Can the Localism Bill deliver 'real' localism?
The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) offers a number of suggestions for interrogating the content of the government’s Localism Bill, published last month.
A short paper by Ed Cox, Director of ippr north, Five Foundations of Real Localism, “provides a set of principles against which the aniticipated raft of localist policy measures can be assessed.”
Those five foundations are:
- localism must be effective and efficient
- localism must be properly funded
- localism must sit at the heart of a drive for social justice
- greater devolution of power and responsibility to the local level must be accompanied by a step-change in the transparency and accountability of local decision-making
- the new drive for localism should be framed within a constitutional settlement between central and local government
Picking up on the second of these themes in a follow-up article, Ed Cox welcomes the decentralisation of key powers to councils and communities. He suggests, however, that the bill as published fails deliver new funding streams to give local people more control over local public spending.
He argues strongly that “Real localism will only be achieved by reforming local taxation. so that council tax is replaced by a fairer mix of income and properties taxes.”
- Five Foundations of Real Localism
- Without local financial powers, Pickles’ Bill is ‘lipstick localism’ article
6 January 2011
