Elliott Keck is Head of Campaigns for the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
There are around 20,000 councillors in the United Kingdom. Sometimes, it feels like there are another 650 of them, but based in the hallowed halls of the Palace of Westminster, rather than the decidedly less grand corridors of the frequently dour and depressing buildings that house today’s local authorities (with some notable exceptions). MPs spend an infuriating amount of time on hyper-local issues – be it campaigns or casework. As Isabel Hardman notes in her book Why We Get the Wrong Politicians:
“Better to get attention by participating in meaningless parliamentary activities than plug away at the boring work of examining laws properly. After all, you can always just take on more and more constituency casework when things go wrong – as they all too often do.”
So, whether or not it’s in the best interests of the electorate, or whether or not the electorate is interested at all, for many of the roughly 47 million potential voters, when they head to the ballot box on 4th July, they will be voting for a glorified councillor, rather than a genuine legislator. Or a “doughty campaigner” as they’ve become known.
To show how far this attitude extends, Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, recently complained in a video that his local district council – a Labour council, he reminds us – has decided not to mow grass verges in the area. Shapps contrasts this with his “record of real results.” Tim Farron meanwhile, a former Lib Dem leader, is campaigning to repair and reopen Brigsteer and Underbarrow bridges. The Labour Party have made filling potholes a not insignificant campaign pledge.
Which is not to disparage these issues, or mock those concerned about them. I can’t claim any knowledge of the area, but a cursory glance at Cumbria on Google Maps reveals what an absolute pain the closure of Bridgsteer and Underbarrow bridges will be.
But we have a layer of government, with hundreds of billions of pounds in revenues, millions of staff, and tens of thousands of elected officials responsible for these issues. Often it’s more than one layer. In fact, in many places we are adding layers of government in the form of mayoralties and combined authorities.
Residents in Cambourne, south Cambridgeshire, have no fewer than three levels of local government responsible for local services, with a fourth if you include the town council, where 19 councillors preside over a staffing budget of half a million pounds. They have a district council responsible for refuse collection, environmental health, leisure facilities, council tax collection and planning applications. A county council is responsible for education, adult social care, transport, libraries and waste management. And a new combined authority, led by a directly elected mayor, is responsible for delivering local economic growth, building housing, developing transport infrastructure and integrating local health and social care resources.
Those same residents on July 4th will now choose whether to replace the incumbent Conservative MP with a Lib Dem candidate who lists among his priorities protecting a local post office and reinstating peak hour buses.
This is terrible for our politics. It disempowers local councillors, and leaves little time for legislators to legislate. And unfortunately, this politics seems to work. One backbench Conservative MP expressed to me his frustration over how little time he has spent on national issues, but when his constituents are going to him rather than the Labour council to complain about litter, he’s not going to miss an “open goal” by addressing their issues.
But critically, this is bad for taxpayers. If delivering for local people is the only thing that matters, it’s a recipe for the kind of pork-barrel politics that has dominated the discourse for years. Where securing grants or funding for local projects is the top political priority for a constituency MP, with questions of value for money at best ignored. It’s the rise of the “doughty campaigner”, a phrase that has appeared 116 times in Hansard since Boris Johnson introduced levelling up to politics , having appeared just 148 times in total during the previous nine years of Conservative government. “Doughty campaigner” of course being a term for a backbench MP in a potentially marginal constituency which is set to receive millions of taxpayers’ funding for whatever likely overpriced short term project that will look good on a leaflet.
This may sound harsh. It’s not a vice to care deeply about your local area. It’s not a vice to have grown up or lived in the seat you are hoping to represent. There are MPs who actively avoid stepping foot in their constituency, and shudder at the idea of talking to the people that vote them in. This is clearly wrong as well. There is some local casework, particularly when it comes to highly complex issues such as immigration, housing, and health, that MPs can make a difference on. And where a local council is so patently failing, MPs understandably want to pick up the pieces.
But we hear time and time again the complaint that the UK has one of the most centralised systems in the western world. And for as long as the most powerful councillors operate from the Palace of Westminster rather than town halls, that will remain the case.
The post Elliot Keck: MPs should not usurp the role of local councillors appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Elliot Keck
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