The Natives Are Not Revolting

Tax is still the key to localism

Tyler recently attended another Westminster seminar on localism. You know, that's everyone's great idea for extracting more value from public services by running them locally rather than from Whitehall.

Like most such seminars, it was attended by a mix of civil servants, quangocrats, local government people, think tankers, private contractors, consultants, and various hangers-on like Tyler. In other words, it overwhelmingly comprised people who in one way or another are paid from the public purse (not, it should be stressed, Tyler).

All - well, pretty well all - were agreed that we must have more localism. After all, we currently have the most centralised system of government in any of the major developed economies, and that can't be right (see many previous posts eg here). Localism rocks.

But alas, the attendees could see problems. Very serious problems.

First, there's the issue of the locals themselves. I mean, have you ever actually met the locals? My dear! How can you possibly have localism when the locals are a bunch of fascists and/or idiots? How can they be trusted to do The Right Thing - ie the thing the people around the seminar table want done? There will clearly need be national guidelines and service standards, and locals certainly couldn't be trusted with say, setting their own welfare standards. Why, they might not take proper account of the European Decency Threshold. They might even revert to workhouses!

Second, there's the issue of capacity. Even if they were given more power over things like welfare, local councils just don't have the capacity to take on the job. Frankly, sweeping the streets and emptying the bins already stretches their meagre abilities to breaking point, and we need hardly dwell on the Baby P area.

Third, there's the closely related issue of infantalisation. Local councils themselves are fully aware of their own lack of capacity, and frankly they like it that way. They simply don't have the confidence and maturity to take on more challenging tasks. Mummy's apron strings offer a far safer and easier life.

Fourth, we could end up with a postcode lottery. A postcode lottery! Some councils might decide to provide different services to others, and then where would we be? Although it must be said that argument did take a bit of a hit when one speaker pointed out we already have a postcode lottery in much service provision - one often caused by administrative accident rather than deliberate policy.

Fifth, it would be expensive. No economies of scale, you see. All those little councils running their own separate little services, rather than relying on the super-efficient national services we currently enjoy. Er, yes... that argument also took a bit of a hit in subsequent discussion.

Sixth, few people out there among the locals actually seems to want it. The natives are not revolting. They are not manning the barricades demanding to be free. And stuffing localism down the unwilling throats of the apathetic locals sounds like a surefire recipe for disaster.

And you know, we've got some sympathy with many of those points - especially the last one.

We have long been strongly in favour of more localism, but it must be admitted that most people round our way don't actually want the council to have more power. True, the rubbish collection seems to work tolerably well, but that's long since been contracted out. Beyond that, people generally have very little confidence in the ability and judgement of the local council. There is no clamour whatsoever to give it more power, and precious little interest in who gets elected as councillors.

And Tyler himself has a pretty hypocritical attitude on this. He may be a big supporter of localism, but when he's actually been approached to stand for the council (there's a local recruitment drive going on right now), he's declined. He believes it would be a pretty thankless task, with no end of brickbats but precious little actual power. Responsibility without power - the classic meat in the sandwich between Whitehall and the angry citizens.

You see, at root, what we have here are our old friends Mr Chicken and Mr Egg.

Councils have lost confidence and capacity because over the last half century they've been gradually stripped of their traditional power and responsibility. They've come to rely on Whitehall for the vast bulk of their cash, and they therefore have to take instructions direct from Whitehall, rather than deciding things for themselves. Is it any wonder it's difficult to persuade people to stand for the council?

So now we face the prospect of localising control into the hands of our weak councils - quite a scary prospect. Yet if we don't do that, we will never start to rebuild all those capacities we've lost. We won't get the chicken unless we take a chance on the egg.

And what is the key step we need to take? As regular readers will know, we have long argued for fiscal decentralisation. Indeed we've even written research notes on the subject (eg see here).

