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.