English local government is unstable, under-funded, disempowered and unscrutinised. These problems have been gradually mounting for decades and the resulting crisis was the subject of a fresh focus at a seminar at CURDS, Newcastle University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, this week. Local government, in the words of one speaker, is no longer local and no longer government.
While there was certainly a shared concern over the current state of local government at the “Local Democracy in Crisis?” event, it would be over-simplistic to suggest that these was a consensus over its nature, causes and remedies. The analysis that follows is therefore this writer’s own.
Instability
Local government has been chronically unstable for at least 50 years. It was Ted Heath’s Conservative government that swept away a host of small councils in England’s main conurbations in 1974 and replaced them with six metropolitan county councils, including Tyne & Wear, and a number of metropolitan districts, of which five are in Tyne & Wear.
Only 12 years later another Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher abolished the metropolitan county councils again, along with the Greater London Council, because she thought they were hotbeds of socialism, which at least some of them were, though in a perfectly democratic and mainly politely restrained manner.
But that was only the start. The metropolitan county councils had been responsible, among other things, for economic development. Somebody had to do it, and there followed in succession over the next three decades urban development corporations, regional development agencies, local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), combined authorities and business boards.
Government offices for the regions came and went. In fact there is no longer even a consistent definition of what the North East as a region is after Tees Valley was hived off in 2010 to form its own LEP and then its own combined authority with its own mayor.
All this disruptive upheaval has happened because local governance has no constitutional safeguard. Parliament, which is supreme, can create and abolish subordinate bodies at will and, as we have seen, is not hesitant to do so.
Underfunded, disempowered
Historically, money has probably always been tight for local authorities. But it was under a Labour government that then Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland famously told councils in 1975 that “the party’s over.” As is often forgotten, he added the caveat that what we now call austerity would be for the time being at least. But it has turned out to be long-lasting. Since 2012 the government has set national limits on the amount of council tax that local authorities can raise. No doubt Labour will claim that better times are coming; we’ll see.
Be that as it may, at the moment, by the time they have paid for adult and children’s social care, councils have only 48% of their revenue budgets left to cover everything else, from potholes to bin collection.
An increasing number are not even able to meet their statutory responsibilities and have to issue Section 114 notices, effectively declaring themselves bankrupt. Between 2018 and 2023 seven councils – Nottingham, Birmingham, Woking, Thurrock, Croydon, Slough and Northamptonshire – issued Section 114 notices, some of them more than once. Some observers, including at CURDS, expect many more to follow.
Underfunding in itself inevitably restricts what councils can do, but some powers have been formally lost as well. A 2021 report from the Local Government Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, found that local authority powers had been steadily eroded over four decades.
The big loss has been public transport. Councils in places like Newcastle and Sunderland once ran trams and buses, and as late as the 1980s Tyne & Wear regulated the buses. The council was thus able to ensure that bus services were integrated with the Metro.
The Thatcher government put an end to that by deregulating the bus companies, but now metro mayors and combined authorities led by Greater Manchester and followed by the North East, among others, are winning back control though bus franchising. It is a rare example of local government being able to reassert itself by taking over a significant new power after 40 years.
Unscrutinised
Two other significant factors, among others, which have contributed to the crisis of local democracy over the past two-three decades have been firstly the catastrophic decline of regional newspapers and their ability to subject local authorities to external scrutiny, and secondly the failure of the overview and scrutiny (O&S) system introduced into local councils in the Local Government Act passed by Tony Blair’s government in 2000 to subject council leaderships to effective internal democratic scrutiny. Let’s consider them one at a time.
When I left the regional newspaper sector in 1992 after 28 years the daily circulations of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and the Evening Gazette on Teesside, the last two papers I worked on, were still over 120,000 and 70,000 respectively. These were all paid-for printed copies.
In the first half of this year, according to UK Press Gazette, those figures were 6,430 and 4,245. It’s the same story all over the country. More than half of regional titles now have circulations below 5,000. The largest circulations in the UK are in Belfast and Aberdeen.
Digital editions do little to relieve this bleak picture. Regional dailies in England generally have only a few hundred online subscribers.
The crippling loss of circulation revenue that goes with this decline has been accompanied by an inevitable debilitating fall in advertising revenue. Advertising revenue at regional papers owned by Reach, for example – the company including the Chronicle, Journal and Sunday Sun – fell from £444mn in 2007, just before the financial crash, to £300mn in 2022.
At the same time as regional newspapers were haemorrhaging revenue they were not surprisingly shedding staff, including journalists. The number of journalists employed by Reach’s regional titles fell from an estimated 2,000 to 1,500. It was a similar story at Newsquest, owners of the Northern Echo.
