Katie Lam is the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the MP for Weald of Kent.
Last week, the Government announced a pause on their plans to reorganise local councils.
Under their plans, the two-tier system of local councils in England would come to an end. All county councils and district councils would be abolished, and would instead be replaced by new ‘unitary’ councils, responsible for all local services. That includes transport, social care, education, social housing allocation, planning decisions, and bin collections.
People will have different views on how best to organise local government across the country, and in their own areas. The services that councils provide are usually the way that people engage most directly with the state, in their day-to-day lives.
And, given that almost everybody pays council tax, we all have an interest in those services being provided in the way that makes the most sense.
So you’d expect that, when the Government started this process of reorganising council areas, they’d do so carefully, with the public’s wishes in mind, and without political bias.
But in fact, this pause is just the latest embarrassing example of the incompetence which has governed the process from start to finish.
From the outset, ministers have ignored local opposition to their proposed boundaries. They’ve repeatedly refused to publish the guidance which informed their plans, or the legal advice that they’ve taken along the way. In other words, they’ve tried to impose new council boundaries on people, without explaining why they’re doing it.
That’s because, far from being politically impartial, Labour have tried to draw council boundaries in the most politically convenient way for themselves, creating new areas in a way designed to ensure that people end up with a Labour council whether or not they want one.
It’s no wonder that, when announcing the pause, Angela Rayner referred to the “legal advice” which had prompted her to do so.
When the new boundaries were finally announced, just before Parliament’s summer break, I was one of more than a hundred MPs who were given no warning whatsoever.
We were told that this was the result of an “admin error”. We were given 45 minutes’ notice to join a video call, which was supposed to be “an opportunity to hear from a minister about these changes”.
And having been given just 45 minutes’ notice, the call itself lasted just 15 minutes.
The minister took no questions. Instead, they listed off the changes that the Government had already announced, and then ended the call. We were told that, if we wanted answers, we could write to the department.
And if that weren’t bad enough, this pause will mean that, for many councils, millions of pounds have been spent on preparing for the transition to the new boundaries – which may not, in fact, ever come to pass. That completely pointless expense comes at a time when many councils across the country are struggling to cover their costs, particularly in light of the funding cuts that have come as part of the Government’s so-called ‘Fair Funding Formula’.
For all of his talk of putting power into the hands of the public, Andy Burnham clearly believes in anything but. His devolution agenda has nothing to do with giving people control over their own lives, or over their local areas. It’s an ideological project, designed to force tax rises on people who don’t want them, and to draw political boundaries in a way that advantages the Labour Party.
What else are we supposed to conclude when, start to finish, Labour’s reorganisation of local government has been such a farce?
And if all that weren’t bad enough, everything that we know about Burnham’s so-called ‘devolution agenda’ points towards more of the same. In places where people have voted for lower council tax, he’s cutting funding, so that those councils are forced to put taxes up anyway. His plans for new local mayors will allow them to raise your taxes, but never to reduce them.
For Burnham and for Labour, local government isn’t about giving people choice over how their local area is run, and it isn’t about providing local services either. It’s just another forum for the high-tax, low-accountability politics which informs everything that this Labour Government has done since coming to power.