The Economist: Trust the locals
WHENEVER Britain is diagnosed as ill-governed the same remedy is proposed: split up the mammoth bureaucracies in Whitehall, the wide street that runs from Parliament to Trafalgar Square and is still haunted by the ghosts of the men in bowler hats who built the welfare state from their offices there. Functions move from one department to another, in the hope of conjuring up better co-ordination across government. Then something new goes wrong, and the process starts again. John Reid, the home secretary, has been at this recently, arguing that his clumsy department would make a better job of keeping track of the miscreants who keep escaping from its databases and on to the front pages of newspapers if it were split into two.
Mr Reid's proposal looks unlikely to go far at present. But there is an alternative to this endless cycle of restructuring followed by disappointment followed by more restructuring. The centre could be forced to do less and local government trusted a little more. Those who think this is a good idea dream of renewing the kind of government that flourished in Victorian Britain, when councils housed in magnificent town halls decided for themselves what they would spend money on and how they would raise it. Happily, a consensus is gradually forming around this idea. It might even happen.
Take the sustainable-communities bill, passed by Parliament at its second reading on January 19th. If it becomes law in its current form (and it has support from the opposition and about half of the parliamentary Labour Party), it would give councils and local authorities far greater discretion over spending. They would be given power to request information on how much Whitehall departments were planning to spend in the local area through various agencies and quangos and, working within that budget, draw up alternative spending plans. The government could then amend these, but would have to explain to Parliament why it had done so. Nick Hurd, the Conservative MP who proposed the bill, reckons the amount of extra money this would bring within council control would be roughly equivalent to the entire grant that councils currently get from central government. …
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