How Covid changed Scotland: Our local government must be reimagined

In the fifth part of a series exploring how life in Scotland has been changed by the pandemic, Ben Wray explains why local government has to be reimagined 

LOCAL authorities have been in crisis for so long now it almost sounds like a cliche to say it. The austerity era, ushered in by David Cameron’s Tory-Liberal coalition government in 2010, has been bad for all public services, but none more so than local government, which has taken more than its fair share of the cuts.

The pandemic was therefore just the latest blow to the ability of ­councils to deliver local services. ­Cosla ­estimates the financial ­impact of the pandemic on councils in 2020/21 was £767 million.

After the one-two punch of ­austerity and Covid-19, what state are our councils in? And with Scotland’s local authority elections less than two months away, what do we want ­local government to look like after the ­pandemic?

READ MORE: After Covid: What our Scottish NHS needs post-pandemic

Constraints and closures

OF all the responsibilities councils have, providing spaces for people to meet and do cultural and sporting activities may not come first in most people’s list, but for Jim Monaghan, an organiser of the Glasgow Against Closures campaign, these venues are “absolutely crucial”.

“Councils are increasingly seeing cultural and community centres as added extras, cream on top, instead of being a key part of what a council delivers,” he argues.

“It could be a knitting club, a chess club, swimming, a running track, or a drop-in centre for benefits advice. We should have learnt from the ­pandemic that for mental and physical health and for community cohesion, these things are really important.

“If we are not running these ­services, what happens to the ­people that are isolated? What happens to the community when you are not meeting your neighbours in different ways?”

The closure of local community centres, libraries and sports pitches in Glasgow is an example of how the pandemic has, in some cases, led to a permanent reduction in the services which councils are offering.

As Glasgow locked down for the first time, it quickly became clear that Glasgow Life – the arms-length ­organisation which runs the ­council’s sports and cultural facilities – was ­going to be in trouble. 101 out of 171 Glasgow Life venues were closed for health and safety reasons. In a ­normal year these venues bring in £37.5 ­million in income to ­Glasgow Life, about one-third of its total ­funding (the rest coming from the council).

The council came to a ­funding agreement for Glasgow Life ­whereby it would provide a minimum ­guaranteed annual income of £100m for four years. The problem with this settlement was that £117m was ­required each year to re-open all of the council’s services.

The result? Sixty-two venues would remain closed. Half of these venues are in the 20% most deprived areas in Scotland.

“People in the city’s areas of ­social and economic ­deprivation may find that they no longer have all of the ­opportunities for sport, ­physical ­activity, learning, ­culture, and ­community and family ­services ­available to them locally,” the ­council’s own Equality Impact ­Assessment on the closures found. “There is potential for an impact for service users of displacement.”

The Glasgow Against Closures campaign has been successful in getting the libraries re-opened, but many community centres and sports facilities remain closed until further notice. Others are set to be re-opened, but no longer as council services.

The council set-up an initiative called People Make Glasgow ­Communities (PMGC) in February 2021, which opened up almost all of the council’s buildings and land – including the 62 closed venues – for possible asset transfer to “any ­organisation, community group or commercial organisation” which wants to make a proposal for how to use it. The council had received 454 expressions of interest as of February.

Monaghan, who is also director of Roma rights group Romano Lav in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, says that the council is using the pandemic as a “cover” for cost-cutting, and does not believe community asset transfers are a positive solution.

“Council ownership is accountable, you can hold your councillor to account. But most important is the financial security,” he says.

“If a roof falls in or there’s a ­problem with the boiler in a venue, if it’s got the financial clout of the council behind it then that’s easily sorted. But if it’s transferred to half a dozen community activists, then the pressure to find funding becomes ­immense.”

For council staff working at these venues, community asset transfer can quickly lead to unemployment.

“One of the big costs is always staff and one of the ways you can cut costs is getting volunteers to do things that workers used to do,” Monaghan ­explains.

READ MORE: How Covid has changed the politics of Scottish independence

Glasgow Against Closures is ­calling on the council to re-open all the venues, a moratorium on all PMGC transfers and for Glasgow Life to be brought back in-house, so that the venues are run directly by the ­council. However, Monaghan accepts that the problem does not just lie with the council.

“This is the result of 20 years of centralisation of powers and the ­disempowerment of local ­authorities in general, by ­governments of ­whatever colour” he argues. ­“Councillors have got few powers left to make any decisions that make a difference to local people.”

Twenty-minute local democracy

IN many ways, to talk of “local ­government” in Scotland is somewhat of a misnomer. Firstly, because Scotland’s councils are not exactly local, at least not in the way local democracy is usually conceived.

