Central government is dependent on local authorities for many aspects of service delivery, but the working relationship is often a difficult one. Jon Stone hears council officials’ views of their Whitehall counterparts.
“There’s sometimes the perception in central government that local government is parochial, doesn’t really understand what [civil servants are] talking about, is staffed by people who aren’t expert, and simply can’t see the bigger picture,” explained Louise Morgan. As a senior policy adviser at the Cabinet Office, she works closely with councils on the government’s City Deals programme, so has spent plenty of time at the awkward intersection of central and local government.
Morgan doesn’t necessarily subscribe to this view, she added hastily: she was merely describing it. But the local authority officials attending Civil Service Live in Bristol last month recognised the attitude only too well – and they had their own set of criticisms of the typical London civil servant’s mentality. Dan Gascoyne, assistant director of Essex County Council, said Whitehall officials often give the impression of being out of their depth when they come to discuss issues relevant to local authorities.
“One of the memorable meetings we had was with a government department director-general – I won’t say more than that – who asked halfway through the meeting: ‘What does two-tier mean?’ That worried me a bit,” he recounted, to audible gasps among the assembled local government professionals in the room (CSW won’t explain it here – if you don’t know what it means, look it up now!).
In Gascoyne’s view, the anecdote reveals more than a lack of familiarity with council jargon: if officials don’t understand local systems and structures, their analysis of the problems they’re meant to be solving will be weakened. “You need to understand the nature of the local landscape in a place like Essex. There are ways of working with partners in a two-tier area that you need to be sensitive to,” he said, citing “the political balance and the relationships that exist”.
Paul Taylor, who heads up the executive office at Bristol City Council, also highlighted a lack of local knowledge: “There’s perceptions that civil servants don’t get what’s wrong with a place,” he said. Too often, he added, in the civil service “there’s this perception that programmes should be designed by [central] government”; local authorities are then treated as “just a delivery arm” for Whitehall, tasked with implementing policies into which they’ve had too little input. He made the argument for more of a two-way relationship between the centre and the frontline.
Despite their trenchant criticisms of Whitehall, the local government professionals at Civil Service Live Bristol were always constructive and sober. That fact does bode well, suggesting the barriers between the two sectors are not insurmountable. But both sides clearly feel they have a bone to pick with the other; and communities secretary Eric Pickles hasn’t exactly oiled the wheels of cooperation with his comments about – most recently – “local Luddites” and “Spanish practices”. Civil servants will have to find ways of circumventing those antagonisms if the situation is to improve.