COSLA president David O'Neill on the challenges facing local government

I am particularly pleased that the theme of this year’s COSLA / IS conference focuses squarely on the issue of inequality. Despite the many huge improvements we have all made in the services we provide Scotland remains a country riven by historical inequalities.

Removing this inequality is the main reason I became involved in local government and I remain committed to the idea that the accidental circumstances of where someone is born and the social conditions they grow up in should not affect their health and life chances or those for education and productive employment. The fact is this does still happen and far too many people have their lives blighted as a result.

Local government, and indeed the whole public sector, has to address inequality at a local level and to do so it must overcome three very real challenges. Firstly and most importantly, while accepting that some services will be universal and designed for everybody, a much greater focus and priority must fall on the needs of the most disadvantaged.

This may mean designing ways to deliver universal services that ensure that the poorest and most deprived communities can really take advantage of them. Conversely, it may mean developing packages of service aimed specifically at our most disadvantaged communities and that are only for them. These services must address the causes of disadvantage and genuinely improve people’s lives.  

Local government, and indeed the whole public sector, has to address inequality at a local level

We must not get seduced by the idea that provision for all is by definition fair and equal or that the raising of standards for everyone is a proper response to inequality. Thoughtless universality is the enemy of equality and for many is simply a shroud not a shield to hide behind.  

Secondly, while I believe that resolving inequality is worth it simply for the good it will do for our poorest citizens, not everybody will agree with this and will be more swayed by another argument.

We now know that those people in our communities who suffer the highest levels of deprivation and disadvantage will, over time, drive the demand for the services we deliver and therefore the cost of them.

The current national model which sentences some people to a life of deprivation and difficulty and then offers services to help them cope with the resultant problems can’t go on.

We simply cannot afford national policy and funding agreements which force all of us to pay less attention to genuinely preventative approaches than we would like.  

The current focus on inputs rather than outcomes and acute services rather than preventative ones will not only fail to resolve the difficulties of the most deprived, they also ensure that more general universal services will cease to be affordable as provision is focused on meeting the legitimate needs of the least well off 20 per cent of our citizens.

A national prevention plan that supports the excellent work of individual councils and others in the public sector is desperately needed. Only this can allow the major shift away from ultimately negative acute services and allow something much more preventative to take place.

Lastly, there is the challenge of being genuinely local. I firmly believe that the level of inequality which appears at least acceptable when viewed from the centre would be entirely unacceptable when viewed from a local point of view. If we had genuinely empowered local government, local institutions and agencies able to design and deliver local services without national interference, they would have to be locally accountable for them. In that case, local communities would demand that inequality was tackled and that those accountable locally did that job on their behalf. This is the real prize of devolution and it must not stop at Holyrood.  

We simply cannot afford national policy and funding agreements which force all of us to pay less attention to genuinely preventative approaches than we would like

Very few of the causes of disadvantage can be eliminated by a single service or by a single agency. Deprivation and dealing with it is necessarily complex. This means partnership and joint working. The difficulty of our largely centralist and national system is that the sheer inertia of delivering genuine partnership is almost overwhelming.

Where partnership genuinely works is where it’s local and when partnership works, inequality can be tackled. Local government must be genuinely local. It must have local partners who are similarly empowered and it must feel itself to be accountable locally to communities rather than nationally to the Scottish Government.

If we can create these conditions and address these three challenges, I believe inequalities can be tackled and Scotland can become the more equal socially just country that we all aspire to.