What it means is that we need to go much further than simply have Whitehall hand over an even bigger pot of cash to our councils. What it means more than anything is making councils responsible for raising a much larger slice of their own cash for themselves from local taxpayers. We need to reverse the pattern of finance at least back to what it was before the terrible Wislon started the destruction of our local authorities in the 60s:

If once again, local councils were responsible for raising half their funding direct from local taxpayers, that would concentrate local minds wonderfully. Suddenly it would matter a whole lot who was running the town hall. People like Tyler would have a real incentive to get involved, and what's more, election to the council would never be a shoo-in.

If we are genuinely serious about localism, step one is the decentralise the tax system. Taxes always have been and always will be the key to local engagement.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, localism

Life, Death, And Virtual Councils

How may I help?

Well, for a start, you can stop wasting my friggin' money

I expect you saw the story of the bonkers council that spent £36 grand of real life taxpayers' money on contructing a fantasy life town hall in the internet game Second Life (pic above).

"The cost has been revealed following a Freedom of Information request, including £3,250 for initial workshops and almost £17,000 to an IT company to develop the 'island'.

The council also handed over almost £10,000 to the company for rental and management of the project, £6,000 for a virtual museum and £400 for a statue."

What an outrage. A classic example of a council wasting our hard-earned cash on half-baked rubbish that nobody asked for and nobody ever used (they refuse to divulge how many people used "the facility"). Who do they think they are?

But what really caught Tyler's eye about this story was the name of the council responsible - Tameside Council in Greater Manchester. Because once in another lifetime, Tyler had regular dealings with the officers and councillors at Tameside Council. They were clients of his.

More than that, for reasons we needn't go into, the corporate relationship ended on an extraordinarily sour note. Tyler can still vividly recall being publicly flogged by the Big-I-Am council leader in front of a packed meeting of councillors, officers, and third parties. How Tyler was a disgrace and ought to be ashamed of himself. And later being told by that same leader that he never ever wanted to see Tyler in Tameside again. Literally run out of town.
 
Well, that's showbiz, and it doesn't help to dwell on such things. So Tyler got on with his life.
 
But now, years later, this little story has brought it all back. And this time, the boot would seem to be on the other foot. How delicious. Time for a bit of Googling.
 
For those who don't know, Tameside is a classic Northern council - a rock-solid Labour fiefdom. No fewer than 46 of its 55 councillors are Labour, and it has been Labour controlled ever since it was established in 1974. It is good old North Korean style one-party rule.
 
In fact, Tameside turns out to be even closer to North Korea than that. Because not only has it been ruled for ever by one party, its leader has been the same individual for 30 years. Yes, that very same individual who publicly flogged Tyler all those years ago. He went on to became the longest serving council leader in the entire country - not quite as long as Kim Il-sung, but getting there.
 
Of course, just like in North Korea, there has been some dissent among the populace. In fact, there now seem to be several Tameside blogs dedicated to the antics of the leader and his colleagues. Tameside Mafia is one, which among other things has kept a close eye on the number of chauffeur-driven Jags provided for him. Another blog, Tameside Eye (sadly open to invited readers only) posted the leader's very own Downfall vid. Yes, there has been dissent, and it seems to have grown.

So what's this leader's name?

Well, actually we're not going to name him. You'll have to Google it yourself.

Why? Because by an amazing and sad coincidence, at the very moment Tyler - after all these years - decided to get reacquainted down there in the second life cyberspace town hall, it turns out that in real life, the leader has just died. His funeral was yesterday.

Tyler isn't normally one for spooky coincidences. But this, this is spooky. And frankly, rather a shock. After all, despite the flogging, he was a fellow flesh and blood, all too mortal man, earning a crust, and doing what he believed was his duty to his community. Besides, whatever may have happened in the past, it isn't right to bad mouth someone who's barely cold in his grave. We're not going there.

Instead, let's focus on Tameside Council itself. Whatever people like Tyler may say, we're not North Korea. People can vote for their councillors. So how can it be that one party can stay in power like that for ever? Especially when it's quite clear that a lot of the locals have serious misgivings.

Well, part of it has to be that old tribal thing. Most people in places like Tameside just don't vote Tory. End of. Lib Dems? Talk sense will you?

But there's something else going on. The reality is that in real life as well as cyberspace, our councils have become virtual. They are little more than figments of our imagination.

