A challenge to Shropshire Council (and all the others)

With a whimper not a shout, a new Council has burst into being here in Shropshire . Imaginatively titled the "Shropshire Council" it is one of nine new unitary councils which are between them replacing 44 county and district councils. The creation of these authorities reflects an assessment by central government that the old 2-tier structure of local government isn't working (or more properly isn't going to carry on working over the coming years). The government hasn't done away with two-tier completely (yet) but the policy leads in only one direction.

A debate took place before the decision to create these new councils was taken. It was a debate , to a large extent, that the public were not invited to join. In fact, in Shropshire, some of the district councils organised referenda and Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough took the government to court. These actions were, inevitably, futile. In other parts of the country the process exposed political and administrative schisms and the unusual approach the Government has taken allowed local political majorities the chance to crush dissenting minorities.

As the day quaintly referred to locally as "vesting day" approached I took part in a local radio phone-in answering listeners questions about the new Council and its plans. Broadly speaking the listenership seemed unmoved. The local press dutifully reported the council tax freeze for next year without exploring the technical but important issue of how tax rates will be equalised across the county and there was shock and outrage at the sums spent by the Borough Council around its final civic service.

The Council snapped into being. There were no riots. Nothing appeared to fall over. Few people noticed.

That the majority of people are left unshaken by the reorganisation of public services is no surprise. This is after all a country where (the island of Ireland apart) we have never had a popular revolution and, across our history, restricted our outrage to unfair or heinous tax levies. There is a temptation to treat this lack of interest as a signal of contentment, as a suggestion that so long as the bins are collected and the potholes are repaired we won't care what the council is up to. These new authorities must not succumb to this temptation.

Shropshire Council and its fellow local authorities are not mere service providers. Shropshire Council and its fellow local authorities are forms of government. They hold considerable powers to interfere in the lives of the people they serve and they are the key organisations who will shape the way local economies and indeed societies develop over the next few years. There is even jargon for this role: placeshaping. The way they shape their places, the way they exercise their considerable and wide-ranging powers and the way they build a consensus about the future for their areas will profoundly affect the lives of individuals and families right across the country.

So it is important that individuals and families, and businesses and groups, and clubs and bloggers (and on and on) are all involved in shaping the way the local authority works. They need to understand the issues, they need to know how to take part and they need to know that the council will act. Some councils are good at this. Some councils are less good at this. No council is good enough (yet).

Local authority communicators are very focused on improving satisfaction with the job their employers do. I applaud that and I applaud the work done to understand how to increase satisfaction. But the real job is much bigger than that. 

I'd like to see a Council so embedded in its community, so well run and so reflective of the society it serves that people would take to the streets to prevent the government wiping it out of existence. That doesn't seem unreasonable... does it?