A group of Wiltshire councillors who were reviewing the likely effects of the Council’s shrinking budget have acknowledged Wiltshire Council will soon be unable to provide many of the non-mandatory services. And the group have questioned the feasibility of area boards taking over the running of such local services without changes to their structure.
But were their recommendations radical enough?
Wiltshire’s area board system was set-up in 2009 to give local communities some standing as the district councils were abolished and the county became the unitary authority we know as Wiltshire Council. There are 18 area boards across the county.
The Council’s cabinet member responsible for area boards, Jonathon Seed has been reviewing their development and a task group under the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee has also had its say.
And without ado they have roundly criticised Councillor Seed for not consulting town and parish councillors during his review.
Their own review of the area board system has provided a bleak glimpse into the future of local government and governance across Wiltshire.
In his evidence to the task group, Councillor Seed emphasised “how reduced local government funding requires a major shift in the relationship between the Council and local communities if current services are to be maintained.”
The task group’s report gives Councillor Seed’s views in their own words: “Reducing funding [from central government] means that the Council will be decreasingly able to provide non-statutory services directly and communities will increasingly need to do more for themselves, initially with the Council’s support.” [Mark that word “initially”.]
“To some extent, the Council’s role will move from being a provider of services to an enabler of communities to meet their own needs through greater harnessing of social capital (e.g. volunteers and community-based organisations) and better co-ordination of resources at a local level.”
For this analysis it is necessary to accept that both the coalition government’s austerity policy and Wiltshire Council’s decision not to raise council tax provides the base line from which we must start.
Agreeing with Councillor Seed’s general analysis, the task group’s members have decided the answer does lie in “increasing local responsibility, accountability and autonomy”.
The task group has come up with twelve recommendations which they want Councillor Seed to implement. These include:
• Making it clear that the basis is communities telling area boards what they need rather than area boards “dictating what the voluntary sector does”.
• Detailing “how performance across the county will be ensured and the risks of a ‘postcode lottery’ mitigated as further services and budgets [sic] are devolved to be managed at a local level.”
• Explaining how the Council will “attract, train, support and coordinate community leaders and volunteers in sufficient numbers to meet the challenges of requiring communities to do more for themselves”
• Review the rules on how area boards can allocate grants: “As the bodies with the greatest understanding of local needs, area boards should be given maximum freedom over how they can spend their grants and this freedom should be made explicit.”
These are only the task group’s recommendations. The Cabinet will be considering (April 22) Councillor Seeds own action plan.
The task group’s list of recommendations imply a re-think of how area boards will have to function as Wiltshire Council budgets tighten, but the task group avoids tackling the way area boards are constituted, who sits on them and who votes.
The group certainly foresees the area boards undertaking much more work. This will, they acknowledge, require more management and secretarial assistance. But will the Wiltshire Councillors who make up the area boards be able to cope? Should they be allowed to try to cope?
Two of the Wiltshire Councillors on the Marlborough Area Board (MAB) are also Marlborough town councillors. Will they be able to attend all the extra meetings and sub-committees the newly empowered area boards will require?
Another more controversial area will be the conflict of interests between their duty to the town and to the wider area.
They will undoubtedly say changing hats is simple to achieve and Chinese walls are fool proof. But it is most important that they are not perceived by the public to have conflicts of responsibility and interest.
MAB has witnessed one blatant attempt by a Councillor to favour his own bid for money for a scheme he proposed – to the detriment of other perfectly valid applicants. Something that the then Chairman nodded through without a murmur of criticism and put off one Marlborough area volunteer from ever attending the area board again.
There will in future, as area boards assume greater local responsibilities concerning services which affect greater and greater proportions of the population, be the need for closer scrutiny of how decisions are taken over the use of public money and the time of publicly paid officers.
The recent controversy over MAB’s £5,000 grant to the Chamber of Commerce for the town’s CCTV project illustrates the dangers of current governance and voting regimes.
A ‘show of hands’ was seen by some people as being the final ‘democratic decision’ against the grant. The meeting could, of course, have been packed with supporters of the project – or by those against it. Perhaps it was.
The grants are and always have been voted on only by the four democratically elected Wiltshire Councillors on the board – even those claiming ‘democracy’ had been flouted knew that.
One thing is clear: those attending Area Board meetings are a self-selected group of people and cannot ever be considered as representative of the area’s whole population.
If you do not like the rules, try and do something to change them. And that sort of involvement will become critical when area boards have to assume much more responsibility than they were originally set-up to bear.
How did the task group approach these problems of governance? They emphasised the need for “A focus on maintaining clear and transparent lines of accountability and influence.”
And they went on: “The task group have specific concerns that specific interest groups can have a disproportionate voice, particularly in comparison with town and parish councils who are the only democratically accountable bodies the area boards deal with. This will need to be considered further.”
It may well be that this ‘further consideration’ should involve a far more radical approach to the area board regime.
Should area boards remain committees of Wiltshire Council when their main role in the future will be more concerned with voluntary and sponsored local services than acting as an arm of County Hall?
With their new responsibilities, they could become independent social enterprises and still attract organisational support and funding from the Council.
If the emphasis is to be on very local services, it would make perfect sense to widen membership of the boards to include, in rotation, chairmen or elected representatives from among the elected (not co-opted) parish and town councillors – people who would not also be unitary councillors.
Another ‘governance tool’ could be the introduction of an independent chairman – perhaps even from beyond the community area’s boundary – to act as an umpire.
The task group was anxious that the devolution of services could produce a post code lottery of varying standards.
The obverse of this fear is the fact that one cap may not fit all community areas. For example the number of Wiltshire Councillors sitting and voting on each area board does, of course, vary.
Community areas with more people to be democratically represented obviously have more councillors – these are, of course, the more urban areas.
So Trowbridge’s AB has nine Councillors, Salisbury’s has eight. Pewsey and Tidworth have three each on their area boards. And Marlborough, Malmesbury and Corsham have four each on theirs.
Some of those area boards with the lowest number of Councillors have a far greater geographical area to cover and will have a more complex task of supplying services across their patch.
One point raised in MNO’s discussions with parish councillors in the area involves what might be called the “Campus syndrome”. Wiltshire Council’s campus policy targets large sums of money and Council effort at the towns at the heart of the 18 community areas.
This apparently – and understandably – leaves some of the larger outlying villages which see themselves as community centres in their own right, feeling decidedly short-changed and left out.
The review did consider how the increased load on area boards might affect the balance of powers: “The task group considered the risk that devolving services to area boards mean effectively re-creating the district council.”
But they concluded that “Wiltshire’s new community model is a unitary model with delineation between local and strategic responsibilities and delivery.” This begs the question whether that delineation can or should continue once the transfer of responsibilities to local communities via area boards is underway.
The basic dilemma is whether the current governance regime will be fit for the boards’ new purposes. And, while considering that, questioning whether it may not even be so for the area boards’ present purposes.
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In their first five years Area Boards do not appear to have made much impact on the public. Unsurprisingly, not all of the 18 boards have developed in the same way – some have a better relationship with their public than others. This is the elephant in the room and poses a problem that seems endemic to local government at all levels: how to interest the public in the way decisions that affect them are reached. MAB generally has poor attendances at its meetings. For some meetings less than half the Marlborough Community Area’s 16 parishes have been represented. Usually the members of the public attending meetings are mostly those applying for grants and their supporters. In replying to the task group’s questions, Councillor Seed said: “The delegation of services in the future will be accompanied by a communications plan to ensure that we continue to raise awareness and encourage greater engagement.” That is an elephant-sized task. |
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