The Great Survivor: The Persistence and Resilience of English Local Government

Abstract

This article is about the persistence and resilience of the form of local government that emerged in England in the nineteenth century and took shape in the twentieth century. English local government has adapted to successive reorganisations and changes to its functions; it has survived centralisation, privatisation, the imposition of quangos, regional governance, elected mayors, performance management and latterly fiscal austerity by responding to opportunities and meeting the continual need for administrative tasks at the local level. The centralised structure to political management in English local government has generated a high level of organisational capacity and a pragmatic sensibility that ensures the institution remains in place even in unpropitious circumstances. Other local organisations, such as voluntary sector bodies and quangos, have less capacity to compete and work to shorter timescales. Such resilience has come to the fore in the period of fiscal austerity since 2009 when local authorities have had to manage severe declines in their budgets whilst taking on additional functions, such as council tax benefit. The organisational capacity and pragmatism of English local government create path dependence as its very efficiency at managing services may have shut off options for democratic renewal and participation.

Key Words:

• Local government
• England
• centralisation
• management

The end of English local government has been long foretold.¹ Most famously – in 1933 – William Robson wrote about ‘the dictates of central power which, if pursued, will be the virtual end of local government’ (Robson 1933, p. 89), and he kept on pronouncing its immanent demise in a series of publications right up to the 1970s (for example, Robson 1966). This sentiment has been echoed ever since, such as by Tyrell Burgess and Tony Travers who believed that the Local Government Planning and Land Act 1980 would transform local government into the ‘outpost of a large bureaucracy’ (Burgess and Travers 1980, p. 188). Though complaints about diminution of its status and relentless centralisation have been continuously made, they reached a fever-pitch level in the heady years of the 1980s when a more ideological and tough-minded central government took away powers, finance and functions from local government in a wave of reforms that heightened the sense of crisis and generated extensive commentary and reflection (for example, Jones and Stewart 1985, Loughlin et al. 1985, Loughlin 1996). Such concerns were well summarised in Allan Cochrane’s wistful, Whatever Happened to Local Government? (1993), and they appear prominently in Margin Loughlin’s account of the ‘disintegration of the constitutional tradition of local government’ (Loughlin 2003, p. 521). The gloomy prognosis returns once again in the inclement 2010s: Gerry Stoker writes about the marginalisation of English local government in its community governance role and considers the institution to be ‘in trouble’ (Stoker 2011, p. 29); other commentators regard the coalition government’s commitment to localism as shallow, disguising the long-term decline of local democracy (Jones and Stewart 2012).

These repeated pronouncements of the end or terminal decline of locally elected government should be treated very cautiously. The extent to which local government has weathered successive crises demonstrates its persistence, resilience and an instinct for survival rather than vulnerability to external forces. An institution that took shape in the nineteenth century adapted to deal with large changes in the service provision and financing of the twentieth century. English local government, strengthened by the local government reorganisation of 1972 and the associated reform of internal management, is still broadly in existence today, responding pragmatically to the varying political and economic situations it faces. The reason for its persistence and resilience lies in the strength of the central political core to management and policy-making, which is usually untouched by changes in external environment. The English model of local government is based on the institutionalisation of party politics in a well-organised management structure, whereby power is concentrated in the hands of senior officers and leading councillors who are in partnership with each other. With its central operating system intact, local authorities can adapt to changes to the functions and finance of local government; and periods of reduction in influence can be succeeded by the acquisition of new roles and activities. In this way, the outward aspects of the organisation, such as service departments and regulatory functions, can alter massively whilst the framework of political management remains more or less same, irrespective of which political party is in control locally.