As we've blogged since the start, councils today are essentially an arm of central government. They may still have town halls, and it may say "Council" on the big brass plate, but in truth they have to do not what their local electors want, but what their paymasters in Whitehall tell them to. It's a simple case of follow the money.

In Tameside's case, its gross expenditure this year is budgeted at just under £600m. But less than £100m of that will come from local Council Tax payers. The rest will largely come from Whitehall, in one way or another.

Which means two things. First, the local electors don't get terribly excited about their local elections - they understand that the council is not where the real power lies. And second, the council itself is mainly in the game of ticking Whitehall's boxes.

And fair play to Tameside - they've done a fabulous job on the ticking. The Audit Commission is incredibly pleased, rating them a 4 star council - the very best - which is "improving well", and delivering top notch value for money.

So while you, me, and everyone else out here in the real world thinks spending £36 grand on a virtual town hall is a crap waste of our cash (and in a similar vein, check out their TV station - Tameside TV), in the virtual world of fantasy councils, Tameside is doing a cracking job.

Of course, going forward, it will get a tad more difficult. Gone is the largesse of Labour, spraying Southern tax revenue all over its Northern fiefdoms like Tameside (an estimated £1.2bn was spent there in 2008-09). Instead, they'll face George's squeeze, alongside a Tory determination to rebalance such grossly unfair spending regional spending biases.

But this whole saga underlines once again that we really do need real fiscal decentralisation. Councils should have to raise most of their own cash from their own local taxpayers. Councillors who think it's OK to spend taxpayers' money on computer games should be forced to explain and justify themselves to their own local electors, not some cosseted quangocrat sitting miles away.

In the real world, you can bet nobody outside the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would stay in power for 30 years.

PS Was everyone Tyler encountered at Tameside Council a dope? By no means. In fact, there were some very good quality people there. But most seemed understandably scared of upsetting the leader, and all were locked into a local government system that is fundamentally dysfunctional.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, localism

Town Halls Still Rich

No April Fools joke - Kent once again the winner

For those concerned about public sector profligacy, the TaxPayers' Alliance's annual Town Hall Rich List has become a must-read. Indeed, it's not too much to say that it's changed the policies of all three main parties, who all now promise much more transaparency and accountability over what top council officials pay themselves.

So well done TPA.

Well, thank you very much.

The fourth annual Rich List is published today (download here). Key points:

• 1250 council staff earned more than £100,000 in 2008-09, a 14% increase over the year. 
• 31 earned more than the Prime Minister
• The average pay rise for these Town Hall fat cats was 5% - in the same year, teachers got 2.3% and nurses got 2.7%
• The highest paying council was Kent, which had 27 bureaucrats on more than £100,000 (the top 2 got more than £300 grand)

Of course, one of the really useful things about the Rich List is that you can check on your own council - the one that's just demanded yet another increase in Council Tax (and despite the need for national belt-tightening, CT is still set to rise by an average 2% next year).

In Tyler's case, Surrey County Council has 7 staff on over £100k, with the Chief Exec on £205k.

Well, actually that's no longer true. As we blogged here, the Chief Exec and several other top staff (including at least two others from the 7), subsequently"left" after the Council's services got slammed for poor performance by the Audit Commission. Things were so bad that a temporary Chief Exec had to be parachuted in to sort it out, finding "a failure of leadership, culture and governance in its widest sense".

Which just goes to show - you can pay top dollar, that's easy. But it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to the quality of service provided.
 
As we've blogged many times, the only thing that will achieve that is full fiscal decentralisation. Councils must once again be made accountable to local people and not the Whitehall (and see this TPA Research Note).

PS A special pat on the back for the TPA's John O'Connell, who produced this year's Rich List. Production requires sending out and sifting through the hundreds of Freedom of Information requests to individual councils, so well done John.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, localism, public sector pay

A View From The Ice Road

The A322

Last evening Tyler drove the treacherous Ice Road across the frozen wastes where Berkshire used to meet Surrey*. And as he gingerly crawled along, he listened to some buffoon on the radio explaining why two arctic winters in a row do not mean the global warming hippies have got it all wrong.

