mudhook

As we slither towards unitary local government I should like to record in this post the historic council tax in Cornwall and its districts. The full details are given here. I have worked out the percentage rises over the eleven years from 1997/98 to 2007/08 for a band D property, excluding parish council tax and that is what I have put here.

Cornwall county council 99 percent increase

Caradon district council 97

Carrick district council 78

Kerrier district council 77

Penwith district council 47

North Cornwall district council 75

Restormel district council 97

Devon and Cornwall police authority 164

ENGLAND (all councils etc) 92

The typical band D council tax in Cornwall in 2007/08 ranged from £1263 to £1322, which is £24-25 a week. People living in these areas over the past decade will judge for themselves whether they have had value for money.

What sort of increases can we expect from a unitary council? More county than Penwith, I expect. The government will probably have to keep capping the rises in council tax.

Of course, we have been promised - well, I’m not sure it is an encashable and enforceable promise, more an aspiratory promise, I expect it’ll turn out to be - that moving to a unitary council “will save more than £17 million of Cornish tax payers’ money a year.” That’s a lot of bottled water or a cut in council tax. Hmm, difficult choice.

NOTE
The link to the data does not always work. The url is http://www.local.communities.gov.uk/finance/ctax/data/ctaxtimes.xls

The order to implement the unitary council in Cornwall passed on 7 February 2008 and it is now full steam ahead. You can read the debate here. A previous post is here.

The Liberal Democrats made their usual nationalist-lite points about Cornwall unitary council needing more powers than the government is giving: the minister repeated that there were “no specific additional powers” for the unitary council in the order but added vaguely to the effect that tomorrow was another day. Four of the MPs supported the order; Andrew George opposed it chiefly because, if I understood his argument right, it did not give or promise enough devolution. The Conservatives pointed out that the various polls in Cornwall showed most voting people there against the county council’s successful proposals and that only thirty two of the eighty two county councillors voted for them; the Libdems had no convincing answer to this arithmetic.

The minister said he approved the proposals because they were viable and support in Cornwall for the proposals was “sufficiently broad” which seems to give a very broad meaning to ‘broad support.’ He added of the government’s criteria for successful unitary proposals , “Our criteria of support are not, and never have been, related to whether a majority of stakeholders, local citizens, or any other interest group were in favour of the proposal.” That is clear: it means people’s views and votes don’t count much. On this official Labour and Liberal Democrat opinion seem at one.

It would be good to hear the parties explore their ideas around this sort of situation: what are the guiding principles when people and MPs/ministers disagree over a proposed measure, what is the democratic approach and answer?

Anyway, read the debate and decide for yourself.

Of more interest now are the financial claims which I am not able to judge. This is the summary worth remembering around 2011 or 2012; (a) the county figures and (b) Chisholm figures.

The savings to be made from going unitary
(a) £15.4 million a year
(b) £6-£9 million a year

One-off cost of going unitary
(a) £19.3 million
(b) £27.8 million.

“the payback period for the changes will be about two years”: John Healey, the minister in the debate.

If I didn’t have to pay the bill, whatever it is, it would be amusing to sit back and see who’s right.

This is an updated version of the unitary update post of 24 October 2007.

Here is the timetable for a decision on Cornwall moving to a unitary council, as given in the House of Commons on 15 October (Hansard column 862W): first the local government bill has to be passed; after that a decision on Cornwall (and the other unitary candidates) will be taken by the government in late November or early December; then the draft implementation orders will be put before parliament; if they are passed the implementation orders will be made at the end of 2007.

On 5 December 2007 the government said it had decided that Cornwall, and some others, should be a unitary council. The elections to the new Cornwall unitary county council will be in 2009. The name of the new council is still to be decided.

The effect of a judicial review is not apparently included in the above timetable.

The government has decided that Cornwall will have a unitary council.

As I have pointed out in several posts a large majority of people in Cornwall who voted were against the unitary proposals of the county council. Whatever one thinks about how local government in Cornwall should be reorganised, this government decision is impossible to reconcile with the expressed views of people here. It is impossible to reconcile with the government’s own requirement for unitary proposals to succeed as set out in its letter to local authorities of 26 October 2006: “it will be necessary for any proposal to have support from a range of key partners, stakeholders and service users/citizens” (paragraph 3.5). Well, 81 percent of citizens voting against in the district polls is not support. In its approval statement of several unitary proposals the government referred to promised savings and they presumably outweighed any votes. In truth, the government conducted the reorganisation project on the basis of consulting the providers and only nodded unconvincingly to the users, the people, thus abandoning the Thatcher principle of the customer matters.