To make these arguments, this article starts off with a review of the emergence of the English system of local political management and shows how it was solidified into place by the reforms of the 1970s. The main proposition advanced is that local government’s organisation and environment exhibit path dependence, which may have shut off alternatives for reform and democratisation. The article then shows how writers on English local government made a mistake in believing that the changes to the functions and finance for local government, occurring since the early 1980s, caused the demise of the institution itself, when, as Hugh Atkinson and Wilks-Heeg (2000) argue, its energy was transplanted into new arenas. The attempt to reform local political management structures in 2000 largely enhanced this system. Turning to the current period, the claim is that the central core of local government is well placed to survive most inclement conditions that public sector organisations and their clients have ever faced, which have been brought about by the fiscal austerity begun in 2009. Further, the current environment delivers some benefits to local elected government, such as provisions in the Localism Act 2011, which give it a number of freedoms. Whereas quangos come and go, regional government institutions are abolished and the voluntary and community sectors have weak capacity to adapt in the face of budget cuts, local government continues in existence and even acquires functions, such as to run local economic policies and administer council tax benefit. The great survivor remains as the main institution governing localities without serious competitors to its power and authority.

1. Origins

Textbooks on English local government often begin with an account of the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act (for example, Chandler 2007), which set up the system of local committees and created the legal person of the local authority (Keith-Lucas 1980). It is the right place to begin because the act produced an entity that could potentially run a range of local services in an integrated fashion. The committee system was important because it created a means for the political control of service delivery and also an institutional framework that could be adapted to deal with new problems and demands for services. This is the essence of English local government: multi-functional, local public bodies that owe their powers to Parliament and where elected representatives exercise democratic control.

Committees are not the only means of delivering flexibility: ministerial portfolios have this characteristic, and also change names quickly whilst the system of Cabinet government at the centre remains largely unchanged. Yet local government committees and their associated administration could be modified particularly easily, especially when changes to the law give powers to local authorities or take them away, which in England happens frequently owing to changes in party representation at the centre. Local government only has limited powers of general competence, has no constitutional protection and is without access to buoyant sources of local finance, which prevented it from generating a continuous provision of services and a more settled pattern to its activities. Nevertheless, with its flexible structure, local government could painlessly adjust its organisation when acquiring new responsibilities or losing them. Also local government became – at least in the public’s view – largely about these service-based committees, with the central system of political management working as a backdrop steering policy, and committee chairs as members of the informal political executive. Not only were the committees easy to alter so as to reflect the needs of council business, they embodied the purpose of local government as an administrator of services much more effectively than a more visible central executive would have done.

The committee system suited the period of expansion of local government functions from private bills and sponsored activities for local infrastructure and enterprise (Stoker 1988). More controversially, it also was appropriate for the period of the consolidation of the welfare state. This is why William Robson and his colleagues were so wrong in their claim for the decline of local government in the mid-twentieth century. They underestimated the flexibility of the structure that had been created. In the 1930s and 1940s, the nationalisation of utilities and the creation of the welfare state, such as the National Health Service, appeared to emasculate English local government. However, the expansion of the size of the state generated new responsibilities, many of which were delegated to local authorities. These services were underpinned by rising central financial support and general grants that did not hypothecate funding to particular activities. Although most of these services were under central control, there was little direct supervision by central government, which allowed local authorities to get on with the job of administering public services without much interference. Many experts believe the permissive legal framework bestowed considerable administration discretion to local authorities over the implementation of policies (Loughlin et al. 1985, Loughlin 1996), and created a balance to central–local government relations (Griffith 1966). Output studies measured the extensive discretion that local authorities exercised within this system (Sharpe and Newton 1984).

2. Party politics and political management

One of the most salient aspects of English local government is the strength of its party politics. Local government was the arena in which organised political parties, such as the Labour Party, developed. One of the most profound changes – happening over a very long period – was the growth in the reach and coverage of political parties (Gyford 1985). The number of independent candidates declined (Rallings and Thrasher 1997), and party groups increasingly controlled policy-making in councils, able to take control of the committees if they had a majority of the seats on the council (Copus 2004). The effect on decision-making was to centralise power: the power structures within parties tend to be replicated in decision-making within councils because nothing of importance could happen without the approval of the party groups – either directly or implied – which met before committee meetings and authorised policy, and to which the officers of the council reported. This power structure strengthened over time (Gyford et al. 1989). Of course, there always has been a subtle relationship between the local party leadership and supporters as many studies show (e.g. Jones 1969, Leach and Wilson 2000). There is also considerable variation in the kinds of party groups (Bulpitt 1967). These studies reveal what should be expected in any authoritative and centralised political system: the astute practice of responsiveness and inclusion as well as natural variation according to place and tradition. Such findings do not contradict the claim that political elites control most decisions in large English local authorities, structuring policy outputs, largely because local parties have control over the selection of candidates and promotion, just as they do in Parliament. Comparative studies of local government in Europe show the party-based nature of loyalty and orientation of councillors in England (Saiz and Geser 1999), though other countries, such as Spain and Norway, display these features too (Egner et al. 2013). Even coalition politics, which became more common since the early 1980s, does not disturb the means of exercising power as bargains between party groups take the place of the single-party rule whilst the political control of services and decision-making remains much the same as before (Temple 1994).