True, the £200m pa tax-funded Department of Climate Propaganda Met Office has once again made a complete horlicks of its winter weather prediction (predicting only a one-in-seven chance of a cold winter). And true, they use this same much hyped "expertise" to predict global apocalypse by 2100. But somehow - in some way Tyler couldn't quite fathom - it's much easier to make predictions covering 100 years than those covering 100 days.

Later on Newsnight, official warmist spokesperson Susan Watts explained that the public are pretty dim. And that makes it very difficult to convey the Met Office's outstanding reliability on millennial climate change in the face of their screaming unreliability on forecasting the weather. If only we could all be as bright as her, we 'd understand that climate change is not the same as the weather.

Sadly, because we're so dim, we're instead left wondering why we've got an expensive Met Office that can't do the stuff we need it to do, but can produce reams of global warming guff none of us ever asked for.

But of course, it isn't just the Met Office where the weather/climate priorities are expensively arse about face. Despite the fact that our councils can't even afford to stock up on road grit, Miliband Jnr today announced the Commissars' latest money inferno - a £75bn programme to build another 6,400 offshore wind turbines to save the planet.

Except, post the Copenhagen fiasco, they seem to have dropped the bit about saving the planet - these days it's all about saving the election  economy:

"Our policies in support of offshore wind energy have already put us ahead of every other country in the world... The offshore wind industry is at the heart of the UK economy’s shift to low carbon and could be worth £75 billion and support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020... We did it before with oil and gas in the North Sea and we’ll do it again for offshore wind."

Now if you think you've heard this kind of thing before, you have - back in the glorious 1970s, when it was known as... er, "picking winners". And it cost us many tens of billions with virtually no payback (see this blog).

So against those £75bn windmills, how much have we spent on grit for our death trap skating rink roads? (which IIRC never got this bad in the 70s, even though at that point the climate hippies were telling us the world was freezing to death).

The local councils' version of the story is summarised here. Councils are responsible for gritting the vast majority of our 250,000 miles of roads (only motorways and a few A roads are covered by the Highways Agency). And they say they have treated "the equivalent of 1.7 million miles of road" (although words like "equivalent" always make Tyler suspicious). They reckon it's cost them £12.2m - about £7 per mile.

Unfortunately they are now virtually out of salt supplies, which with more snow promised sounds like a Grade 1 disaster.

Some very obvious points:

• Against the wholesale danger and disruption now being caused by our ice roads, £12.2m is a vanishingly small sum. It stacks up against the £600m per day the chaos is estimated to be costing UK businesses.
• £12.2m is less than 0.007% of total local authority spending this year. It compares to the £450m pa the TPA discovered councils spend on publicity (see this blog).
• Refocusing the Met Office on weather forecasting and cutting its budget by £100m pa would fund an eightfold increase in council supplies of salt and grit

So next time you're stuck in a snowdrift listening to some arrogant buffoon telling you that it wouldn't make financial sense for warming Britain to spend more on gritting, feel free to put your fist through the radio.

*Footnote: The ancient and proud county of Berkshire now exists in name only - after 12 centuries it was abolished by the Commissars in 1998.

PS I know we've made this point many times, but it is important we remember it. Every single Labour government we have ever had has ended in disaster. Usually, it's a straightforward financial and economic meltdown of the kind you expect from socialism. But it can't be coincidence that the abiding image of Labour's last go at government is of wintry streets lined with rotting rubbish - and ours now hasn't been collected since well before Xmas.

PPS I know what you're thinking - Tyler must have made some mistake - surely local councils have spent more than £12.2m on gritting. But I promise you that's the official number from the Local Government Association. Here's the full quote:

"An LGA analysis of council gritting activity over the last three weeks, since the cold snap started, estimated that:

• The equivalent of 1.7 million miles of road have been gritted by council gritting teams
• 200,000 tonnes of salt have been spread on the road
• £12.2m has been spent treating the roads
• 4,000 council staff have been involved in gritting operations around the clock"

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, roads, transport, untrue grit

The Government Inspector

Ofsted are coming - we're doomed!

