Local government in England has already become more presidential in form and style, with relatively little debate about the shift in governance from what was once more parliamentary than Parliament itself to an extreme form of presidentialism. This trend is about to be turbo-charged by new reforms being introduced by the Labour Government.
There are currently 317 local authorities in England. Most are so-called unitary authorities, carrying out all local government functions. Some remain two-tier councils with split functions between upper-tier country councils and lower-tier district or borough councils.
The average size of a council is about 170,000 people, but there is large variation. The smallest (Isles of Scilly) has a population 2,281 whilst the largest (Kent County Council – an upper tier county council) has about 1.6 million people.
English councils are already on average roughly three times the size of their European equivalents. But they are about to become much bigger. The Government wants all councils to become unitary’s with a population size of 500,000 or higher. On a very rough estimate that would reduce the number of councils from 317 to around 112.
But the proposed reforms go much further.
Firstly, these new larger councils will have to conform to new governance structures imposed by Whitehall. At the moment councils can have one of three internal governance arrangements.
- One is directly elected executive mayors with a cabinet and scrutiny committees system. There are less than a dozen of these left.
- The second, government preferred and currently dominant model, is the leader, cabinet and scrutiny committees model. Very similar to the Parliament-Government model.
- The third system is the old local government model where there is a leader but no cabinet. Instead each function is run by a committee of elected members drawn from all political parties represented on the council who in turn report to the whole council.
This latter system is due to be abolished by central government. But not, interestingly, the remaining directly elected Mayors. In fact, here the Government proposes to massively increase the role and number of directly elected executive mayors for all but the largest local authorities.
The Government proposes to create what is in effect a new ‘upper tier’ of local government with the extension of “strategic authorities” or “mayoral strategic authorities” to most of England.
Figure 1
There are currently 14 such strategic authorities in England and a further 7 areas have been identified as ‘priorities’. If the system is extended to all or most of England the total number of strategic authorities and Mayors would probably grow to between 35-45.
Figure 1 illustrates how the Government sees this system working whilst Figure 2 shows the existing and prioritised Mayoral Strategic Authorities.
Figure 2
PARLIAMENTARY OR PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNANCE?
What we are seeing in English local government is an accelerating change from what was historically a parliamentary form of governance, mirroring but not the same as national governance, to a far more presidential form.
The debate about Parliamentary versus Presidential forms of government is of course not new. Arend Lijphart, for example, in his seminal edited collection Parliamentary versus Presidential Government distinguishes two main types of government – single person executive independent of a legislature (Presidential) and a collegial executive dependent of the legislature (Parliamentary). While there are quite a few hybrids, most states in his analysis fall into these two camps – with the USA as the arch-type of the presidential form and the UK of the parliamentary.
In the modern era, debates on the merits and demerits of these systems have mainly focussed on national or state level governance – as in Lijphart’s classic collection. Much less attention has been paid to the fact that whatever the national form of governance is, it tends to be replicated fairly closely in lower tiers. In both the USA and UK, local government has tended to be run on similar lines to national government.
This was certainly the case in the UK. Representative local councillors (instead of MPs) were elected by geographical area wards (instead of constituencies) and formed a council (instead of a Parliament). Which in turn appointed councillors to various roles to run the council.
Old-style local councils were in some ways more parliamentary than Parliament. At Westminster, a majority faction (usually of one party) runs the government (Whitehall). In committee-style local government, all political parties participated in running the council and its services through whole council meetings, a committee system that oversaw individual services (social services, housing, recreation, transport, etc). This is the system the Government is now seeking eliminate entirely. At a national level, this would be the equivalent of select committees in the House of Commons actually running Whitehall departments, instead of merely scrutinising them!
The idea of more presidential style local government has been around for three decades and was first enacted by the New Labour after 1997. The new directly elected executive mayor and Greater London Authority system was very different from the old GLC (Greater London Council), abolished by Margaret Thatcher, where the leader was elected by councillors. Although the last leader of GLC and the first directly elected mayor was the same person – Ken Livingstone. The new Mayor began his acceptance speech with memorable line “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago”.
The extension of directly elected executive mayors to other urban areas like Manchester, Birmingham, proceeded slowly. As did the expansion of directly elected mayors in single local authority areas, where only a small minority opted for mayors. Now, almost all of local government in England is being pushed rapidly towards a (strategic) mayoral system. How this works with non-mayoral local authorities below them, and a still Parliamentary governance system above them, remains to be seen.
Colin Talbot.
Colin is Emeritus Professor of Government, University of Manchester. He also has relationships with the Cambridge Judge Business School and the Federal Trust. Colin has worked extensively with all levels of British government and public services, including being an advisor to two House of Commons Select Committees and appearing as an expert witness over two dozen times in both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Assembly. He has also advised more than a dozen other governments, from the USA to Japan.
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