What’s the future of local government?

I recently had the pleasure of being part of a panel at the Scottish Parliament’s Festival of Politics for a session looking at the future of local government.  

At Carnegie UK we believe that an important part of putting wellbeing at the heart of decision making is the concept of subsidiarity – that a central state should do only those things that cannot be better done at a more local level. Both as a concept and as a practical approach, subsidiarity is part of tackling the crisis of trust and influence in our democracy. This is important not just at a national level, but at a local level too, as our Life in the UK report found that in 2023 28% of people in Scotland had low levels of trust in local government (compared to 26% for the UK overall).  

A lack of shared vision

One of the topics that came up early was the lack of shared vision for local government today. Is it set up to be a genuine form of local problem solving to meet the needs of residents? Or is it designed to be local administration of centrally set priorities and statutory services? 

It is hard to deny the creeping centralisation of both finance and decision making in Scotland today. Local government budgets have been repeatedly diminished to support central government initiatives and the ability of councillors to act or invest meaningfully in discretionary local activity has been reduced. 

A shared and clear vision for what we want local government to do and how it is resourced has been missing from our policy debate in Scotland. While it might not be a vote winning priority, the lack of vision for the role of the state in Scotland has real impact when it comes to the tough decisions about how over-stretched resources are best allocated. 

In England, the UK government is currently championing mayoralties in combined local authority areas with an expanding map of 14 metro mayors now covering most of England’s major population centres. With this in mind, it was interesting to note the recent comments from leader of the Scottish Labour party, Anas Sarwar MSP, when speaking on Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast about his interest in establishing mayors in Scotland’s four major population centres. 

Despite having written about ways that mayoralties could potentially be established in Scotland, I remain agnostic about the idea of Mayors as a political concept. I am more interested in a clear vision for what we want to achieve with local government and then working towards that, driven by evidence of what works rather than what is most politically in fashion. If that happens to take us to Mayors then so be it but let’s focus on impact and outcomes first. 

The importance of leadership

While views from the panel, and in the audience, differed on the merits of mayors and their potential in Scotland, Professor Hall noted her firsthand experience in Manchester of the ability of the Mayor’s office to bring people together to get things done. 

This talks to another challenge for local government both in Scotland and more broadly: the need for decisive leadership. The Accounts Commission has recently been much more consistent in calling for bolder local government leadership. Their recent Delivering for the Future report noted the need for decisive leadership in order to choose where, why and how to spend increasingly pressurised resources. 

Even going back to the 10th anniversary of the Christie Commission in 2021, the Auditor General highlighted the need for bold leadership to make good on the ambition of that landmark report to shift resources away from frontline line demand management and more into upstream prevention and asset-based investment. 

Part of this complex picture of change and reform involves bravery in changing how we measure both risk and success. This is an area of particular interest to us at Carnegie UK with our recent work with the North of Tyne combined authority showcasing how a wellbeing approach can help to better set local priorities and our annual Life in the UK index offering an alternative measure of our overall social progress as a nation. 

There are many innovative pockets of local government services reform across the country, but it remains a missed opportunity that we have not yet risen to the challenge of bolder and braver leadership to meaningfully scale proven innovations and reforms in our local services. Too often we find ourselves in a state of “pilot project purgatory” as Jonathan Carr-West referred to it. 

Creative thinking on finances

Another important aspect of the challenges for the future of local government is that of finances. How do we best raise the money to deliver the services that are needed? What’s the right balance between local and national revenue streams? Who should decide how money is allocated locally? Can local government be genuinely accountable to local people if it doesn’t have meaningful responsibility for how money is raised and spent? 

Big questions for which there are no simple answers.  

A good place to start however, is in thinking about how we can evolve our debate and the sophistication of our policy approach to local government finances.  

Too often our local budget conversations start and end with a transactional mindset. We need to think more holistically about how money is raised and spent to meet local needs. This is something that our new Financing the Future programme is looking at. Our wider debate on this needs to include consideration for more approaches that invest for impact, such as blended finance initiatives, and models such as total place budgeting and outcomes-based budgeting. And when thinking about local levers of taxation, we need to shift towards a mindset that looks at the full suite of devolved tax powers and how best these align between national and local discretion in order to create a coherent approach across Scotland. 

Where next?

The event was a great opportunity to get into the substance of these difficult and substantial issues. This is not a topic that lends itself well to political soundbites, but in the current era of major budget challenges facing Scotland’s public purse, it is a debate that needs to be had.  

At Carnegie UK we believe that now is the time to consider all ideas for how we can put wellbeing at the heart of our decision making to ensure that people across the country have what they need to live well now and into the future. Local government has a key role to play in this and I hope to see some of the issues discussed at the panel session inform the future work plans of both Holyrood’s Local Government Committee and the work of COSLA. 

Event image from COSLA on X. The panel consisted of Professor Steven Heddle, Professor Donna Hall CBE, Dr Jonathan Carr-West and Adam Lang. The session was chaired by Convenor of the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, Ariane Burgess MSP