WITH a yet another round of cuts being visited on Scottish councils, it is essential that there is a discussion on the future of local government in Scotland.  

From that point of view the report by the think tank, closely associated with Gordon Brown, Our Scottish Futures is welcome. The title Re-Wiring Scotland is more than a nod to Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, for ultimately the report adopts the contentious position that Scotland should legislate to allow a “metro mayor” system.

However there is a at least one point in the report that is not contentious at least across the left in Scotland, that is the need to decentralise power from the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood to local authorities. 

The Red Paper Collective, for example, a group of socialist activists, trade unionists and academics, has noted in a number of its publications the extent to which the Scottish government had absorbed powers and resources that ought to be locally based.

Let us begin with finance. According to analysis from the Scottish Labour Party, the SNP government has cut councils’ non-ringfenced revenue funding by £937.3 million in real teams between 2013-14 and 2021-22. 

Non-ringfenced funding is the money that the local authority can spend at its discretion as opposed to money the government gives it to spend on specific projects. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) claims that ringfenced expenditure affects up to 65 per cent of budgets. 

There is little doubt about who is paying the piper: the vast bulk of local government funding in Scotland is still allocated by central government. 

Currently the block grant to local authorities from the Scottish government makes up around 85 per cent of their net revenue expenditure, with the remainder coming mostly from the regressive council tax.

Strangely while the report acknowledges the need for proper funding of local government, and explicitly calls for the council tax to be replaced with a more progressive form of local taxation through cross-party consensus, it does not call for constitutional change that would guarantee local government autonomy and prevent the absorption of local government areas of responsibility into Holyrood.

It is not just control of finance that robs local government of democratic control in Scotland. An article by Vince Mills in the Red Paper’s There is a Third Option publication has detailed the extensive appropriation of previously local controlled provision by Holyrood. Last year the SNP announced plans to create a new national care service. Its plans were met by this response from Cosla: “The consultation launched today cuts through the heart of governance in Scotland — not only does it have serious implications for local government, it is an attack on localism and on the rights of local people to make decisions democratically for their place. It once again brings a centralising approach to how decisions which should be taken locally are made.”

The SNP government is not only concerned about controlling delivery of services, it also wants to shape the nature of that service. Education has been centralised through the Curriculum for Excellence and the development of a National Improvement Framework and school performance indicators. 

In addition, further education, once run by local councils, is now funded centrally; the fire and rescue service has been centralised and so have Scotland’s police services. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the independence of local government in Scotland is at risk which is why it is surprising that this report doesn’t consider how we embed local authority autonomy through constitutional reform.

A further major weakness is the report’s approach to inequality and the poor performance of the economy in Scotland. While its description of these is accurate, its analysis of why this is the case and how we respond, fails to acknowledge much more fundamental issues than the fact that “Scotland’s low-growth, low-productivity economy is intrinsically linked to levels of regional inequality, due to a lack of access to well-paid jobs and economic opportunity.”

What it does not explore is the relationship of this regional inequality to ownership of the Scottish economy. As Greg Dalzell of Commonweal explains in the Radical Options for Scotland and Europe (ROSE) magazine: “Scotland is one of the most foreign-owned countries in the developed world and the consequence of this is the loss of more than £10 billion pounds every year mostly as a result of shareholder dividends and other forms of profit extraction.”

As Dalzell points out, taking control of the Scottish economy means public ownership. For example, Scotland still does not have a national public energy company. Our energy infrastructure is largely owned by foreign multinational companies or they are owned by foreign public energy companies like Norway’s Equinor. And yet the report makes no mention of this nor its solution: ensuring that the Scottish Parliament has the necessary powers to take key elements of the economy under democratic control.

Neither does it acknowledge that the STUC has already outlined how public services could be transformed in Scotland to address inequality by a fundamental reform of taxation not just for higher and much more redistributive taxes, but for a shift in both tax rates and the tax base to fund universal basic services. 

Instead, the report offers a tried and tested “reform” that sits perfectly with the neoliberal model of local government, as its solution to the crisis in Scottish local government — “a new Local Governance Act to create Scottish Combined Authorities, clarify the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government, and provide a mechanism for devolution within Scotland.” This includes “the possibility of a directly elected figurehead.” For which read elected provosts (mayors in England).

This approach has already been implemented across several areas in England as a result of the Cities and Local Government Act (2016) and there are now a number metro mayors in place. However, constitutionally there is no directly elected body to hold them to account, instead, in England the mayor is “scrutinised” by overview and scrutiny committees of the councils comprising the councillors who will be looking to the mayor to ensure the best deal for their council area. This is not only a recipe for horse-trading, croneyism and patronage but, much more seriously as John Tomaney, professor of urban and regional planning at UCL argues  “… the model of devolution currently on offer is one designed to advance a narrowly defined set of business interests with very little democratic scrutiny…”

Scotland does not need to enable more access for business, especially the big corporates, to our democratic institutions. They are already too deeply embedded. Instead to ensure local government autonomy, the system, powers and functions of local government should ultimately be enshrined in a written constitution as part of a UK-wide federal settlement, but as soon as possible they should be embedded in Scottish legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament. This includes a reassignation of levels and forms of taxation along the lines advocated by the STUC. Scotland needs more democracy and less big business influence. This report offers the opposite.