We should consider the long term, by which I mean the really long term, going back decades. At the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities’s conference tomorrow, I will be in conversation with Sir Neil McIntosh, and we will be talking about this very point. Sir Neil’s days in local government go back to the 1960s and he was involved through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s. We have had a long conversation on the subject, and he will show tomorrow the way in which local government has been disempowered, which has continued post-devolution.
The McIntosh commission, which was established in 1998, I think, and reported in 1999, argued that we needed a new relationship between local and central Government, with mutual respect and parity of esteem. It said that we needed to address the financial disempowerment, but the evidence is clear that that disempowerment has not been addressed. It comes in the form of local government’s autonomy to raise revenue being taken away. It is not that long ago—I remember the days—that 50 per cent of the revenue that local government spent was raised by local government. I also note the way in which central Government has gradually, over time, told local government what it ought to do, essentially creating local administration rather than local government. There is less autonomy.
11:15
There have been a number of factors over a long period of time. For me, one of the great sadnesses is that we did not really accept the McIntosh report, which was a cross-party report. Your predecessor committee in 2000 looked at the report and said, “This is what we should be doing”, but nearly 20 years on, we are still here. We need to reverse that urgently.
On IJBs and suchlike, one of the issues is that integration and co-ordination come in different forms. There are minimalist forms and maximalist forms. On the approach that we require, I note that the Christie commission, of which I was a member, argued for a more maximalist approach than we have seen. Bringing chiefs round the table to try to agree on broad outcomes is good, but it is not enough. Ultimately, they go back into their silos and carry on doing largely what they did before. That is particularly the case when money is short. People say, “It’s my money, not yours”, and we get into a really tricky situation.
It is much more difficult to get effective co-ordination, co-operation and integration in these times than it was in, if you like, the good old times, which we did experience at one point.