'Radical thinking' is needed to address council funding gaps

Simon Danczuk, Rochdale MP

Simon Danczuk, MP for Rochdale says 'radical thinking' is needed to address council funding gaps.

Simon Parker, Alex Thomson and James Plunkett make some excellent proposals in attempting to fill the estimated £16.5bn local government funding gap that’s expected by 2020.

I certainly agree that we should be involving local people more in deciding what should be cut, embracing technology, integrating health and social care and looking at a shift towards more community budgeting.

They rightly pointed out that sharing back office functions and managing demand more effectively, whilst important, won’t be enough to fill the gap. However I believe think tank wonkery will only get us so far; we need one or two big ideas.

It is my belief that local government needs to radically re-invent itself. It is not simply a matter of doing more with less, we need to look at doing things completely differently.

One idea is for local authorities to become ‘enablers’ not just deliverers or procurers. Just as most of us baulk at too much national state intervention, so we should also baulk at too much local state intervention.

I suspect there are departments or teams in a good number of authorities that are already acting as effective enablers but this approach needs to become the rule rather than the exception.

Councils need to help others deliver what we’d traditionally consider council services. That means supporting local charities to run local services. It also means encouraging more people to volunteer to deliver services.

Let’s pick a winter example. Every year in Rochdale the council puts out grit bins. There are never enough to go round and bins and grit often get stolen meaning that local residents always rightly complain. It has almost become a seasonal tradition.

Why don’t the council – and I suspect it’s done elsewhere – recruit ‘snow wardens’ for certain streets? Why don’t they ask for residents to site some grit bins in their gardens, or fixed to their walls, where they’ll take responsibility for them? The council needs to encourage ownership of the issue – that’s what a truly enabling authority would do.

Another example would be authorities providing activities for those currently unemployed. There is enough remedial work, enough cleaning and public realm enhancement required for councils, in partnership with the local DWP, to have those out of work putting in a few days a week to improve their neighbourhoods. An enabling authority would create imaginative opportunities which have a number of positive outcomes.

Councils should also take the lead on making big projects happen locally, something that many councils have been successful at doing. For example, they should lead on establishing local energy cooperatives, owned by local people, which focus on wind or solar power, or even fracking. An enabling authority would relish the opportunity to develop solutions to big local problems.

Obviously, there would need to be changes to the old style employer-employee relationships. There would need to be more entrepreneurial skills developed within local government – though many social entrepreneurs already operate very successfully within councils – and authorities would need to be much more fleet of foot. It is a wholesale change in the way local government is done. What I am proposing is a vision of local government not as something which is ‘done to’ local people, but as a space where people, businesses and organisations from the local community can come together to work for the enhancement of their area. It is this kind of radical thinking about local government that is needed if we’re to mind the funding gap.

Simon Danczuk, Communities and Local Government Select Committee member and MP for Rochdale