The Axeman Cometh

We are fast approaching that time when the London Borough of Hounslow delivers its budget for the coming year. In early March 2011 Borough Council will debate and vote upon a series of proposals that will, it hopes, enable it to reduce the local authority's annual spending by £18m. Inevitably valuable provision will be cut and the public will see a reduction in the services it receives.

The Axeman is an avowedly non-party political being. Up until 2006 he slashed services under a Labour administration, causing much angst as he closed John Aird House (a residential care home in Brentford), threatened to privatise vital health care services and hacked £1m in a single blow from the Education budget at a time when monies provided by the government for that very purpose were not ring-fenced. I attended more than one demonstration against what appeared to me to be acts of almost gratuitous inhumanity.

Then in 2006 a new administration took office of which the Independent Community Group (ICG) was a part. Almost immediately our Conservative coalition partners announced the launch of a drastic cost-cutting initiative called the Performance Improvement Programme (PIP) and declared its intention to freeze Council Tax levels, which we generally supported and between us actually managed to do for four years in a row. But there were casualties, not least the Hounslow Language Service, and from opposition Labour opposed many of the savings made by the coalition Axeman, campaigning against cuts in public services as we ourselves had done in opposition.

Now Labour is back in office, and the Axeman is once again playing for the team in red. Granted the impetus for the drastic programme of cuts upon which Hounslow is about to embark comes from central government and its savage Comprehensive Spending Review, but nonetheless the Labour administration has to deal with the same reality as the coalition administration before it and the old Labour administration before that. That reality is that the level of central government support for local councils declines year upon year no matter who is in charge at the Exchequer.

What happens at the stage we are at now is that Lead Members will have asked Chief Officers to identify potential savings in their own departments. Some of those suggested savings are included in this document, which will be discussed by the Executive next week.

The flaw in this process, and which has always been the case, is that Chief Officers will invariably identify those savings that they themselves are comfortable with, and omit those that they are not. For instance, rarely if at all will Lead Members be presented with a proposal to reduce Chief Officer salaries, or to merge departments so as to reduce their number. Unless the Lead Member is unusually hands-on, he or she will almost always accept the options presented as being the only ones realistically available.

The ICG has not had the opportunity to formally discuss these proposals as yet, but what I imagine will concern my colleagues in particular are the various implied assaults on local democracy. In particular the suggestion that Area Committees could be abolished or curtailed. My guess is that these were probably amongst the first proposals to have been mooted by certain of our Chief Officers and I would be surprised if much sleep was lost as they found their way onto the list.

It would be tempting, of course, to consider Area Committees as a luxury by comparison with frontline services to the really needy such as Older People or Children's Services. By that logic we might just as well do away with elections to the council as well - the potential saving involved would be considerable.

But the whole rationale of local government is that it enjoys a democratic mandate. This is precisely why elected members, as opposed to the more "expert" officers, are ultimately responsible for making decisions. Once that principle has been compromised we are embarked upon a journey down a very slippery slope with no handbrake. One cannot put a price on democracy.

I am also concerned by the suggestion that local community centres may be cut adrift. Sure, I do note from the document that the need for local community groups to be given time to build the capacity to take them over is acknowledged, but knowing as I do the complete lack of interest in resident involvement or even opinion that exists in certain departments there is little doubt in my mind that, were such a proposal to be taken up, our community centres would be abandoned with indecent haste and indeed closed down as soon as it was felt it could be got away with.

This is not about empowering communities, this is about certain senior officers seizing a perceived opportunity to remove themselves forever from meaningful public scrutiny.

These are difficult times, and I am reluctant to try to score points by blaming the current administration for the predicament it finds itself in (although it has to be said, under the circumstances, that some of the ruling party's election promises were reckless to say the least - everyone knew there would be cuts whoever triumphed at the general election). However I do believe that the organised community must lobby hard to protect itself from any attempt to use government cuts as a convenient excuse for curtailing its freedoms and its ability to organise.