The government has treated local people with contempt, as people whose views are irrelevant and can be disregarded. This is likely to further alienate some people in Cornwall from government and politics. Why vote, the government always wins; why vote, if most votes are ignored?

The reorganisation of local government in Cornwall is not urgent. It is one of those issues where a big conversation between government and people is appropriate, where government should take time to try to convince people of the sense of a unitary council if they believe that council is the best way forward, take time to talk to people and listen to people, and take time to explore all the arguments. To ride roughshod over people’s views after a few weeks, however much the government may think those views uninformed or unwise, is not going to persuade people that democracy is flourishing. The new council will begin overshadowed by a lack of democratic legitimacy. It is not the people’s choice.

The results of the consultation with people in Cornwall through leaflet and questionnaire by Cornwall county council are now available in a report by PFA, Bodmin on the county council website.

There were 665 unique responses but the leaflet was not delivered to some areas.

The report begins with a warning: “the many and varied responses received on the questionnaire are open to subjective interpretation.” As I explained in this post, perhaps that is what the county council wanted in choosing this sort of consultation rather than a straightforward yes/no vote on their proposals. However, PFA have helpfully produced quantified answers.

On the first question about support for a unitary council if it is financially sound, 49 percent said No and 34 percent said Yes. On the other two questions about more local decision making there were comfortable majorities in support.

Thus, most people – well, 49 percent – opposed the unitary council proposals or the principle of a unitary council.

In its response to the report Cornwall county council does not mention the 49 percent of opponents though it does reproduce the figures, more comfortable for it, of the other two questions.

This isn’t a response; it is the politics of an ostrich.

The county council has put up another response to the unitary issue on its website, a leaflet called Towards one Cornwall . Here it is casually dismissive of the
71 000 people in Cornwall who voted in the district polls. It does not, of course, mention the 49 percent opposed to the unitary council in its own survey; rather it says “the vast majority of people have been confused by the conflicting messages” about the unitary council. Oh come now, voters are well used to conflicting messages in any election and well able to make up their minds. I do not believe the county council would be talking condescendingly like this if the majority had supported the proposals. Perhaps we see here a new Liberal Democrat approach: an end to all elections because the voters get confused.

Of the 81 percent vote in the district polls against the unitary proposals, the county council says it “carefully considered” it and then dismisses it as insignificant. This is shameful.

It really isn’t worth spending any more time on Cornwall county council. It has thoroughly discredited itself through the high-handed way it has handled the unitary issue and the Liberal Democrat party finds itself seriously tainted by all this.

In recent polls around 81 percent of voters in Cornwall opposed the county council’s proposals for a unitary council. In Penwith the figure was a massive 89 percent. See this post.

Nevertheless, the Liberal Democrat county council has decided to persist with its proposals. The five MPs for Cornwall, all Liberal Democrats, supported the original unitary proposals and have supported this decision to persist in the face of vast public rejection. Incidentally, the council’s decision to persist was supported in a vote by only thirty two of the eighty two county councillors.

The MPs have consulted stakeholders in each constituency – people like doctors and school governors. I do not know how many people were consulted and replied, six or sixty or six hundred. I don’t know what questions were asked but I see on one of the websites there is a survey for the public with a series of questions which asked if they supported more decisions being taken locally by “elected Cornish representatives” rather than by “unelected authorities” in the south west region which isn’t the point as people aren’t being asked to decide on an abstract principle but on actual on-the-ground proposals. I assume the stakeholders were asked the same or similar questions by the MPs. If one asks that general question mutatis mutandis anywhere in England one can pretty well guarantee the answer. The MPs got an unsurprising majority Yes vote.

To interpret this as a vote in support of the unitary proposals would be absurd.

An MP should listen to what his or her constituents say and, if consonant with his judgement and principles, accommodate them, but listening does not necessarily mean agreeing. I think if four fifths of constituents, or even nine tenths as in Penwith, take a particular view an MP is still free to stick to his contrary view; indeed it might be seen as his duty to since an MP owes his constituents his judgement not his compliance, but he has also a representative duty to tell the government that most of his constituents disagree with him and to explain to his constituents why he thinks them wrong.

