Trouble and strife in local government

All is not well in the world of local government. There has been a putsch by the political leaders at the Local Government Association and its chief executive, Paul Cohen, has been suspended and is not expected to return, Public Servant magazine reveals. Cohen said in a statement:

Since Septmeber it has become increasingly difficult to have confidence that the political leadership and the managerial leadership of hte LGA are at one on both the direction of travel and the day to day leadership of the association. I was asked to leave, which I have done. The LGA and I will now seek to agree a way forward.

The LGA is one of those organisations that is quietly quite important in trying to make sure councils work well with central government, but it appears things have broken down dramatically. The immediate flashpoint, I'm told, was his handling of the crisis over council investment in Icelandic banks. Councils believed that he supplied a list to government of councils in trouble, that were later named and publicly embarrassed by John Healey, the local government minister.

But the problems run deeper than that, if two critics of the LGA are to be believed. See this exchange on December 8, during the Commons Communities and Local Government Committee which heard from a number of expert witnesses who were highly critical of the LGA.

Dr John Pugh (Liberal Democrat committee committee member): Across the LGA there are various sorts of bodies representing the local authority family, if I can put it like that, and it was hoped the LGA would actually perform a significant role in being an advocate for local government with central government and maybe with the public as well, but what we have seen, I guess, is that they have established a bureaucracy, they have affordable things like training, they produce a lovely - but singularly uninformative - magazine every week. Do you think that the LGA are performing a real and valuable function as an advocate for local government?

Professor John Stewart, Birmigham University: The LGA is a very strange body. Indeed, I have often said that the local authority association in any form is almost a contradiction in terms because local government exists to be diverse and different, and an association exists to reduce that complex of views to one particular view. That is one of the dangers facing a local government association. The second is that their working relationship, their day to day practice, the things that come to them all tend to make them part of the village of Whitehall and they come to accept the assumptions of the village of Whitehall over time. Obviously they have to have a working relationship with government but at times they have gone too far in accepting the views of central government. They have not pressed the constitution issue that we have referred to. They have not highlighted the very complex accountability issues raised by the local area remits where local authorities appear to be, according to the legislation, being held accountable for the activities of the various appointed bodies in the area for which targets are set. It is a very confused situation and yet the association let itself be browbeaten into signing the concordat even when it was not really satisfied with it. I would argue that most of these things derive from the fact that they have almost become part of the village.

Dr Pugh: It is not a very effective advocate.

Professor Stewart: It is not as effective as it could be.

 

Comments

[Rex]

This is a very important topic. The LGA is one of those 'bodies that represent bodies' which work better when they are ad hoc and concentrate on one subject, for a brief time only.

The LGA has become an excuse for Central government not to work properly in detail and effectively with individual local councils and that is wrong.

It is a far too expensive empire on its own now and it is ironic that it works from the building that it does. Rather in the same manner as you observe in your piece in The Times this morning, it represents the growth of a highly paid but actually very poor quality cadre of government management and should be disposed of.

[Colin Holland]

All this dissemination of words when the simple fact that the LGA has been got at by government and been politicised would have been enough.
Now tell us what we do not know in that who is to blame?

[jennywren]

Colin, who do you think is to blame. The LGA is yet another government quango masquerading as something else.
As a District Councillor (Conservative) I have to put up with a lot of their nonsense, and I have to tell you that a-political it isn't. It is simply there to peddle the Government's constantly meddling target driven local agenda.