The community power studies carried out in the 1970s support this account of party domination, which contrasted with the more open and fractious politics of US cities (Newton 1976). Some of the community power studies are more explicit about the impact of party politics, such as Clements (1969) who showed that party politics had driven out other local elites, such as those from business (see also Jones (1969), pp. 114–119). Outside this ruling group, the ordinary councillors, in spite of heavy time commitments (Barron et al. 1991), played only a minor role in decision-making, because most decisions are centralised within local authorities and councillors outside the ruling group did not take a great deal interest in policy (Copus 2004). Most studies of decision-making in English local authorities back up this account of the centralisation of power (Dearlove 1973, Saunders 1979, Green 1981); others stress more complex relationship within local authorities (for a review, see Stoker and Wilson (1986)). In spite of pressure groups being an essential part of local government (Newton 1976, Stoker and Wilson 1991), they tended to be strongly influenced by local authority polices and funding (Smith et al. 2004).

Local government bureaucracies increased in size and became more professionalised and staffed with cadres of expert officers. These service empires dominated local government and were reinforced by professional networks (Young and Mills 1983). The prominence of professionals also appears in Patrick Dunleavy’s account of housing policy in the post-1945 period (Dunleavy 1981), and in his theoretical treatise on urban politics (Dunleavy 1980). He emphasises the homogenising effect of professional cultures on the outputs and outcomes of local authority decisions as well as the insulation of local government from electoral influences. Professionalism meshes well with political control because the heads of service and the chairs of committees form close alliances; so rather than bureaucratic elites dominating local government or there being excessive political control, a joint elite mainly governed local authorities, sharing power (Blowers 1980).

The same factors that ensured local government was usually well run also make sure that local politics was more about service delivery than promoting democracy. This is the sympathetic critique John Stewart makes of English local government (Stewart 1989, 2000). Stewart encourages local authorities to focus more on community leadership and rise above demands of professionalism and service management: ‘Attitudes nurtured by the traditions of professionalism, departmentalism and committee reinforce the role of local authorities as agencies for the provision of services...The local authority has to be organised for service provision – whether directly or indirectly – but that organisation must be geared to community leadership if the role is to develop as more than a peripheral activity’ (Stewart 2000, p. 286).

These factors – flexible committee structures, centralised party politics, service orientation and rule by the dual elite – created a bifurcated organisation to English local authorities. Power tends to be concentrated in a central core comprised of the leading party politicians and senior bureaucrats, which can act cohesively to produce policy for the local authority. The outer parts of the organisation are the service-providing bureaucracies not in the centre. These elements are important for the functioning and health of the organisation; but they are not the organisation’s power structure, nor comprise its interest; and they may be dispensed with when necessary. Put in this way, what matters for local government is the autonomy of its central operation. Elements of the outer organisation and their budget lines can be sacrificed without affecting the identity and salience of the primary organisation. Such a distinction between the operating core and peripheral elements to organisations is a staple of organisational theory (see Mintzberg (1983)), and has been used to understand cutbacks and agencification in UK central government, forming an essential moving part to Dunleavy’s bureau-shaping model (Dunleavy 1992).

