Balancing the micro and the macro in local government

In the good old days, the job of being a local councillor was primarily about deciding where resources were to be allocated.

A swimming pool here, a civic centre there, a new school everywhere. It was the part of the locally elected member to look after the interests of their patch, and their perceived effectiveness was directly correlated with the facilities that were opened in their community.

The role was often associated with civic largesse and opening ceremonies.

Fast forward to the present day and we see a very different scenario, where budgets have been slashed and the ‘low hanging fruit’ of painless savings have been harvested over a number of years.

Instead of announcing the opening of facilities and new services, the role of a councillor seems to be more focused upon which services should be discontinued, which buildings closed and which teams of staff should be offered voluntary redundancy.

A thankless task you might think, and in my experience of working with many councillors who have dedicated themselves completely to the people in their wards and communities, one that they take incredibly seriously.

Yet the old mindset has been very difficult to shake off.

Elected members are often elected on a personal manifesto that promises to keep facilities open, with success being judged on how well they maintain the status quo.

And, burdened with that promise, they fight any potential solution that threatens that local equilibrium.

At first glance this seems to be a more than reasonable stance and appeals to those who would argue that the local politician, as a democratically elected representative of the local community, is obliged to place the needs of that electorate to the fore when it comes to making any decision.  

The focus of the elected member is at a micro level – the person attending their weekly surgery who has a problem with a council service or who needs something done.

They walk the streets of their community and those interests are reinforced with every passing conversation. All well and good, you might think – and indeed it is, but only up to a point.

For I would argue that the traditional micro focus presents a huge risk to the continued delivery of high quality services to local communities.

In order to demonstrate what I mean, I’ll use a story my granny used to tell me about an ancient Aberdeenshire coastal village called Pimscoorem.

The village depended upon two fishing boats to go out to sea every day and return with enough fish to feed the village, with a little left over to barter for other produce, and what was left over after that sold for savings.

One day, one of the boats wouldn’t catch enough fish, but it was balanced out by the catch from the other boat, and on the next day the balance worked the other way.

All this worked well until the boats started to show their age and it became obvious that the catches were reducing every year as the boats struggled to cope with the worsening weather conditions.

A village meeting was called and it was suggested that the only solution was for the village to use all of its resources to buy a new boat to replace the two old ones.

Everyone agreed that a new boat with bigger nets would be able to catch more than the two old boats put together.

However, each of the old boats belonged to a separate family who had fished for over seven generations and never fished in the other family’s boat.

The new arrangement would mean that not every member of the family would be able to continue as a fisherman.

The two families went off to discuss the proposal.

It was clear to everyone that the two old boats would not be seaworthy in a few years’ time.

In fact, they were already dangerous, but the idea of giving up their family heritage made it an impossible decision to accept.

The two families returned to the village meeting and said that they couldn’t give up their old boat.

A few years later the catches dwindled to the point that the village no longer had enough money to buy a new boat, and the village was eventually abandoned and overtaken by the encroaching sea and the windswept sand dunes.

No one from the two fishing families ever went to sea again.

The point of the story was that times change and we must change with them – even if it means that we have to give up something we care deeply about.

If we don’t then we will lose everything we care about.

My granny was a wise woman and her story might be of some assistance to councillors who look at local problems in much the same way as the two fishing families did.

If you only look at your own needs and ignore the needs of the wider community, then eventually your own wellbeing is diminished.

This then, is at the heart of the challenge for local government, the need to balance the micro view of the world with the macro reality that has the potential to overwhelm our local demands unless we take definitive action.

I suppose the recent deliberations in Paris about climate change are a case in point: even if some of the solutions have a negative impact at a local level, they will hopefully sustain our global environment for generations to come.

My great fear is that we see more and more councils going round and round in circles unable to take the kind of definitive action which will be required if local services are to protected – albeit in a different form from what we have known in the past.

If not, then I worry that the encroaching sea and windswept sand dunes are not that far away.

Don Ledingham is chief executive of leadership development organisation Ceannas and honorary professor of leadership at Queen Margaret University.