As late as the 1980s, to my personal knowledge, the Chronicle, for example, had around a dozen general news reporters at its head office just off the Bigg Marget as well as specialists in industry, education, health, culture, crime, the courts and, of course, local government and politics. And there was a whole features department of talented writers, a sports desk with reporters whose names were known to every fan in the region, and an unsung but essential team of sub-editors. Then there were reporters based in about ten offices around the region and even a small team in Parliament. The Journal had a similar staff, though somewhat smaller, and the Chronicle and Journal editorial teams competed fiercely with each other as well as other media to be first with the news, which kept them on their toes.
No one in a position of power or authority anywhere in the North East at that time could complacently expect their actions to go unscrutinised by the Chronicle, Journal, Sunday Sun or other local paper. Reporters had the time to build the contacts needed to discover what was going on behind the scenes and reveal the stories the authorities would have preferred to remain hidden.
But Thomson House, home to hundreds of staff not just in editorial but also advertising, production and distribution, closed in 2018. Those remaining moved to offices in Eldon Square shopping centre. Whether even that remains today I don’t know, for those wishing to make contact are, as with so many businesses, encouraged to go online, where the personal contact that generates so much news is impossible.
The dismantling of the journalistic infrastructure was accompanied by the decommissioning of the linotype machines, printing presses and other equipment that enabled newspaper production in the days of hot metal – which, to be fair, was neither here nor there except as a matter of sad nostalgia who for those who had grown up with it.
The few thousand copies of the papers that can still be found on the shelves of supermarkets and elsewhere still provide some local news, notably sports and business coverage. Local government and regional politics also still have a place but it is provided not by the papers’ own staff but mainly by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
Local Democracy Reporting Service
The LDRS is a partnership network of 165 reporters throughout the UK covering what its name implies. It is funded by the BBC as part of its current Charter commitment and its stories are available to more than 1,000 media titles and news outlets that have joined the Local News Partnership scheme. Those wishing to join are vetted by the BBC against criteria including financial standing and track record of relevant journalism.
The scheme seems to work well as far as it goes, at least in the North East, with a regular stream of good-quality stories appearing in the Chronicle and other papers. Along with business and sport it is the backbone of their editorial content. But it lacks the edge of competition and, worst of all, there has to be a nagging doubt over its funding. What happens if and when the BBC withdraws support for any reason?
New local media
Bylines
In the face of this disaster for local news, some professional journalists are trying to establish a foothold for traditional reporting in the online world and are being joined by enthusiasts taking the opportunity to introduce new voices that previously went unheard. The Mill, a Manchester online newspaper, has been among the leaders, along with the Bylines Network, which has several regional editions, including North East Bylines as well as national outlets such as Byline Times, and Byline TV.
North East Bylines is free online and provides both news and a good deal of freedom for its mainly citizen journalists to write about their topics of interest. These citizen journalists, while not fully professional, have to undergo basic legal training. It is fair to say, I think, that while Bylines is not tied to any single political party, it is generally left-leaning and, in particular, anti-Brexit. Dr Mike Galsworthy is both executive director of the Bylines Network and chair of the European Movement UK.
The QT
The QT was launched last year by a former editor of The Journal and a paid staff of journalists. Aimed at a North East readership, it said of itself: “Independent and politically neutral, we will offer issued-led campaigning news, features and commentary that is free from political spin, media bias and social media toxicity.”
Published weekly and available for a monthly subscription of £7.99, it lasted for just 24 editions. The editor said at the time of its closure this year that The QT’s business model should not be seen as a failure just because it had stopped publishing after six months with a scaled-back structure. The market research showed that there were enough people in the region willing to pay a couple of quid a week for quality, trusted journalism, he said; it just didn’t reach enough of them in time.
Cultured North East
Cultured North East is a weekly online subscription newsletter which describes itself as “championing, celebrating and surveying the rich landscape of arts and culture which makes the North East of England a better place to be.” It contains extensive listings as well as news, features and reviews. Founded and run by a couple of professionals formerly with the Chronicle & Journal, it asks its subscribers, who it claims number 3,000, to pledge £5 a month or £50 a year. But they are not charged unless they enable payment.
There are other, more established news magazines in the culture sector in the North East, notably The Crack, a free print and online publications that has been in production since 1985.
Overview and Scrutiny
Turning from external to internal scrutiny of local governance, the weakness of the overview and scrutiny (O&S) system in holding council leaders, mayors and cabinets to account by backbench councillors became evident to students of local government as long ago as 2004.
Professor Gerry Stoker and others found that the use made by backbenchers on O&S committees of their power to call in decisions for review could depend on council politics. If the parties were closely matched and competition fierce the call-in powers would tend to be exercised frequently and used for point-scoring; if one party had a big majority backbenchers would be more reticent about questioning their own party leadership. Others found that restricting backbenchers to scrutiny rather than empowering them to action was demotivating. This demotivation adds to that already felt by backbench councillors as a result of their disempowerment through underfunding, as discussed above.