3. Reorganisation and political participation

Many of the features described in the last two sections were well entrenched by the end of the 1960s. Such a pattern is to be expected in path-dependent conditions. For much of what happened to local government during the twentieth century has been endogenous, part of a self-reinforcing system that keeps the same kind of behaviours and institutions on track. What is described in this section might be seen as the consequence of the form of politics rather than a cause of it. However, the reorganisations that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s – whereby local government was transformed from the complex patchwork of authorities inherited from the reorganisations of 1884 and 1894 to the large professionally organised authorities of today – had important consequences for the management of local government (see the review in John (2011)). Technocratic considerations dominated both the London reform of 1963 and the English reorganisation of 1972. The Herbert and the Redcliffe-Maud commissions were concerned with service efficiency and reaping the rewards from economies of scale, so much so that the Redcliffe-Maud commission largely ignored the weak and ambiguous evidence for the positive link between size and efficiency, which was set out in its own commissioned research published alongside with the main report. Famously, its director of research, Jim Sharpe, turned against the technocratic character of the reforms (Sharpe 1972). He believed that the legislation would need to be unpicked because it was not sufficiently based on the identity of local communities.

At the same time as reorganisation, two official reports recommended professionalising the management of local government: the Maud Committee (1967) and the Bains Report (1972). This professionalisation of local government led to a stronger central organisation under a chief executive. Managerialism, however, did not disrupt the existing balance of power based on committee chairs and directors of services that had been established in the preceding century. The reorganisation and management reforms went in hand with the creation of larger, more service-orientated organisations, with a political system of control from the centre, essentially reinforcing the central operating core of local government.

Since 1972, professionals in central and local government agreed that even larger local authorities would be able to deliver service efficiencies and that a single tier would help achieve this aim. Proposals for larger, single-tier local authorities have reappeared consistently ever since: the organic changes for larger cities in 1979; the abolition of the Greater London Council and Metropolitan Counties in 1986; the Local Government Commission’s attempts to create single-tier local government between 1992 and 1996; the provisions for single-tier local government in the abortive regional reform of 2004 and the facility for councils to come forward to form single tiers after the 2006 White Paper.

Even though there were attempts to stimulate greater citizen participation in planning decisions in the wake of the Skeffington Report in 1969 and a move to promote public involvement in community development programmes, these initiatives were short lived (Loney 1983). Efforts to energise local participation have generally been spasmodic, whether it is the initiatives of the 1970s, the decentralisation experiments of the 1980s, community empowerment in the 2000s or the Big Society of the 2010s. Academics stress the limits to the extent to which local authorities can engage the public (Wilson 1999), partly from lack of interest from the citizens and also from institutional barriers, such as poorly designed participation schemes (Lowndes et al. 2001a, 2001b, 2006). In spite of public participation and citizen engagement featuring heavily in the Redcliffe-Maud report, the two agendas of boundary reorganisation and political participation were not considered jointly, and reformers privileged the service efficiency and public management aspects of the reforms.

4. Centralisation

As with the 1930s and 1940s, many regarded the 1980s as a point of transition for local government: the final move from a system of local-self government to one where the local authority had become an agency doing the bidding of central government. There were important changes to be sure, but they illustrate the thesis of adaptation and survival rather than diminution and fall from power. The new policies from central government were profound of course deriving as they did from the deep financial and economic crises of the 1970s. These central interventions reflected the growing concern about the quality of public services, particularly for education (John 1989). Then, a more ideologically driven central government wanted to implement radical policies, such as greater competition for services and stronger performance management (see Butcher et al. 1990). A key factor behind the conflict was the radicalisation of local council politics, particularly from Labour local party groups and also Conservative-led councils. Labour-run authorities used the command structure of local government to introduce new policies, which appeared to challenge the Conservative government (Boddy and Fudge 1984, Gyford 1985). In the face of the new conflict, the government tightened spending controls (Travers 1986) and introduced precise legal supervision over local government (Loughlin 1996). To ensure that change happened on the ground, central government took functions away and created new local organisations, such as urban development corporations, to run local services, such as planning and housing, and to carry out entrepreneurial activities (Imrie and Thomas 1999). There followed a succession of centrally sponsored organisations, such as city technology colleges, housing action trusts, training and enterprise councils, which led academics to believe the local state would in time be constituted by non-elected bodies (Skelcher 1998). It was not surprising that many commentators thought these reforms amounted to a radical change to local government, creating in effect a reduced size of organisation and a constrained form of local administration under central government control (Loughlin et al. 1985, Butcher et al. 1990, Cochrane 1993). Foundations and research councils commissioned research and reports that deplored the apparent demise of local government (for example, Carter and John 1992).