Autocratic regimes always employ legions of government inspectors. Their job is to tour round the various outposts of the centralised state and put the fear of God into local bureaucrats - to remind them who's boss.

It was back in 1836 that Nikolai Gogol wrote his classic comedy about how the Czar's inspectors terrorised the officials of provincial towns in Russia. The play's joke is that the government inspector actually turns out to be a conman, who finally scarpers with his bribes and the mayor's daughter. But its underlying truth is that the inspection regime does nothing to contain the endemic corruption and inefficiency of the Czar's local officials.

Gogol could write virtually the same play today in Brown's Britain. In councils and schools and hospitals throughout the land, bureaucrats and frontline staff quake at the prospect of a visitation from the inspectors. The inspectorates now cover all aspects of local services, employ many thousands of inspectors, and have budgets running into hundreds of millions (for more details, take a look through the excellent TPA quango report).

One of the most high profile inspectorates is Ofsted. It costs us £228m, has a staff of 2700 (2007-08), and is headed by the wife of disgraced Labour minister Tony McNulty (honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up).

According to Ofsted's website:

"We inspect and regulate to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages."

Which gives it an extraordinarily wide brief. It now inspects and regulates not only schools, but also "colleges, initial teacher education, work-based learning and skills training, adult and community learning, education and training in prisons and other secure establishments, and the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass)". Not forgetting childcare services (aka prosecuting members of baby-sitting circles), and childrens' social care.

Ah yes, childrens' social care.

We blogged the appalling case of Baby P several times (eg see here). Ofsted was centrally implicated, having awarded Haringey childrens' social services excellent marks virtually at the same moment Baby P was dying.

It turned out their inspection had been little more than an elaborate box-ticking exercise, largely carried out by those actually being inspected. At the end of which, Ofsted praised the council for providing “a good service for children”, and improving their "life chances" - a sickening testimony to the uselessness of their inspections.

So how have they responded?

Well, by increasing the number of boxes that require ticking of course. According to those at the sharp-end (HTP HJ), since the Baby P case, social workers have been submerged in a deluge of new bureaucracy. The chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers says:

“What social workers are having to do 80 per cent of their time is serve a bureaucratic machine, which actually has nothing to do with good social work and has everything to do with keeping a really ineffective inspection regime operating in a way that does not support really effective work with children and families.”

Which sounds spot on. And note the response of Childrens' Commissar Balls, when asked if he would intervene to stop the lunacy:

"The answer to that is no. The idea that social workers who are dealing with complex cases of potential child abuse or neglect wouldn’t be making records or keeping track of what they do doesn’t seem to make much sense."

Yup. Yet another here-today-gone-tomorrow amateur who knows better than the frontline professionals how they should do the job.

And if by any chance some courageous council might consider ignoring the government inspectors, and backing the judgement of their own people instead, they should expect a visit from the Cossacks.

Already in the last few months, two previously well-rated shire counties have fallen foul of Ofsted's rage.

We already blogged the case of Surrey County Council, where the failure to tick all of Ofsted's child care boxes properly led to Whitehall intervention, mass sackings/resignations (including Surrey's Chief Exec), and a stinging critique of the entire council delivered publicly by the commissar parachuted in to conduct the purge.

Now a similar thing seems to have happened in Cornwall, where Ofsted has condemned local childrens' services for inadequate record keeping, and various other perceived organisational failures. Only this time, the Chief Exec immediately ran out into the market square to confess his council's shortcomings and promise they will obey all future orders without question. Local democracy it ain't.

Cam reckons he's going to take an axe to Labour's inspectorates. He needs to. We've already suggested axing the Audit Commission. Ofsted can join it. Total saving £450m pa.

PS Tyler used to do the odd spot of acting at school. And The Government Inspector was the first production he ever appeared in. No photos alas, but a quick Google produced the following cutting of another school performance at about the same time. It gives a pretty good idea of the kind of nuanced acting we're talking about, and it even seems to feature the same rented costumes:

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, localism, quangos, social services

Localism - Follow The Money

Local decisions for local people

As we all understand by now, the UK has just about the most centralised system of government of any developed country. Our once proudly independent local councils have become little more than an arm of the state, with all kinds of dire consequences for local services, local accountability, and the stewardship of taxpayers' money.