The Liberal Democrat MPs apparently believe that half a loaf is better than none and that a unitary council could lead to many more powers than are on offer at present and a de facto devolved regional assembly for Cornwall – the summa summarum for Liberal Democrats here. I do not share their conviction and for all their trumpeted meetings with the government about this the MPs are not giving guarantees about more powers, but in the long term they might be right. However, this fails to address the seriously unsatisfactory aspects of the current proposals with which we might be lumbered for many a year.

In the meantime, Penwith district council has asked the government whether additional and serious powers will in fact be devolved to a unitary council in Cornwall so we should soon know the answer to that.

To sum up. 81 percent of voters in Cornwall reject the unitary proposals. The county council and five MPs still support the proposals.

In the light of the decisive rejection of the unitary proposals by people in Cornwall, the government cannot credibly go ahead with them. To persist would be to dismiss out of hand people’s views and in a matter of local government that is absurd. The final decision should rest with the people whose local government it is.

Oh, and I expect we shall sooner or later be told by the MPs and the Liberal Democrats generally on some issue or other that the government isn’t listening to people. The Liberal Democrat MPs and Liberal Democrat county council have established - and I agree with them - that to listen to people does not necessarily mean to agree with or to obey, no, not even if it’s nine tenths of people.

The results are in from five popular votes in Cornwall on the county council’s proposals for a unitary council. And in each district there is a decisive vote against.

In North Cornwall district six thousand ballot papers were issued to randomly selected households. Forty percent returned them and 82 percent voted against the unitary proposals.

These results can be read in detail here.

In polls in the four districts of Caradon, Carrick, Kerrier, and Penwith 71 722 people voted and overall 81 percent voted against the unitary proposals. Read the four-council results here.

The most strongly opposed is Penwith (89 percent) and the least Carrick (75 percent).

These are decisive results and the county council should now withdraw its proposals which manifestly do not have the support of people in Cornwall. It would be extraordinary if the government now gave the go-ahead for a Cornwall unitary council.

The Liberal Democrats should rethink their way of doing things. The county council, which they control, lamentably declined to hold a poll of the people of Cornwall. Instead it had a consultation though apparently not all the county consultation leaflets got to people. One wasn’t delivered to me but I read it on the net. I wonder what the results of this consultation will be? Does it matter now?

PS In July the government nevertheless gave approval to the unitary proposals.

There is a possibility of local government reorganisation and limited devolution in Cornwall by way of a unitary council. Two arguments have emerged: Is a unitary council an idea to be taken up? and How do people in Cornwall get a say? I’m here primarily concerned with the latter question.

The case for limited devolution anywhere in England rests on taking power from the central goverment and its appointed or indirectly elected agencies and giving it to the locals; more power to the people who live here rather than in remote Westminster. Locals, the argument goes, the people on the ground here, know best about what is needed and wanted locally and should decide. Indeed, the Labour government in its letter of 26 October 2006 inviting unitary proposals spoke of such proposals needing to “empower local people so that they have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives” (paragraph 3.9.ii). It’s an attractive and persuasive argument though there remains the difficulty of post code lottery and the form of devolution is arguable.

Incidentally, the description of the proposals as a single council for Cornwall is misleading. If I understand them, there will also be additionally at least sixteen community networks (sort of forums/councils) and presumably the present 209 town and parish councils will remain.

Why should people in Cornwall get a vote on the proposals?

Although the government wrongly put the stress on consulting and securing the agreement of “stakeholders and partners” for a unitary council – for example, the fire service but not individual firemen in Cornwall - it also said in its invitation letter that a change to unitary arrangements should have support from a range of people and groups including “service users/citizens” (paragraph 3.5). That means members of the public, and how can their views be discovered except by asking them?

It is sensible to see whether the proposed unitary changes command public support. What do people in Cornwall think? What’s the best way to find out what people think? Easy, you ask them, you organise a vote. At the end of the day a yes-or-no decision will be made by the government to go ahead or not with a unitary Cornwall council so it makes sense to ask the people of Cornwall to vote Yes or No. That way we get a clear result from people. The government should have insisted on a poll of every adult in Cornwall.

Consultation by leaflet

Cornwall county council, controlled by a Liberal Democrat majority, has proposed a unitary council. A binding referendum on the unitary issue would not be legal but an advisory poll is. The county council could have gone for such a countywide poll to ascertain what the people of Cornwall want, whether they support or oppose a unitary council, and the result would have been an unmistakable expression of people’s views, giving them genuine influence over the decision. Conservative and Labour county councillors pressed for a popular vote.