Even at the time, many experts did not really believe that local government had been strongly centralised even though the policy changes were important. At the end of the 1980s, local government had much the same level of finance as at the beginning of the decade (Travers 1989). Broadly the same functions remained in place. The long list of acts that were frequently seen as evidence of centralisation were in fact largely comprised by a series of minor amendments and consolidations of existing legislation (John, 1994, p. 416, n. 28). More radical reforms, such as the poll tax, proved to be temporary and never had a massive impact on local accountability (Butler et al. 1994). Accounts of central–local relations stressed the difficulty of implementing top-down reforms, which were processed and modified down the delivery chain (Rhodes 1988, Marsh and Rhodes 1992). Studies of local governance found that local government was far from being marginalised: it was at the centre of new networks; and it was the most powerful and legitimate organisation operating within local governance (Stoker 2000). Local government was the key member of public–private partnerships, such as in local regimes (Harding 1997). In the shifting sands of local policy networks, it was locally elected government that had the resources, capacity and legitimacy to lead them and to give a focus to policy-making as many case studies show (e.g. Cole and John 2001). Even when funding is controlled by many other organisations, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust study Whose Town Is It Anyway? The State of Local Democracy in Two Northern Towns finds strong resilience in institutions and high attachment to local democracy (Wilks-Heeg and Clayton 2006). Studies of quangos show that they formed close relationships with local authorities, often exchanging personnel (Imrie and Thomas 1999). The leaders of these new organisations realised that they needed to cultivate good relationships with local authorities if they were to achieve their objectives. Many of the quangos had a short life, linked to particular funding streams, ministerial initiatives and government terms of office, so had to move quickly to get policies into place before being abolished or restructured. The succession of quangos resembled an alphabet soup of names, with UDCs and TECs being replaced by local strategic partnerships (LSPs) and local area agreements (LAAs), which in turn got wound up. Local authorities remain a permanent fixture in this organisational flux.

Local authorities adapted to the new centrally imposed rules. They learnt to be pragmatic by losing some functions and developing others. Local government retained its role as a service principal even amid restructured services that it delegated or contracted out provision to others. Most of all, local government found new things to do, and the funding to implement them, such as local economic development, carrying out services for the European Commission and inventing a variety of new activities, such as over crime and the environment, a set of developments reviewed by Atkinson and Wilks-Heeg, who write that ‘local government not only remained a sizeable part of the British state, it continued to be a source of policy innovation’ (2000, p. x). The terms centralisation and decentralisation were hard to apply in such a complex and adaptive environment (John 1994). What was happening in England, with the rise of stronger local leaders, partnerships, decentralisation and Europeanisation, was not so different to developments in other parts of Europe (John 2001). All through this time, the same system of political management continued (Gyford et al. 1989), largely unaffected by reforms in the Local Government Act 1988 which were designed to curtail the dominance of parties in decision-making, but which local government easily learnt to negotiate (Young and Davies 1991).

The period of centralisation shows that pragmatism is the value system that underlies the system of political-bureaucratic management and thereby the culture of English local government as a whole. This set of assumptions ensures that local government’s leaders believe there is no point in resisting central government controls. The cases from the past where local government had rebelled, such as the poor law authorities like Poplar in the 1920s and Clay Cross in the 1970s, central government respectively removed the function, or used its legal power to take action. In many disputes, such as over rate capping in the 1980s, very few local councillors took the final step of breaking the law. Such a reflex from local leaders must have been learnt over time. The strong culture of pragmatism in local government encourages officers and councillors to search for new forms of administration rather than seek confrontation. The radical policy experiments of the early 1980s were short-lived. Local government returned to its pre-determined path of administrative adaptation fairly quickly. This is the rational response to the persistent centralism in England where the key powers are in the hand of ministers, and which is reinforced by a cultural distain for local government in central government ministries (Greenwood 1981, Jones and Travers 1996). The legal framework and top-down approach to governing generate either acceptance or passive resistance to the policies of the centre. Local authorities use ingenious strategies to forge some autonomy so long as they are undetected or tolerated by central government departments.

