THE question of the new tax powers for Holyrood may have dominated the election campaign so far, but the biggest issue the next parliament will face is the financial crisis in local government. The scale of the cutbacks and job losses to come is staggering, with councils facing headline cuts of around £350million next year and much more in the years thereafter Glasgow alone is facing £130m in cuts and will need to cut 1,500 jobs in the next year, to add to the jobs that have already been lost. And yet the manifestos and campaigns have barely touched on the question of what local government should look like – or how it should be paid for.
Addressing the issue in its own manifesto, the think tank Reform Scotland says there needs to be much greater devolution of powers to councils and even suggests pilot schemes handing control of health to local authorities. That is unlikely to happen any time soon, but there is at least a wide consensus that councils should have greater powers.
The problem is there has been very little action and the slow erosion of councils’ financial control over the last 50 years has been accelerated by the Scottish Government’s centralising tendencies. The most obvious example is the council tax freeze, which has meant local authorities no longer having control over one of their main sources of income.
There has been some movement in recent months with the announcement of the end of the freeze and modest reform of council tax. But Reform Scotland is right to express disappointment at how few proposals there are from the parties to genuinely reform local government and increase its powers and accountability.
The need for change centres on some basic issues. First, even with the proposed reforms to the banding, the council tax system remains fundamentally flawed and outdated. It was introduced more than two decades ago as a quick fix by John Major’s government and was obviously an improvement on the disastrous poll tax. But it has essentially remained unchanged ever since, meaning it is now based on property values that are 20 years out of date. The tweaking of the bands will help, but the council tax is still a poor fit with the principle that the wealthier you are, the more you pay.
Second, there has been very little action on the merging or sharing of services between councils. Some councils, such as Stirling and Clackmannan, have taken steps to collaborate on back office and other actions, but six years on from the proposals to reshape councils by Sir John Arburthnott, the progress has been slow.
Finally, in any process of local government reform, there needs to be serious discussion about the current map of 32 councils and whether that is the right number for a country the size of Scotland.
All of these issues have been dodged one way or another by most of the parties ahead of the election, but Reform Scotland is right to say that local government reform will be a key issue for the next parliament and government will have to focus on it. The idea of a cross-party constitutional convention on local governance, which the local government organisation Cosla has proposed, is a good one. But whatever happens, denial and delay on such an important issue are no longer possible.
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