Professor Tony Travers, director of British Government at the London School of Economics spoke at a breakfast meeting of the Local Government Association conference. MCFly editor Marc Hudson caught up with him to talk about bureaucracy, democracy and, surprise!, climate change. By the way, if you’re concerned about local action on climate change, well, THIS.

To paraphrase your speech, you said that local government had many fine qualities around innovation and efficiencies, and central government had some things to learn. Above and beyond Weberian analysis – or maybe a Parkinson’s Law analysis – of the bigger the bureaucracy the more the inefficiency – are there any other explanations that you’d posit for the difference between the effectiveness of two levels of bureaucracy and governance.
I think it isn’t just a matter of scale. It has to do with the proximity between the people who are making the decisions about the way public resources are used and the people who vote for them. So if you’re in Manchester, or any individual authority, having decisions made in the [local] Town Hall just means that there is easier access to the people who make the decisions, and the people who make the decisions have a closer knowledge of what’s going on locally. And therefore I think they’ll just use resources more efficiently. There is some economic literature on this subject in fact, and so you’ll get more sensitive government. And there’s also some academic research that suggests the public are more content with services provided at a local level than the same services if they’re provided more distantly.
So I think it just creates a greater understanding amongst those who are delivering services of what people want. I’m not saying they get it right every time, but it’s simply more likely to be an accurate representation of what people want.

I completely agree. I mean, I can get hold of local politicians that even if I lived in London I’d never get hold of central government because there’s layers of, well, flak-catchers, basically. But conversely, local politicians are famously kicked out of office no matter how good they are because local elections are treated by the electorate as a referendum on the popularity of the government and especially the leader. So there’s a little bit of a contrast there in the amount of pain the local government will get, distinct from what it’s actually doing.
There’s no question that local government – not everywhere – not in Manchester, it would appear, but in many places, councillors who are good lose office simply because of changes in national political sentiment. And that isn’t really fair, or indeed good for local democracy. However, people do differentiate,and there’s plenty of evidence that they’ll vote for different parties at local and national level, for example. So I think that we really need to do is empower local democracy more. Britain is a very very centralised country, especially inside England. Though similarly it’s the same inside Wales and Scotland, even though there’s been devolution to Scotland and Wales. And I think that local government would make, on balance, more efficient and effective decisions than the same things done at national level, because national government just can’t understand everywhere.

Central government is unlikely to voluntarily give up power, so what sorts of things need to happen. So with Rewiring Public Services – when will we know if the LGA’s campaign has been successful or not?
I think it won’t happen overnight. With all these things you’re talking about drip drip drip on a stone. It’s possibly years of effort to get changes. Britain is a small-c conservative democracy in many ways. It doesn’t change radically. However, I think there is some mood change. Two things really suggest that. One is that the scale of the need to reduce public expenditure and the concentration of that effort on local government is a unique and unusual factor. And secondly, within England, I think there’s a perception that devolution has had no real impact. The Scots have had devolution, the Welsh have had devolution, Northern Ireland has had devolution – and what’s England got? I think that is a fairly powerful idea, and might well drive at least city-regional devolution, which is something of course that Greater Manchester Local Authorities have been working on for some years and to effect.

Just a couple more questions. So, more power to local councils. And Eric Pickles is apparently happy for council tax to go as high as you like, as long as you can get a referendum through. Now here in Manchester in 2008 there was a Transport Innovation Fund referendum. And it was overwhelmingly rejected. And it seems to me that the public want the services, but the public, famously, don’t want to pay the taxes.
Well, I think the Manchester referendum on the Transport Innovation Fund, and of course the endlessly complex issue of road pricing, or congestion charging, does test the limit of the public willingness to pay taxes or charges that they really feel. The difficulty for local government is that with the council tax, and indeed with a congestion charge were it to exist, people understand that. Whereas many of the taxes they pay to central government are buried. You know, VAT, or income tax which is taken away before you get the last number at the bottom right-hand side of your pay slip. And as a result of that, national government raises money much more easily than local government does. Local government has to argue its case much more.
So of course, nobody wants to pay taxes, but there is a moral case to be made for paying taxes, and personally I think that politicians who want to expand the state – and that’s a legitimate thing to want to do if that’s your view – then they have to argue the case for taxes. And very few politicians in any party are willing to do that.

Final question… So it’s ten years in the future, and there are city deals and earn backs and referendums have been won on local taxation. And central government is still doing defence, because you can’t really have local militias. What about climate change? Because someone has to demand/enforce carbon emissions reductions, and local governments aren’t going to do it because they can always play a”beggar thy neighbour” policy. So how do we drive down carbon emissions while still having the local democracy that we want?
I think obviously there is a risk that local areas will say “well, we can’t do anything because other areas won’t do something.” But countries can do that as well of course.
But on the other hand, more positively, at the local level, councils do understand that local detriment caused by climate change and also by other environmental issues. These things show up. All politics are local, so if there are risks for flooding, or heat islands, or whatever the consequences might be, it will be local government at some level that ends up picking up a lot of those issues up and trying to deal with them. I think the other thing is that cities are places where lots of people live together, and that requires the management of spaces between streets and buildings. Cities generally are relatively efficient in environmental terms, in the sense that people tend to live closer together, fewer of them use cars, and it’s easier to make more of them take public transport if you have policies [for that]. So cities I think are good for the environment. They look bad because you get high levels of pollution, and additive effects, but actually per capita big cities can be very very efficient. So I think this is an argument for cities doing things that are good for reducing the impacts of climate change, which are also good for city life in a common sense way. So who’s going to disagree that we should have more or better public transport. Or that we should have higher densities in big cities because that allows more people to walk to work. And these are things that work for several different policy reasons at once. And I think that the more those who are trying to reduce the impacts of climate change can ally their cause with common sense good government in the way cities function, then you’re getting two agendas for the price of one.

Anything else you’d like to add?
Well, I take the risk of “beggar my neighbour” policies, but I think it’s the C40 group [that’s doing work]. Cities have taken a lead in elements of climate change, partly because in many cities around the world there are many concerned people who are interested in the subject, and that’s something else to go with.

[Interview conducted Weds 3rd July at 9.20am by Marc Hudson]