5. Modernisation and New Labour

Many of the same ambiguities in central–local politics continued under Labour, which was in power in the centre from 1997 to 2010 (for a review, see Stoker 2004). New Labour wanted to promote local democracy with its slogan of new localism (Corry and Stoker 2002) and sought to revive local political leadership. Yet it also wished to ensure strong control over the quality of services through performance monitoring, such as the Best Value Regime and Comprehensive Performance Assessment. The result was a contradictory set of policies, some promoting local initiative, others centralising local decisions. This governing style was not controversial in a period of increasing levels of public funding. Rather than leading to problems for English local government, New Labour’s policies maintained or enhanced the political management centre that had survived for so long in the years from 1974 to 1997. Local authorities became adept at using the performance management system to improve measured performance each year (Boyne et al. 2010). They became willing partners in the large number of centrally funded initiatives that were rolled out at this time, such as Sure Start.

The reform of the council constitutions proved to be one of the strongest examples of path dependence. The modernisation reforms, introduced in the Local Government Act 2000, were intended to be a challenge to the hidden world of local political management, were designed to open up local government by providing stronger leadership and greater accountably, in particular by allowing for directly elected mayors, creating cabinets and ensuring clearer and more transparent structures for review and accountability. Just as with the other reforms, local government adapted to the changes and made them its own (Gains et al. 2005). Few mayoral systems were approved, partly because of the lack of enthusiasm from within local government. Even though the mayors worked well and improved decision-making and accountability (see Copus 2006, Elcock and Fenwick 2007, Greasley and Stoker 2008), they were not adopted in the large cities, and mayoral local authorities have tended to be influenced by the existing structures and practices of political management (Hambleton and Sweeting 2004, Copus 2008). The cabinets that were introduced in most of local government largely extend and formalise the party elite systems of political management. The scrutiny committees cannot challenge this power structure even though they can put items on the agenda. Essentially the same system of local government political management carried on as before and was even strengthened by the reforms (Gains et al. 2007). The main victors of the new council constitutions were the senior officers who were able to enhance their desired form of organisation and work ever more closely with the politicians (Gains et al. 2008). Even though the period of New Labour coincided with the popularity of forms of decentralisation and governance beyond local government, what was called double devolution – or community governance, empowerment or community leadership – studies of democratic renewal under New Labour stress the limits of what was achieved and the strength of official discourses about political participation (Barnes et al. 2007).

6. Fiscal austerity and localism

A new era for local government emerged in 2010. Even before the coalition came into power, the previous Labour government had announced cuts to the funding of local government whilst at the same time keeping council tax rises under strict control. Once the coalition had formed the government, local authorities faced cuts of 27% in the Comprehensive Spending Review of October 2010, which would have been enough to devastate most organisations. On top of that, central government remained committed to decentralise beyond the local authorities by giving power to community groups to run services. The Localism Act 2011 also ensures that local authorities must produce information on small amounts of spending, so appearing to add pressure on locally elected government.

Yet the coalition has brought benefits to local government. The Localism Act gives local government more freedoms and flexibility. Some of the old ring fences on spending have gone. There is a new power of general competence. Central bodies that controlled local government in the past, such as the Standards Board and the Audit Commission, have been abolished along with much of the performance management regime. Many of these changes have been driven through by Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and it is significant that he is a local government politician of long standing, and the stability of portfolios under the coalition means he has been in post for a long time.