Now the Tories have pledged to reverse this. They pledged it again at last week's Conference.

To which we say hurrah!

Except of course, rhetoric is one thing - action is something else entirely. This morning, Steve Richards highlighted a key point:

"The problem with localism is that governments like to keep hold of the levers even if in theory they want to let go. As an added twist quite often the case for holding on to a lever or two is compelling...

How does central government give away powers when it is responsible for raising most of the money spent by local providers?"

Yes, when it comes to localism - as with everything else - we must follow the money. As long as local councils continue to depend on central government grants for the bulk of their cash, localism is never going to be more than a sham - probably an expensive one.

Now, it just so happens that Tyler is working on a paper for the TPA on precisely this issue. So he's been having a deeper delve into the figures.

First, relative to other developed economies we really are out on a limb in terms of fiscal centralisation. The following chart is taken from a recent OECD working paper, and it shows the variation in how local authorities raise their cash, as between local taxes and transfers (grants) from central government (click on image to enlarge):

As we can see, the UK is at the extreme end in terms of how reliant our local authorities are on central government grants - only Ireland, Greece and the Netherlands are (slightly) more extreme. Even in traditionally centralised states like France, local authorities raise much more of their own funds from local taxpayers, rather than relying on central government.

Second, it really wasn't like this in the past. Traditionally, our councils raised most of their own funds. Right up until the 1960s, their receipts from local taxes were roughly in line with their central government grants.

But as government got bigger, central government crushed local control. They massively boosted their grants to local councils, but only on condition that councils complied with Whitehall directives (recalcitrant councillors could even find themselves banged up). In the 80s, the Thatcher government introduced rate capping, directly limiting council's power to raise local tax. Finally, in 1990 local authorities lost their ability to tax local businesses altogether.

These measures transformed councils' funding mix. And they correspondingly transformed who got to call the shots:

So here we are, with more than 80% of our local councils' spending funded by Whitehall.

And unless Cam changes that, all his talk of localism is so much hot air.

We'll be watching this space very carefully.

PS Simon Jenkins can sometimes be very irritating. But his 2004 paper, Big Bang Localism, turns out to be a pretty good overview of the whole issue. Worth an hour or two.

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Fear And Loathing In Surrey

A typical weekend in Guildford

Tyler lives in Surrey.

Well, he would, wouldn't he. Surrey is nice and leafy, yet close enough to the fleshpots up the Smoke.

True, Surrey has been described as Britain's biggest carpark, and Surrey housewives are not to everyone's taste. But it's also got more Waitroses than anywhere else outside London, and important National Treasures like Cliff Richard live here.

Unfortunately, it is expensive. And one of those expenses is high council tax. This year Tyler will be contributing £2972.16 to his various local authorities, of which no less than £2178.36 is going to Surrey County Council.

Now, Surrey CC is an entity that knows how to spend money. Last year they got through £1.4bn on so-called Revenue Expenditure, which was nearly £1,300 for every single inhabitant.

But unlike most local authorities, apart from its ringfenced schools grant, Surrey gets very little financial assistance from central government - the inhabitants are deemed too rich. Indeed, under this Labour government the County has received only about one-third as much support per head as the average authority. True, that's a perfectly fair punishment for voting Tory (which is why Labour voting areas should expect heavy retribution over the next decade), but it has made balancing the jolly old books rather tricky.

So some years ago, Surrey CC chiefs decided they needed to cut costs. And to achieve that, they wheeled out a giant mechanised scythe called the Business Delivery Review, or BDR as it was "affectionately" known.

The results were somewhat less than a triumph. In four years, Surrey's "star rating" - awarded by the Audit Commission for service quality and value for money - plunged from four (the top award) to one (the bottom):

Surrey had landed in the bottom 3% of local councils, alongside Haringey (yes, Baby P Haringey), Doncaster (yes, 7 child deaths Doncaster), and Milton Keynes.

