Letters to the Editor | 29 October 2005

Power to the locals

Leo McKinstry takes a dim view of the new localism (‘Local schmocal’, 22 October), but most of the new intake of Conservative MPs have signed up to the localists’ ‘Direct Democracy’ charter. We have done so because we believe Britain’s centre-right needs a strategic rethink. Why? First, because we recognise the government has failed to improve public services because it has tried to micro-manage them from Whitehall. Second, because we realise that no matter who wins elections, power will still reside with unelected and unaccountable quangos, judges and Eurocrats.

Only by making the public services downwardly accountable to the people they are meant to serve, as opposed to upwardly accountable to remote elites, will we live in a Britain where the police go after criminals, the health service treats patients properly and schools educate children.

Mr McKinstry is quite correct to identify just how difficult it will be to achieve localism. The true localist — as opposed to the lip-service localist — recognises that there will indeed be instances of failure; an inevitability in a pluralist system. There will naturally be cries of a ‘postcode lottery’. Yet under our centralised system this is precisely what we have. With localism, those let down by local public services could do something about it.
Jeremy Hunt
House of Commons, London SW1

As a district and county councillor, I see examples every day of encroachment by Whitehall on areas of policy which should be in the remit of local authorities. Earlier this month the government announced that it was axing public inquiries; the Licensing Act of 2003 virtually excludes both parish and district councillors from acting as consultees and from representing the communities who elected them; rejections of planning applications for new housing estates or developments such as wind turbine ‘farms’ are reversed by an inspector who assumes he knows better than the people directly affected; there is a continuing attempt to impose controls on the budgets of local councils so that less and less is left to be decided by those elected locally.