As central government seeks to respond to weak economic growth and a decline in living standards, once more it turns to the adaptable entity that can efficiently deliver services in exchange for funding. This is shown by the publication, Local Growth: Realising Every Place’s Potential, Cm 7961, October 2010, which gives local government a central role in new programmes that encourage growth, such as local enterprise partnerships. Then the government created City Deals which hand to local government the responsibility for leading economic growth in cities. A range of measures on local taxation and growth give more capacity for local authorities to act, such as the New Homes Bonus and Community Infrastructure Levy, as well as freedoms in certain areas through Enterprise Zones. The government has introduced a Single Local Growth Fund to which Local Enterprise Partnerships can bid. In a move that replicates past exercises in pragmatism, local government gets council tax benefit to administer, but has to meet a 10% reduction in funding. Central government for a century and half has been keen to give locally elected authorities administrative tasks that it does not want to carry out itself because they are troublesome or politically contentious or both, which allows it to shift blame if it needs to. The coalition is no different to its predecessors in this respect. As a multifunctional organisation, local government is willing to acquire these new activities, even on what appear to be poor terms of trade, because it enhances the sum of activities its central core is in control of.

The spending cuts have had a massive impact on services, but most local authorities have been able to manage the changes very carefully. The approach is usually highly pragmatic: seeking a best possible outcome for the organisation whilst protecting as much as is possible (Lowndes and McCaughie 2013). Lowndes and McCaughie’s case studies show institutional resilience in the face of these cuts, with local officers adapting to the changes, some even using them as an opportunity to reintroduce old policy proposals. Many local authorities have learnt how to be resilient, bouncing back after adversity and taking advantage of new conditions, as Shaw’s case studies reveal (Shaw 2012). A lot of this agile and adaptive policy-making was made possible by shrewd financial management. As Travers observes, local government finances have been effectively managed in previous decades (Travers 2012, p. 14), which means that it is well placed to implement the cuts so that the central core of the organisation can remain in place. The effect of the spending reductions on the other organisations of local governance, such as the voluntary sector, is severe (NCVO 2013), and it is possible these bodies will face greater percentage reductions in their budgets than local authorities. In inclement conditions, it is the larger organisations that have the capacity to survive.

Nor will community organisations be likely to compete with local government as a service provider. The attempt to revive community governance under the rubric of the Big Society is not likely to achieve large changes in community mobilisation (Ishkanian and Szreter 2012). There has not been much public protest or engagement by interest groups, such as trades unions, against the cuts (Lowndes and McCaughie 2013). In spite of efforts to introduce elected mayors for local government, just Bristol came to pass in the referenda of 2011 (Liverpool and Salford adopted mayors by council resolution). Only police and crime commissioners appear as new leaders in local areas, but they are elected on much lower turnouts than most local authorities. With the abolition of regional government structures, such as regional development agencies, central government has reduced the number of organisational competitors to elected local government, ensuring it becomes more than ever before the main legitimate and powerful decision-maker present in English localities.

7. Discussion and conclusion

In the language of the new institutionalism, English local government displays a high degree of path dependence. An equilibrium came into place during the twentieth century, whereby the service-focused orientation and pragmatic impulse of local political institutions fitted well with the environment of central politics. Given a relatively nationalised political culture and centralised political parties, there was no room for a powerful and transformative local government, especially after the welfare state had been extended in the 1950s. Instead, there was a role for an organisation with a coherent political-bureaucratic core to its activities, which was content to adapt and reform in response to the demand for services needed at any point in time, either from central convenience or from local initiative. The high level of organisational capacity and culture of pragmatism ensure that local authorities continue to run a large array of public services and keep accessing a supply of offloaded activities from the centre whilst exercising some discretion in the manner of the delivery of services and a degree of autonomy in allocating funds across spending heads. This arrangement continues over time, reinforcing the internal characteristics of local government organisations, in particular political management structure in the core. In periods of rising levels of public spending, this approach to decentralisation usually worked well, so that the main controversies in local–central relationships were rarely ideological but about distribution of benefits and managing the complex form of delegated administration. Overall, there have been good conditions for the survival of this form of local government, helped by the habit of compromise honed over the decades. The consensus was only occasionally disrupted by brief episodes of radical policy-making and confrontation, such as the Poplar dispute of 1921, or by leftist councils in the 1970s and 1980s. Local government has also survived periods of centralisation and party-defined policies from the centre, using the same tactics and applying its pragmatic instincts. Even under inclement conditions, local government usually benefits from opportunities to run services that successive governments have provided, including the one elected in 2010.