Old dogs and new tricks

On Thursday I and the excellent Sue Witherspoon, Acting Director of Housing at the London Borough of Hounslow, made a presentation to the Board of Hounslow Homes about the coalition administration's vision as defined through the new Hounslow Plan, and its ambitious Performance Improvement Programme (PIP) which will create the structures through which it will be realised.

Such a presentation was never going to be greeted with whoops of enthusiasm by everybody on the Board. When Hounslow Homes was set up in 2003 under the old administration it was regarded by most as fairly much an appendage of the New Labour political machine. All five council appointees on the new Board were either serving Labour councillors or unsuccessful Labour candidates. Having been rejected at the polls by the borough's tenants, the then administration thought it a good idea to cock a snook at the electorate by putting these same people in charge of the borough's housing stock.

The five tenant representatives were elected behind closed doors and, amazingly, usually resulted in the election of known New Labour activists. The ten council and tenant Board members would then choose another five independent members to make up the remainder of the Board of fifteen.

On the staff side the set-up was not entirely dissimilar. Many of the problems on our estates described elsewhere on this blog arose from the fact that those of us who were the "wrong" councillors were effectively frozen out of discussions relating to things happening in the wards which we had been elected to represent, as were the tenants who were known to have supported us.

When I took over the Housing portfolio I resolved to introduce a new culture into Housing in Hounslow. I believed there was a better way to conduct business, one which was not only more ethical but which also served our tenants and leaseholders better. The conduct of business by whisper and secret handshake may well work in other institutions, but in the field of government it is not only undemocratic, it also leads invariably to stagnancy in ideas and complacency and inertia in service delivery.

Nevertheless the Old Guard retains an important presence on the Board and, surprising as it may sound to some people, I have no issue with this. When we first came into office, both the Community Group and the Conservatives agreed to elect council representatives to the Board on the basis of political balance, rather than political allegiance as had been the case previously. Consequently two of the five seats were offered to Labour, an offer which they happily accepted without any evident embarrassment, even though we all know full well that in the event of Labour being voted back into office in Hounslow the old, undemocratic practices would immediately be restored. As Councillor Mark Bowen rightly said during a recent debate at Borough Council, we do things a better way because we are better.

Similarly I have no issue with other Labour activists being on the Board, just so long as they are properly elected or appointed by means of an open and transparent process. To me it is healthy, and a good thing, for all shades of opinion to be represented on such an important body.

Anyway, I digress. My brief was to present the administration's vision to the Board and I entirely anticipated that the political element would not pass up the offer of a platform from which to give voice to their sometimes very peculiar notions of where they believe me, as Lead Member, to be coming from.

The first indication that this opportunity would not be passed by came as soon as Sue introduced the ruling coalition as being one comprising the Conservative and Community Groups. "And the Liberal Democrats," interjected one of the Labour councillors, obviously disappointed by the more selective and intelligent approach to opposition taken by the small Lib Dem team on the council than by his own gang.

But it was at the Question and Answer session following the presentation that the claque really got into the swing. One member delivered himself of the opinion, completely unsupported by any evidence at all, whether circumstantial or actual, that I intended to sell off all HRA (Hounslow Revenue Account) land to developers to build private accommodation. Another, paradoxically, took the opportunity to plug a proposed development in which a close relative of a very well-known local Labour politician has or recently had an interest, even though the issue had no connection with Hounslow Homes whatsoever.

However, when all is said and done what really was pleasing about the evening was the level of interest being taken by some of the newer members of the Board, who seemed genuinely keen to know where the future lay for social housing in the borough, and how their partnership with the local authority might be further developed. This, and the fact that I already enjoy a good and positive working relationship with most of the current senior officers at Hounslow Homes, bodes well for the organisation in the future.

I hope I am not being naive when I say I believe that many who may at first have been sceptical now see the new positivism as being an altogether better way. There is no reason, other than possibly party diktat, that this positivity cannot in time transcend organisational allegiance and permit a group of people who are united in their desire to improve social housing in our borough to all work together in a spirit of openness and mutual trust.

I remain of the view that it is just possible in certain circumstances, given the time and the will, to teach an old dog new tricks. To those who counsel that it would have been easier to have just shot the dog and been done with, I would simply point out that I still have the gun.