Local governance in Wales

I promised at the end of my last blog post some comments on the (now not so recent) Williams Commission report. So here are a few comments:

I agree with what most commentators in Wales have stated for some time now, that there are too many councils in Wales. The size of population they are servicing and duplication of job roles for nearby areas this implies is not sustainable (although I do accept the rurality and therefore geographical size of some councils need to be taken into account). It has been noted previously that Wales has too many politicians in the wrong places, which is an important point. There are 1264 councillors in Wales, that is a paid councillor (earning over £13,000) for roughly every 1830 people in Wales, paid for by the already financially struggling people of Wales. That is more than Scotland, which has less councillors (1222) for a bigger population (5.2 million), to take just one example. The picture on the right, taken from the report, is one suggestion on how councils could be merged.

I'd much rather have 20 more Assembly Members in the National Assembly holding the over powerful Welsh Government to account than all these extra councillors (there are more councillors in most of Wales' council chambers than there are in our National Assembly). They are needed much more in the Assembly where the key decisions which affect Wales are increasingly made. As Professor Richard Wyn Jones has commented it is "incongruous, inconsistent and irrational".

There is a corollary to this though, and that is if we do merge some of the councils and therefore reduce the number of councillors we should give the new larger councils more responsibility by handing powers down to them from the National Assembly. Devolution should not stop in Cardiff Bay, and we should learn the lessons of Westminster rule, that concentrating power in one place has disadvantages. On this I agree with the Welsh Liberal Democrats.

I also agree with a number of suggestions I have seen that the new councils should be voted for via some form of proportional representation, to better reflect the public's choices in terms of local service delivery. But with Labour being the main beneficiaries of the first past the post system of election at local council level in Wales I fear this is unlikely to happen.

With all that said, council reorganisation itself is no answer to the key questions of good service delivery, and the council merger side of the Williams commission report will probably have a limited impact in this area. Although there is some evidence that larger councils provide better services this is far from a proven fact, and it is also important that the new councils represent areas that have enough in common to consider themselves a distinct geographical entity (the names of the councils will be important here). There is however much more in the Williams Commission report than just a plan for council mergers, and there are some good ideas in there besides the headline grabbing council merger proposals. It would be a tragic missed opportunity if it is just bigger councils we end up with and some of the other useful suggestions are ignored.

There is also the issue of a lack of democratic engagement at the local level, especially with regards to town and community councils which play an important role in the communities of Wales. The fact that nearly half of Wales' community council seats were uncontested is very worrying from a democratic perspective. Perhaps those prospective councillors that will lose out at the county council level following a reduction in Wales' councils could help fill the gap here?

The fundamental issue at the heart of all this is the question of governance, and how much of it we need, as well as how much we should be paying for it. I am a small state sort of person at heart and generally believe that people should be given plenty of freedom to make their own decisions in life and that the state should stay largely out of the way. This means that it doesn't take excessive amounts of tax from people, at all income levels, and that with more money in their pockets people will choose to spend money on those things which they see as valuable or vital (I'm not talking here about the obviously necessary services such as rubbish collection or education, which councils will always need to organise). Some services that Welsh councils currently fund will survive or fall based on how much local people value them. This option also has the bonus of being a more democratic option and being good for the economy.

With all this comes more responsibility for each person in Wales, something which Labour seems to be trying to discourage, but a general culture change will be as difficult as it is necessary.

Wales is clearly over-governed, we have at least five levels of governance from the EU down to town and community councils and with a Welsh civil service roughly the same size as the Scottish civil service, despite a smaller population and less devolved functions in Wales. But it is not necessarily the number of layers which is a problem but how much power each has and what they are all trying to do. I tend to think that the two layers that should have the most power are the Welsh and local council levels, with much less power at the UK and European levels, although remaining part of both unions.

So to get back to the original point of all this. Firstly; we cant afford 22 local councils in Wales (and despite what some have argued that it wont save money, I am pretty convinced there will be savings in the long term if the changes are managed well). Secondly; we should take this opportunity devolve more power to the local level and to think about how services are delivered. Thirdly; we should embrace the idea that government, or the state, cant do everything for us. Fourthly; vested interests will always complain when changes could mean less funding for their projects, but we should trust people to vote with their wallets and their time. I believe that Wales is the sort of country where we could have an engaged and pragmatic civic culture if we are just given the chance.

