» News » Blogs

Our new Prime Minster Gordon Brown should have been in Birmingham last week to chew the fat with around 200 of local government’s top communicators.

Councils are waiting expectantly to see what Gordon‘s coronation means to the future of local councils in this country.  And he and his government were much in the minds of delegates at the LG Communications annual conference at Birmingham Council House.

Brown is not known as a lover of local government and is thought to be a fully paid up member of the control freakist tendency that has dominated central-local relationships in recent years. On the other hand, he has been making some vague devolutionist noises as part of his pitch to the country in recent weeks so no-one quite knows what will happen next.

If he had come to Birmingham, Gordon would have seen that local government is  an energetic and exciting place to be at the moment, if somewhat defensive about its position in public life and a little sceptical about the government’s commitment to “localism�.

Sitting in the 19^th century splendour of the Council House would also have done him good because here he would have been reminded of what local government could do when it had real power and the imagination to use it wisely.

As few speakers at the conference failed to remind us, Birmingham was the home of Joseph Chamberlain who as mayor of Birmingham in the 1870’s transformed the fortunes of the city and its council with visionary leadership and the kind of roll up your sleeves and get it done approach to public life that is somewhat lacking in the Age of Celebrity Big Brother.

These were the days when there was a perfect balance of responsibility between local councils and central government. The British Government ran the world and left local government to run the country.

Left to its own devices local government can achieve great things.  In his day Joseph C left the city “parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas & watered and improvedâ€Â�.  In more modern times, Birmingham has been transformed into a thriving city of culture and business by councillors prepared to think big.

But all too often governments want to mess around with local government and keep it under control. These days the government does it by prescribing exactly how local councils spend their cash and by giving local government hundreds of managerialist targets to achieve.

Of course the government calls it “reform� and “raising standards�. But this often leaves councillors too preoccupied with the minutiae of performance management and financial accounting to have the time or the capacity to let the imagination fly and to make a real difference in their towns and cities.

This leads to some dull communications too with councils trying to find interesting ways to report performance tables and CPA scores when they really should be telling an exciting and compelling story about how they are changing the area for the better.

So if Mr Brown really wants to change things in this country the best thing he can do for local communities is to do absolutely nothing.

Leave it to councils to get on with the job of transforming local lives, Gordon.  After all it worked for Joseph Chamberlain.