slight problem in that Labour council leaders are pretty much non-Corbynista. This may explain the almost complete absence of reference to ending outsourcing, to which Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have committed in recent speeches; references to the leadership are tepid.

But the bigger problem is more widespread: there is no clear view among either the general public or MPs about how much autonomy councils should enjoy.

The political right, despite its love affair with new public management, is no more coherent than Labour on this. Javid’s predecessor Eric Pickles couldn’t resist instructing councils on the number of times they should empty the bins. Javid becomes an avid centraliser and intervenes, at least when the failings of Northamptonshire Tories become politically intolerable.

If Andrew Gwynne, his Labour shadow, were in office, he would do the same in Rotherham, Doncaster or wherever if circumstances demanded, as his party predecessors have done. In addition, Labour now has some heavy policy baggage on adult social care, schools, housing, public health and so on – which implies councils would have to do as they were told, especially if austerity were to end and the money taps get turned on again.

Northamptonshire has not been able to survive austerity. But it has done nothing to balance the respective powers of centre and locality.

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