Why the West rules and the lessons of history

Perhaps just before Christmas was not the best time to start writing a blog, as I have been too busy to write much since I started this blog about a month ago (2 posts a month being a shameful output). But better to get started than to never start at all I suppose!

Rather than writing predictions for the year ahead or anything like that I thought I'd write something about a book that I have been reading over the holiday period, and some thoughts it has provoked.

It is a fascinating book that I would thoroughly recommend that you read, which I have only just finished today. The book is called "Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future." and was written by Ian Morris (Professor in Classics and History at Stanford University) and published in 2010.

The book is fascinating in a number of ways, as it attempts to go back into ancient history and trace the rise of early human civilizations through to the present day. The book focuses on the two distinct zones of development which gave rise to the Western core (starting in the Hilly Flanks in the modern day Middle East before moving westward through the Mediterranean to North West Europe and then to North America) and the Eastern core which has moved less but expanded almost as much from central China.

It shows how social development (based on a number of measures) has gone upwards and downwards in history. An obvious example for Europe being the period following the collapse of the (Western) Roman empire and the subsequent fall in social development in most of Europe until the days of the industrial revolution in Britain in the 18th Century. During much of this long period the East led the world in social development, and could be said to have ruled the world.

The book discusses some of the key drivers of social development, summarised quite worryingly as fear, laziness and greed. It is also interesting to note some of the theories that are discussed in the book, such as the advantages of backwardness, and how regions which were once peripheries become dominant over time by learning from their more socially advanced neighbours and adapting the best bits to their own cultures. This being how north west Europe slowly became the dominant part of the European continent which had previously been dominated by the Mediterranean area.

It is also interesting to see how all the great empires of history eventually crumbled when they were stretched too thin and their weaknesses were exploited by innovative neighbours. It shows quite clearly that geography is (or maybe that should be was) the main shaper of human history, and that the West took an early lead in social development due to the Hilly Flanks being endowed with a larger range of domestic-able plants and animals than the worlds other early civilisations.

While reading the book it is easy to make comparisons between the big empires of history and more modern and smaller units of political power, and I think there are a number of lessons for countries like Wales and Britain that could be learnt from the book. They would take quite a bit of explaining, and you may draw your own conclusions so I would recommend that you read the book if you want to know what I'm getting at. But I think it is safe to say that countries like Wales (or Britain) have both suffered because of their geography and been saved by it. For example Wales was largely protected from Anglo-Saxon and then Norman advance because of its largely mountainous landscape, it has also suffered more recently as it made connecting much of Wales with itself a more difficult task. Britain in a similar but opposite way, suffered early on from being an island, only for that problem to later on become an advantage, protecting the island from outside aggression and forcing it to become a maritime power. Geography shapes development, and then development shapes geography.

The final part of the book looks to the future and whether the 21st century will be the century when world power shifts from its current location in the United States to the East (largely focused in China, at least to start). It also asks some new questions such as whether the concepts of East and West will exist in the future before straying into the realms of science fiction, discussing how robotics, nanotechnology, genetic science and other new technologies will completely revolutionise social development. There is also a warning that the next 40 years could be the most important years in human history, where we will either face an ever accelerating level of social development or an apocalyptic end of days scenario which the author calls Nightfall after the Isaac Asimov short story. We live in interesting times.

One lesson that I think is relevant at the beginning of a new year being how often we fail to learn the lessons of history and how often we make the same mistakes. But saying that, it also shows how difficult it is to make good decisions in any case, as with the long view of history it is easy to see how decisions that at the time seemed good, but had terrible long term consequences. Let us hope we muddle on through the 21st century with a bit of luck.

If you want to understand why the world is the way it is, why certain countries are the way they are, if you want to have a good grasp of modern geopolitics or you want to see what the future may hold then I think this is a book you should read.



*I hope to comment shortly on the Williams Commission Report which has recently been released and how I think it will effect public services in Wales. Thereby keeping my earlier promise to comment on topical news as well as other things.