These problems of scrutiny and accountability have been gradually accumulating over the past five years and have come to a head this year in the case of Tees Valley and its mayor, Lord Ben Houchen. They were comprehensively exposed by the Tees Valley Review, commissioned by former Communities Secretary Michael Gove, and reported by media led by Private Eye and including North East Bylines. But so far Mayor Houchen carries on much as before.
Teesside Airport
The failure of O&S in Tees Valley was evident as long ago as 2019. “I don’t think we did enough,” one member of TVCA’s O&S committee said after Houchen, a Conservative, drove his manifesto commitment to buy Durham and Tees Valley Airport from its private owners and rename in Teesside International to the apparent delight of his voters but against the wishes of his whole cabinet, made up of the leaders TVCA’s five constituent local authorities, all Labour.
Houchen outmanoeuvred both the cabinet and the O&S committee over the airport purchase. The committee followed this failure even more abjectly with two inquorate meetings in early 2019, leaving a report on diversity unscrutinised. Then, at its first quorate meeting for six months it called in a decision to amend the TVCA constitution to restrict its own powers without, it said, consultation. Yet a week later, when a special meeting was held to discuss this important matter, there was once again no quorum and the changes went through by default.
Teesworks
But worse, much worse, was to come. In August 2017 South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) had been created to lead the regeneration of the site of the former SSI steelworks, Britain’s biggest brownfield regeneration project. The mayor took the chair, as he did of two more development corporations covering the centres of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool. Teesworks was in turn set up by STDC in partnership with two local businessmen to carry out the work.
At a critical meeting in September 2021 the O&S committee was told by the TVCA monitoring (legal) officer that it had no authority to scrutinise the work of the STDC, even though TVCA provides funding for it.
“Whilst the remit [of the committee] extends to the decisions of the Combined Authority including the decisions in relation to funding given by the Combined Authority,” he said in a written report, “…the O&SC’s reach ends with the Combined Authority’s decisions and does not extend inside some of the principal funding recipients such as the STDC and Teesside International Airport.”
This powerlessness, which has since been challenged by independent legal advisers, left STDC free to hand over without scrutiny a 90% stake in the Teesworks project, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, to the two local businessmen. In 2023 it led to Gove’s independent Tees Valley Review, which reported early this year that although it had found no evidence of corruption it had found that “there are issues of governance and transparency that need to be addressed and a number of decisions taken by the bodies involved do not meet the standards expected when managing public funds.”
The Tees Valley Review has been extensively reported in North East Bylines and elsewhere and its repercussions are still felt. But if Mayor Houchen is among those feeling the effects of this scrutiny, he is keeping it well hidden, carrying on blithely in his boosterish way. So much for overview and scrutiny.
Conclusion
We have seen how local government in England has been destabilised and underfunded over the past 50 years and how both external and internal scrutiny have been weakened over the past two decades. What is the answer?
This article is diagnostic, not prescriptive. A comprehensive response to the problems discussed is for another time. Briefly though:
Back to the future is rarely a solution to anything, but there is no doubt that England needs less centralised government and something more like the local and/or regional government of the 1970s, before Anthony Crosland told big-spending councils “the party’s over” and Thatcher abolished the metropolitan county councils.
That means local government needs significantly more funding, though where the money should come from – government grants and/or local/regional taxation – will be fiercely contested.
It does not mean going back to the urban and rural district councils that were abolished in 1974. Action at neighbourhood, community or parish level can be very effective in providing very localised facilities, such as libraries; it is not, however, an answer to the provision of major public services like transport or infrastructure like rail, roads, housing and economic development. In these cases bigger is, up to a point, better.
The government is committed through the Labour Party Manifesto to deepening and widening devolution, bringing combined authorities and elected mayors to much more, perhaps all, of England. According to the Manifesto:
“Towns and cities will be able to take hold of the tools they need to pursue growth, create jobs, and improve living standards. Local areas will be able to gain new powers over transport, adult education and skills, housing and planning, and employment support. We will ensure those places have the strong governance arrangements, capacity, and capability to deliver, providing central support where needed.”
That is welcome, provided the reference to “strong governance arrangements” is fulfilled. That means improving and strengthening the O&S system to ensure there are no more Tees Valleys.
More powerful regional government would also, I hope, prod regional media back into professional, independent-minded, non-deferential and investigative life in some form or another, whether in print or, more probably, online. Somehow in this world of fragmented media, building on the work of the likes of the Bylines Network, it needs to become financially self-sustaining and not dependent for funding for an important segment of its output on the BBC, which instead should be a vigorous competitor in a healthy news marketplace.
