Jonathan Werran, chief executive, Localis looks at what is coming down the tracks for local government in the year ahead.
We haven’t had time to finish the second week of 2024 but already the tramlines for an epochal year of change and transition are firmly laid for local government.
What do we know about the future? To quote former American defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the second Gulf War: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.’
For the sector, the known knowns are a quintet of fixed events, issues and agendas which will bring enough anxiety to have no bandwidth for known unknowns or even unknown unknowns. In terms of destiny setting, it is a situation mainly akin to a person trapped in a lift and without any agency to choose which floor they land at.
The five particulars are the local elections in May, the general election which we now know will be scheduled for Thursday 24 October, the ongoing crisis of local public financial management, the shunting impacts of the health waiting lists and the predictable consequences of a systemically broken housing market.
Setting the febrile tone for later in the year, the May 2 local elections will be a psephologists bonanza in extrapolating what the London and mayoral combined authority, unitary and some district elections spell on the national stage. All eyes will be on whether the Conservative poster boys of devolution Andy Street and Lord Ben Houchen can swim against the national tide and hold on to the West Midlands and Tees Valley mayoralties. However, local democratic accountability will be served through the efforts local election officials battling through the fog of voter ID and whatever else by way of obstacles can be thrown their way. And it can’t for most be as bad as 2019 for polling fatigue.
Like the Post Office Horizon scandal before the Toby Jones dramatization, the further ratcheting of pressure on overstretched and largely unchecked local government finances will continue, make headlines and then be forgotten about until the next batch of Section 114 notices. Ahead of a jubilee reset of qualified audits, the Government’s overtures for councils to disinter any untouched assets to fund the day-to-day or in the case of hard-pressed districts consider voluntary unitarization, will only encourage many to hold on to what they’ve got and remain solvent and intact until the October general election.
The cumulative effects of the junior doctors’ strikes at the very start of the worst month of the year for a health service creaking at primary and acute level to clear the post-pandemic backlog is another known known. The problems will manifest in places as deeper discharge difficulties around social care, increased absence from work for the local government workforce as well the trajectory of worklessness owing to physical and mental health. With what capacity and resources can the local state attend to the failures and weaknesses of national health provision? Looks like we will discover over the course of the year.
It is to be expected that planning and housing will be strong campaigning issues for nimbys and yimbys alike in the May 2 local polls as well as a dominant domestic chord in the October election. We can expect the heat of political debate to pivot around known unknowns in the form of promises of future top-down targets (1.5 million new homes under a Starmer-led Government alongside 10 new towns to compete with the Conservative retail offer on housing).
However, the day-to-day reality for local authorities will be trying to keep a lid on the financial, social, and economic fallout of temporary accommodation pressures. Like council finances, the issue has raised itself into a slumbering nation’s conscience as another forgotten then remembered national scandal. If anyone wants to implant the personal indignities of our failure to provide enough homes into the debt-heavy attention economy of our easily distracted island race, they should return to the source from which ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’ came and script a compelling drama, cannily scheduled for broadcast in the mould of Ken Loach’s ‘Cathy Come Home’. And that’s as if local government doesn’t create drama enough of its own.
