Colin Mair, chief executive of Improvement Service, on why councils must keep decision making open and transparent

There are pretty evident challenges facing local government right now and across the next few years. Budgets will reduce in cash as well as real terms, demand and expectations on services are growing, and there is a proper pressure to improve outcomes and reduce inequalities in Scotland. Possible responses to these challenges are also fairly well defined: improving productivity and impact through shared services, a “shift to prevention” and more effective joint working with other public agencies, with the third sector and with communities.  

The challenges and responses above are generic and could apply to any public service authority whether appointed or elected, national or local. However, councils being local and elected gives a distinctive character to the challenges noted above and to how they should be addressed.  

The budget cuts that all Scottish councils will make next year were not locally decided – they were about 85 per cent decided by the UK Treasury, 10 per cent by decisions of Scottish Government and about five per cent locally decided. What precisely to cut was local – whether to cut was decided elsewhere. Councils consulted local communities on their budgets but that many did not want cuts and job losses at all did not matter. The UK Government cut the Scottish budget and the Scottish Government inevitably passed that on.  

Budgets will reduce in cash as well as real terms, demand and expectations on services are growing, and there is a proper pressure to improve outcomes and reduce inequalities in Scotland

There is little at present councils can do to prevent this but they should represent it honestly to local people, and forcibly represent local people’s concerns and anger about cuts to Scottish and UK Government. Local government is political and representing local people’s concerns and priorities up the system is at the heart of local politics in a very centralised state. If elected local government simply does what a body appointed by ministers could do equally well, what is the point of elections and what is local about accountability?  

Many council services are universal (education, social and personal care) and this is often used to justify standardisation. However, ‘universal’ is not equivalent to ‘standardised’.  Inherent in the area of a ‘universal’ service is its ability to adapt itself to the requirements of all the different people, cultures and contexts it serves.  

Financial constraints, combined with top-down policymaking, may lead to pressures for further centralisation and standardisation. That has not worked and will not work. For example, the ‘problem’ of inequality is not a debate about whether we should have universal services or not, it is that our ‘universal’ services are too standardised to be truly universal.

A key challenge for local government is to maintain its commitment to a universalism that respects diversity, rather than standardisation.

Given the pressures across the next few years, it will be tempting to ‘close down’ decision making rather than open it up to whole range of community interests. That would be fatal for local government – we cannot resist top-down imposition if we are seen to do it ourselves.  Equally, we cannot properly represent communities that we do not listen to ourselves.

Opening up decision making, through community engagement, participatory budgeting, etc. will not make life easier but it will make it better in terms of local democracy.
The headline challenges set out at the beginning of this piece are severe, however they are handled. Being local government needs to be expressed in how we handle them. That is the real challenge and that is a challenge that councils across Scotland are already embarked on addressing.