A bizarre proposal for devolving power

By Mike Katz / @mikekatz

Eric Pickles, self-styled champion of localism (the Tories’ word of the month) has come up with a bizarre proposal for devolving power downwards in his new consultation on council tax, published today.

Under the plans if councils want to increase the tax above a set ceiling – which could be the rate of inflation, according to the Daily Telegraph – they would have to submit the plans to local referenda, costing tens of thousands of pounds. However, as the referendum would be held after the increase came into effect, the council would have to refund residents if the difference if they voted for the smaller increase.

This of course comes after he has showed his hands-off approach to freeing local government from the shackles of Whitehall by naming and shaming councils over how much they spend on their local newspapers and ridiculing ‘non-jobs’ (which often turn out to be quite useful roles).

Only an idiot would be taken in by the notion that there’s a real choice here. My hunch is that, if local councils are forced to conduct a binding local poll to ask if they can raise council tax by so much, the majority of residents would already be conditioned – by knowing the alternative is a legal obligation to set a lower tax rate – to provide a two-fingered response. It’s a different proposition from the case of some local authorities who have already put a range of tax and spend options to their residents.

If you have to ask… the saying goes. Any genuine effort to promote devolution to local authorities and encourage innovation and responsiveness has been, in an instant, nobbled by the crude centralising reach of this new diktat.

In practical terms, it will probably mean that – given the length of time it takes to put a council budget together – councils will have to waste money on putting together two budgets – one on the basis of the government’s ceiling, and one on the basis of their referendum offer. That, and the cost of the referendum itself, will be a massive waste. Every year? Councils soon would stop bothering.

On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Pickles observed that referendums could be held at the same time as elections. Wow, he gets his brief. Like many councillors, I’m elected once every four years.

Even councils elected by thirds have a year off. Perhaps it will be easier in a non-election year to give up the pretence of having any autonomy over our own budgets and just accept what the government has put on the table.

To pretend it’s anything but capping with a crude populist twist is to take local councillors of all parties for fools.

Labour went some – but sadly not quite all of the way – on giving councils the assurance that they could set the council tax which they thought was appropriate for their communities’ needs.

The ConDem government’s true instincts have been shown up in this move. To give them the benefit of the doubt, if they ever believed the rhetoric, they’ve certainly been captured by the Whitehall-knows-best mindset after only a few weeks. However they try to dress this up, this isn’t a truly empowering proposal. Wonder what the Tory – let alone the Lib Dem – councillors think about it?