The path dependence comes from the negative feedback in the system: because local government is efficient at what it does, other proposals for reform and possible alternative models were not fully considered, such as during local government reorganisation, and participation initiatives in the 1970s, 2000s and 2010s did not take root. The standard operating procedures that structured local politics were reinforced over time as party politics became entrenched and the central executive more defined. As local authorities became larger and more professionalised so their capacity increased. Such path-dependent processes influenced the implementation of new council constitutions after 2000, whereby the cabinets enhanced the existing pattern of core decision-making, formalised the party-based executive and strengthened the partnership between senior officers and the leading councillors in the majority parties.

All this is consistent with institutional accounts of politics (see Pierre et al. 2008, Peters 2012), in particular a version of this approach that not only stresses the salience of formal powers but informal routines and habits that create path dependence. In the 1980s and 1990s, academics had correctly reacted against an old institutionalist view in which formal structures were thought to dominate. In their enthusiasm for the study of networks and community governance, they may have neglected the vital links between the formal and informal power. Stoker highlights this in his use of terms from the study of international relations, that of hard and soft power (Stoker 2011). This is what comparative studies of local governance discovered: in complex policy networks it was local authorities that knew how to manage the relationship between hard and soft power, and they crafted patterns of local leadership to balance out local interests (Cole and John 2001). Politicians and officers, often working in the same buildings and operating in similar organisational structures to those created or modified in 1964 and 1974, inherit and pass on these values and assumptions. With these powerful drivers in place, it is no surprise that path dependence describes the history of local government in turbulent times. Writers on the salience of institutions in local politics, such as Lowndes (Lowndes and Roberts 2013), also outline the importance of these routines. Whereas the argument here concerns the continuity of the organisational cultures and management practices, Lowndes takes a middle course between persistence and adaptability, noticing the incorporation of some new public management ideas (Lowndes 2005).

As citizens, we should be pleased that England has a relatively efficient and adaptable multifunctional organisation that is capable of handling most local policy challenges in a pragmatic way, rarely willing or even able to put up a fight against central government. Even if it does not have the heavy hitting power of directly elected mayors that can be seen in some European counties, English local government’s leadership is politically responsive if quietly so. Nor does England have complex layers of subnational government to deal with as it has a simplified system of large either single or two-tier local authorities. There are, however, costs to this equilibrium trap in that other potential participants are often shut out of this form of elite decision-making – whether the backbench councillor, the community group or the citizen (Cotterill and Richardson 2011, Richardson 2012). The very effectiveness, efficiency and pragmatism of local government, which are the sources of path dependence, may have prevented a more engaged and energetic form of local politics from emerging.

Acknowledgements

The ideas for this article were first presented at The New Localism seminar, organised by the Centre for the Study of British Politics and Public Life at Birkbeck, which took place on 13 February 2013. I owe a debt to the participants at that event for their sympathetic reception to my initial ideas. I also thank Liz Richardson, one of the editors of Local Government Studies, for encouraging me to write these ideas up for the journal’s fortieth anniversary volume, and I am grateful to Tom Entwistle for his insightful comments on an early draft of the article.

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Peter John

Peter John is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University College London. His publications on local politics include Local Governance in Western Europe (Sage, 2001) and Local Governance in England and France (Routledge, 2001), with Alistair Cole. He currently works on the use of randomised controlled trials to engage citizens, many of which were published in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think (Bloomsbury 2001).

Notes

^1. The article is about England rather than the local government systems across the UK. This focus makes the telling of the complicated story much easier. However, the ideas and concepts developed here could be readily applied to local government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Such an account could show how these local authorities, which inherited a common framework of decentralisation, have gradually adapted to control by devolved governments whilst at the same time retaining their pragmatic orientation.