The current system of 32 local ­authorities was created by the ­Tories in 1994, and today it means that ­Scotland has the least “local” local democracy in Europe. The average council size in Scotland is 2502 km², 65 times larger than the European ­average (38 km²).

Secondly, “government” ­usually means elected representatives can to some extent raise their own ­revenue from citizens and decide how it is spent. But local authorities only do this to a very limited extent today, with almost 80% of their annual budget coming from a Scottish ­Government grant and non-domestic rates (both controlled from ­Holyrood) and the rest from council tax, which councils only have very limited ­powers over.

Add to that the fact that a ­growing proportion of the money that does come from the Scottish ­Government is ring-fenced for ­spending on ­Scottish Government priority ­areas (58%, ­according to Cosla), and one can ­easily see why James Mitchell (above), ­University of Edinburgh Politics ­Professor, told a Scottish ­Parliament committee in 2019 that it may be better to now talk of “local ­administrations” rather than “local government”.

“The evidence is clear that ­disempowerment has not been ­addressed,” he added.

Creeping centralisation appears to have been embedded into the ­pandemic response as well. ­Audit Scotland’s latest review of local ­government finds that ­“during the last few years we have seen ­increasing amounts of funding ­provided by the Scottish Government being ­ring-fenced for specific purposes and this limit on local flexibility has also emerged through the funding ­arrangements for Covid-19”.

The introduction of the National Care Service looks set to take this a step further. The plans are not finalised, but the Scottish Government looks likely to takeover the commissioning of care from local authorities.

Craig Dalzell (below), head of policy and research at the Common Weal think-tank, tells The National that there is a “twin problem” of centralising ­powers on the one hand, and of “councils being dumped with responsibilities, but without the resources to pay for them” on the other. He says the net-zero carbon transition is a case in point of the latter.

“The Scottish Government now expects councils to be retrofitting all of their public buildings, ­including council housing, but they are not ­getting any new resources to do that, nor new tax-raising powers.”

Dalzell, who lives in Kirkmuirhill, a village in the South Lanarkshire Council area, believes the community action at the start of the pandemic –when local groups were set up across the country to provide help for people self-isolating — highlights the need for genuinely local government.

“One of the big weaknesses we had was that we didn’t have these local structures in place before the pandemic,” he says. “I doubt these actions could have been centrally ­co-ordinated, they had to rely on the local groups on the ground.

“The vulnerability of that is while a lot of places, including my village, had quite a strong response group, some places didn’t have the ability to set one up.”

Dalzell has co-authored a Common Weal paper advocating a municipal level of democracy, below the current council level.

READ MORE: How Covid changed Scotland: There is much still to be done to repair Scottish economy

“You need people on the ground, who know the area, who have ­relationships with people, and who are empowered to take the action immediately,” he argues. “That’s ­municipal government, and it’s just the normal thing in most of Europe.”

In wake of Covid-19, the ­Scottish Government has promoted the idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods, where one can access work, services and amenities all within a ­20-minute ­distance. The aim is to enhance ­community self-sufficiency and ­ecological sustainability. Dalzell ­believes democracy is the missing link in this concept.

“Local democracy should be no more than 20-minutes away,” he says. “For me currently, it would be quicker to get to Glasgow City Council’s head offices than the head offices of my ­‘local’ government [in Hamilton].”

The local elections

LOCAL Government is not exactly popular with the public. Polling from 2019 finds Scots’ trust local government more than the UK Government “to make fair decisions”, but less than the Scottish Government.

Perhaps the most revealing statistic is that 9% said they didn’t know if they trusted local government, compared to just 1% who said the same about the Scottish and UK Governments. There is a lack of interest as well as a lack of trust.

Monaghan believes these attitudes are driven by a feeling of “disem­powerment” at local level.

“People feel that they have no say over what’s happening, and the ­further you take those decisions away from people, people feel disenfranchised and disengaged from the whole process, that there’s nothing they can do,” he says.

That perhaps explains why voter turnout in the last local council elections, in 2017, was just 46.9%, much lower than the Scottish Parliament and UK Parliament elections which took place around the same time.

Given the local authority elections are less than two months away and the crisis facing councils is evident, surely genuine local government ­reform has to be on the agenda? Dalzell says that “unfortunately, it doesn’t currently constitute a serious part of the debate”.

No-one voted for the decline of ­local government, but nonetheless it’s ­happening, and the pandemic appears to have accelerated that process. The least the Scottish public deserve in the run-up to May 5 is a proper debate over its rights and wrongs.