However, the Libdem county council rejected the clarity of a yes-or-no poll and has chosen instead to consult people through an oblique approach. Consequently every household is being sent an informative leaflet asking for their views - but not containing a straightforward yes-or-no voting slip. The public is asked on a post-paid slip “What do you think about” the creation of a unitary council for Cornwall? The slip also invites people to “send any further comments” to the county council.

The leaflet presents a good general case for a unitary council and it certainly is a good idea to give people information about the proposals but, damagingly, the county leaflet contains only the case in favour of a unitary council with no doubts expressed; for example, the serious challenge to the unitary financial arithmetic is unmentioned. This is wholly unacceptable: people are not given the counterarguments and therefore this leaflet does not help them make a truly informed choice. Read the whole leaflet at www.cornwall.gov.uk.

Thus a clear vote for people is avoided, leaving the responses to be interpreted by the county council. Consultation seems to mean asking people for their views without actually asking them directly and simply whether they approve or oppose the unitary proposals. Only one side of the arguments is presented. This is a seriously wrong approach for a party that has the words liberal and democrat in its title.

District councils give people a balanced leaflet and a vote

Fortunately for most people in Cornwall, they will also receive a balanced leaflet and a vote from district councils, who will be abolished under the unitary proposals and who oppose them. North Cornwall district council has produced its own leaflet which strikes me as a very fair one; it sets out the county council’s unitary case and in a separate column its own counterarguments, along with a post-paid voting slip. This is going to a random six thousand houses in North Cornwall. Details of all this are at www.ncdc.gov.uk.

Penwith, Kerrier, Caradon, and Carrick district councils, four of the six Cornwall district councils, are going to have a direct “Do you want” yes-or-no postal vote around the unitary council question for all the people in those four areas. There is a balanced leaflet with the unitary case and some of the persuasive counterarguments of Michael Chisholm (Department of Geography, Cambridge University) and a yes-no postpaid voting card. The district councils’ leaflet and the full Chisholm paper can be read at www.kerrier.gov.uk. These four councils, along with North Cornwall, have taken seriously the government talk of empowering people and giving them influence.

Lamentable

Whatever the vote result, the district leaflets and polls are seriously embarrassing for the outdemocratted Liberal Democrat county council. The decision not to have a public poll and to put out at taxpayers’ expense a leaflet which presents only one side of the argument is lamentable.

Footnote

The figures for the cost of shifting to a unitary council and the likely savings from one rather than the present mixture of county and district councils in Cornwall are now bewilderingly varied. They range from £19 million to £27.8 million in set up costs and £6 million to £17 million in annual savings.

The government has given councils the chance to suggest changes to the present arrangements for local government. Cornwall county council, controlled by Liberal Democrats, has proposed a unitary council for Cornwall, replacing the county and district councils; most of the district councils have proposed an alternative scheme.

Much play was made by the county Liberal Democrats about a Cornwall unitary council being able to draw down additional powers from the regional authorities such as the development agency and NHS boards. Cornwall Liberal Democrat MPs supported the unitary proposals and the consequent taking back of powers from regional bodies; for example here. The unitary council of these county proposals would, it seemed to some, be pretty much a regional assembly in all but name.

Mebyon Kernow said that drawing down was not on offer.

Who was right?

Now there is an item on the Mebyon Kernow website about a meeting at county hall on 9 March 2007 with a government representative. Dick Cole, the MK leader, asked him directly about the proposed unitary council drawing down extra powers. The representative said, equally directly apparently, that there was no question of it; a unitary council was just that, no extra powers were available.

That is very clear. A key plank in the Liberal Democrat unitary scheme, the very reason for it perhaps, has been blown away. Will the Liberal Democrats explain how they got it wrong or withdraw their unitary proposal which MK has said is based on a “false premise”?

However, perhaps all is not what it seems. If a unitary council were established, it would be able to press continually for additional powers. Over time it might well succeed for decentralisation looks like a trend and no present arrangement is likely to last unchanged. No extra powers are on offer now but that does not mean they will not be in the future.

MK seems to be saying, devolution and no half measures. That has clarity. But perhaps it would be wiser to accept a half measure now so that one is better placed to get more later. The Liberal Democrats might have the last laugh.

Now see this updated post of April 14.