Matthew Scott is the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent.
Government reform programmes will leave our citizens further away from power and decision-making. Across multiple strands of government, local involvement in democracy is being peeled away in favour of larger and less accountable bodies.
In policing, they are scrapping locally-elected Police and Crime Commissioners, whilst at the same time proposing a merger of policing that could see as few as twelve mega-forces created. In the South East, that could mean policing decisions in Portsmouth, Milton Keynes and Dover all being made by the same Chief Constable. All of this would be underpinned by a more operational National Centre of Policing. Yet there is no objective evidence that bigger means better.
How they will be held to account is crucial, but their plans for local governance have become confused and convoluted. On the one hand, where Mayors won’t exist, they announced that they would create unelected Police and Crime Boards, with appointed Police and Crime Lead Members. Very shortly after, plans for the mega-forces were briefed to the media, with the suggestion that they could be directly accountable to the Home Secretary.
The Police Reform White Paper will need to address this two-tier approach to policing governance, as there has been no evidence to date that this style of system will work in England and Wales, beyond comparisons to the Netherlands.
If there is no real democratic oversight, no one is accountable for how much council tax you pay. It will be harder for neighbourhoods to elicit a response when they are suffering crime and antisocial behaviour. At present, PCCs are public facing and deal with the public on a daily basis. Under these plans, policing will not be.
Policing is not the only area where democracy and accountability is being reduced. Local Government Reform will see scores of councils abolished.
In their essay titled Reorganisation, local government and the future of English Devolution, Colin Copus and Steve Leach argue that because Local Government Reform will see thousands of councillors abolished, those remaining will be subject to increased workloads and insufficient support to manage. This could, in turn, lead to challenges around trust in elected representatives if they are not able to support the public in the way in which they have been able to at a more local level.
Centrally imposed targets for new housing will place further burdens on councillors, with an expectation that said councillors are across every strand of detail on their local plans, planning applications and appeals. Whilst at the same time, their planning reforms give councillors less ability to block inappropriate developments and protect green spaces. This will put them at odds with their electorate and leave them on the back foot with planning scrutiny, whilst dealing with all of the new responsibilities they have.
And that’s after the delay of local elections for millions of people.
Across the public sector, government is moving towards centralisation and standardisation. Schools reforms will remove some of the vital freedoms that Conservatives gave to Academies to vary pay and teaching of the national curriculum. Health reforms abolish NHS England and brings it under the direct control of the Department for Health and Social Care. Devolution and the creation of new Mayoralities in Essex, Hampshire, Sussex, Norfolk and Suffolk have all been delayed. And the Ministry of Justice is considering removing trial by jury in a significant number of cases.
Core conservative principles of freedom, fairness and opportunity will be stifled by larger and less accountable public sector behemoths.
Never has trust in politics and democracy been needed more. What we are getting is the end of localism.