| Making localism work |
| The issue: |
Dear George,
I have just read David Cameron's article in the Guardian. I hope your party have woken up to the case for the small, local and sustainable. Yes people need power to control their own environment, but some things need to be devolved to local institutions, and other things need to be decided at the national, or European level.
I agree with restoring local accountability for hospitals, schools and local transport. Local people can ensure that these services are provided and run at local levels. But the policies and curriculum for the education must be of national standard. the care and treatment we recieve in our local hospitals must be of the highest standards.
The one problem with your proposals is to give local people votes on council tax. You will get problems if people vote for more services, but dont want to pay for them. Also local councils can (and are) very innovative in providing new sustainable and green policies, but would find it hard to do that without proper funding.
My personal view is that I would vote for you once, on a platform of making local services work again, and making them Green. However we would have to see evidence that you mean what you say, both now (before you get into power) and in the first term of any future Conservative parliament. |
| Date Issue Raised: |
17 Feb 2009 |
| My response: |
Many thanks for the email, via my website.
I think we have become over-centralised, and this is bad for democracy. People feel disenfranchised from the decisions that affect them, and local councillors feel disempowered. There is too much direction and control from Whitehall.
This is the background to our proposals; abolishing the regional tier, and devolving those decisions down is an important first step.
I set out at the bottom the proposals in more detail. We propose to give people an opportunity to veto excessive council tax increases, rather than to vote for higher ones. And you rightly make the point that extra obligations on council need to be accompanied by the requisite funding.
Best wishes, George Young
• Abolishing all regional planning and housing powers exercised by regional government, returning powers and discretion back to local communities.
• Creating bottom-up incentives for house building, by allowing councils to keep the increase in council tax revenues from new homes, rather than it being equalised away by Whitehall.
• Allowing councils to establish their own local enterprise partnerships to take over the economic development functions and funding of the Regional Development Agencies.
• Giving a real incentive for councils to promote local economic growth, by allowing them to keep the uplift in business rate revenues.
• Giving local authorities a new discretionary power to levy business rate discounts, allowing them to help local shops and services, such as rural pubs or post offices.
• Provide citizens in all large cities (Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Wakefield, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Newcastle upon Tyne) with the opportunity to choose whether to have an elected mayor, through mayoral referendums. The referendums would take place on the same day to ignite a national public debate.
• Greater use of direct democracy, including allowing residents to veto high council tax rises, and instigating local referendums on local issues.
• Requiring councils to publish detailed information online on expenditure by local councils – including the pay and perks of senior staff, and issuing new guidance to stop ‘rewards for failure’ to sacked town hall staff.
• Scrapping Labour’s new Infrastructure Planning Commission, which it intends to use to force throw the environmentally damaging Heathrow expansion; and instead use National Policy Statements, ratified by Parliament, to help speed up planning inquiries
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Sir George Young Bt MP: Constituency and Parliamentary Website 