How could that possibly have happened? According to the Commission:

"Surrey County Council is not improving adequately. Overall levels of improvement and service provision are variable. Services for vulnerable children and young people do not meet minimum requirements and safeguarding is inadequate."

The impact of this verdict on Surrey CC was huge. The Chief Executive "left". The Leader of the Council was forced to resign. Many of the top managers were exited. Staff morale collapsed. It was a Grade A disaster.

Things got so bad, an emergency Chief Exec was parachuted in by Whitehall. And most unusually, he has just published his findings for all to see (HTP JF).

He reckons he's found an organisation in breakdown. The staff loathe the managers, the managers fear the chief exec, the members hate the officers, and the officers spend their days trying to ignore an Elephant that's somehow crept into the Room. To summarise:

"The difficult position in which the County Council finds itself is fundamentally a failure of leadership, culture and governance in its widest sense...

...the Council is seen as remote... is viewed as superior and arrogant... problems compounded by a significant breakdown in mutual trust and confidence within the Council... widely viewed as lacking vision, direction and strategy and instead operates by a series of often disconnected short-term tactics... driven by events rather than a sense of the Council being in control of its own destiny... very internally focussed, obsessed with itself, with its own processes and bureaucracy... silo mentality... central control-freakery... blame culture and bullying...

The most striking aspect of the management style is how bureaucratic it has become as a result of an obsession with the control of inputs and resources since BDR which is then mistaken for a focus on efficiency. This is perhaps inevitable given the lackof a clear vision and strategy which means there are no clear strategic outcomes to focus on. Documents... are widely viewed as being designed to keep either the Government or various Inspectors happy."

Sheesh!

Absolutely, terminally, hopeless!

We clearly need to get out. We need to move right now to a better council - to... I dunno... Barking and Dagenham - according to the Audit Commision, they are a four star council.

Hmm.

Hmm and double hmm.

The thing is, all local councils are bureaucratic. We surely all know that. And they can all appear arrogant and remote. And they all seem to lack vision and direction. That's just the way it is when they're accountable to the commissars in Whitehall rather than to their local taxpayers.

In fact, because it gets so little funding from Whitehall, Surrey CC is probably rather more accountable to its council taxpayers than many other councils.

And how come the Audit Commission rated Surrey as a three star council last year but only one star this? What changed so quickly? Are we saying last year's assessment was wrong? In which case, why should this year's be any righter?

What changed of course was the Baby P case, and the panic knee-jerk reaction in Whitehall. Once Baby P had died... no, once the public reaction to Baby P's awful death had impacted on our national politicos, then the hunt was on for any council that wasn't ticking all the child protection boxes precisely as specified. And Surrey fell into that category.

We've said it before, but let's say it again: these Audit Commission reports aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Just remember that Haringey Council itself was rate three-star even as Baby P was dying.

We're no particular fan of Surrey CC. But the truth is that most residents think it does a perfectly steady middle-of-the-road type job. School results are above the national average, social services seem no worse than elsewhere, and the potholes in the road aren't noticeably bad.

Sure, Council Tax is ridiculously high, but we know that's largely down to our Labour government. Nobody gets too excited about the Council itself one way or the other (although from the remoteness perspective, it might be nice if it moved County Hall into the county, rather than sitting in the London Borough of Kingston).

But the Audit Commission's report is nothing to do with what we think. After all, we're only the Council Tax payers.

What it really comes down to is that, although the average Surrey resident gets a reasonable - if expensive - service from the County Council, the Commissars reckon "vulnerable children" may not. And since "vulnerable children" are this year's hot button, the Commissars are giving that priority over everything else - including value for money (where they actually think Surrey does quite well).

Like we've said from the start, local democracy and localism will never work as long as the Commissars hold the purse strings.

PS The Audit Commission costs us £210m pa and has c2000 employees. It should be drastically downsized. We should strip it of all the "quality improvement" functions it picked up under Labour, and return it back to its original (and cheaper) simple audit functions. Another contribution to George's list.

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