The power of councils to help communities

By Sarah Hayward / @sarah_hayward

Last Tuesday morning Camden Council had cleared up the mess left by rioters in Camden Town and Chalk Farm by the time many people left for work. When, a little later, around 100 people turned up to help the clean up, it was already done and council staff (not politicians like me) suggested volunteers headed to Clapham. Which many of the volunteers did.

Later on Tuesday, as rumours abound that Camden might be a target for a further night of violence on Tuesday, the council proactively spoke to nearly 300 young people or their parents and sent over 800 text messages to people warning them to stay in on Tuesday night.

Over the last week our council has received plaudits from businesses, voluntary groups, residents and opposition councillors for our response to the riots in the Camden. Yesterday we launched an online discussion forum for people to give us their thoughts about the violence and what our long term response should be.

Across London, councils have provided emergency shelter, co-ordinated charitable donations, cleaned up significant damage and worked as the fulcrum round which all sections of local communities can act to respond to the violence.

A local council’s position within a community is unique. The myriad services we provide, stakeholders we have and people we work with mean we can work strategically across our area as easily as we have hyper local knowledge about individual streets or families.

Despite this, often a council’s work can pass by unnoticed. Until the bins aren’t collected one day. Many people sadly aren’t aware of the depth and breadth of the services a local authority runs. It’s when something catastrophic like last week’s riots happen that people reach for the support of the local council. It happened in Labour authorities like Camden and Haringey and it happened in Tory Birmingham, who were similarly praised by their local communities for their response.

Local councils aren’t the sexy end of politics, but they are the bit that makes the most difference, most regularly to most people’s lives.

The lack of general knowledge of, or sympathy for local councils by many people (voters) means that we have been a very easy target for the Tory led government’s attempts to ‘roll back the state’. In Camden we are having to cut £100m or nearly 25% from our budget for services in three years. In Camden we also have a massive capital challenge on account of losing so much capital investment in our schools.

The cuts levied on local government are further and faster than cuts to any other area of government. The Tory-led government seems to have singled out councils for particularly pernicious treatment. These cuts, deeper to councils in deprived areas than for councils in affluent areas, mean in many of the communities affected by last week’s riots we’re having to cut services that would normally be invested in to prevent a recurrance – both carrot and stick services, like CCTV or community wardens as well as youth clubs and community centres.

In Camden Town/Chalk Farm where the biggest disturbances were in my borough, the council has funded additional PCSOs for the Safer Neighbourhood Team for a number of years and while we’re trying to find a way to continue meeting this cost, the police haven’t been so generous. They have already cut the dedicated sergeant for that community policy team.

On top of the cuts, the Tory-led government is using legislation to castrate local government. The localism bill could give any group including private providers the right to run local services, meaning there will no longer be a single strategic fulcrum in an area. The Public Services White paper further re-enforces this push to remove provision from the public sector to a disparate group of providers who will have little accountability to either the local council or the local community. You certainly won’t be able to to the ballot box to force them out if they don’t do the job like you can with your local politicians. The education bill is encouraging schools to separate off.

The cumulative effect could leave councils as a little rump of commissioners with councillors little more than arbiters in community planning disputes.

Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone have rightly focussed on the police cuts and their immediate impact on restoring order if the cuts go ahead. But cuts to councils and the denuing of their power, could have a much more devastating impact as we try to grapple with the issues that caused last week’s violence – and how we prevent a recurrance.