Hidden in the hot air of Angela Rayner’s devolution white paper published just before Christmas – there are promises, for example, to empower councillors to ‘convene local people to engage in their community as respected leaders’ – there lurk some proposals which need careful investigation.
By-laws currently passed by local authorities are subject to confirmation by central government. But in Rayner’s white paper this rather prudent requirement is pooh-poohed as ‘hundreds of years old and outdated.’ Local leaders, the proposed legislation says, should have the final say over what they want to ban. Furthermore, it continues, authorities should probably get powers to enforce prohibitions by using on-the-spot fines rather than criminal prosecution.
There is little evidence that local authorities will use their new powers sensibly
All this may look like healthy localism, but is likely to turn out to be nothing of the sort. Rather, it will extend petty authoritarianism.
Under Rayner’s proposals, councils will be given remarkably open-ended powers. The government gives comforting examples, like cycling on footpaths or climbing park trees: bit it’s quite possible to imagine much less reassuring instances. What about a ban on, say, vaping or eating fast food in the street, displaying controversial posters on your front door, or holding boozy parties on your front patio? At present we needn’t worry too much about such extreme measures: however keen local apparatchiks may be to pass them (and fanatics abound in local life), they won’t get past the ministry. If the government has its way, however, this would change drastically. True, an entirely outrageous measure might be struck down as outside the powers of the authority. But that is scant comfort to the person confronted by petty officialdom who hasn’t the time or money to argue an uncertain legal toss in court.
And that, of course, is assuming the matter gets to court. The government frankly sees the need to prove a prosecution case as a tiresome brake on local authorities’ powers to order the rest of us around. Far simpler to give petty officials, or even private company employees, the power to issue on-the-spot fines and put on the victim the awkward burden of going to court at a later date to fight the matter if they really want to.
Nor is this the only problem. At present by-laws, while theoretically an exercise in decentralised law-making, are in practice fairly standard: a good case has to be made for a ban that doesn’t appear on the official templates at the Ministry. The problem with doing away with the need for central approval is that it will create a new unpredictability, not to mention adding a piquant new terror to intra-UK travel. Pity the day visitor who doesn’t realise that some activity entirely lawful in Leeds may land him with a demand for name and address and credit card details from some Jack or Jill in office dressed in a hi-vis jacket in Birmingham.
There is little evidence that local authorities will use their new powers sensibly, as the excellent Manifesto Club has pointed out. Since 2014, local authorities have been empowered to issue so-called public space protection orders over behaviour they see as detrimental to the quality of life: a power all too enthusiastically embraced, with people being mulcted for such nefarious activities as walking too many dogs at once (or not producing a poo-bag on demand), foul language, bird-feeding or having an untidy garden. There is no reason to think that authorities will be any less trigger-happy in exercising their new-found rights to prohibit without government say-so anything that some functionary with a bee in their bonnet thinks ought to have a stop put to it.
For that matter, the democracy may not be that local either. Local authorities are getting larger, and the government itself is encouraging this. With a government that sees an ideal authority as a unitary one covering a population of 500,000 or more, the connection between genuine public feeling and local legislation is likely to become more and more remote, with local authorities more and more like regional satrapies able to order their people about at will.
Actually, one suspects that all this rather appeals to the likes of Angela Rayner and Jim McMahon, minister of state for local government, who produced the white paper. For the last 50 years or more Labour has mistrusted genuine local choice, and for that matter the idea of leaving individuals free to do as they like subject only to a few clearly-defined prohibitions. For new-style Labour, the individual falls to be treated as a potentially wayward schoolboy, carefully monitored, never really trusted and always liable to be told what to do by a trusted prefect if they fall out of line. The present proposals, one fears, may presage more like them.
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