This week, Scotland's eight police forces have finally been merged into one.
Duplication will be removed, billions of pounds will be saved and the new force can get on with fighting crime in a modern, coherent way. It is a good reform that was overdue by many years. But now that we've done it, perhaps we could get on and reform Scotland's councils in a similar way.
The need for such reform was underlined just the other day by an advertisement in the jobs pages for a new chief executive for South Ayrshire Council. This man or woman will be paid £121, 680 to run an area that has a population of only 112,000. Over at East Ayrshire Council, another chief executive is paid a similar amount to oversee a similarly small and shrinking population. At North Ayrshire Council, it is exactly the same again.
Sadly, the salaries and expenses of these three chief executives, and the chief executives of all the other councils in Scotland, make up just a top-line figure, the apex of many pyramids, at the bottom of which are the poor council tax payers. All of Scotland's 32 councils have expensive structures duplicated over and over again: human resources departments, planning departments, council tax departments, reflected 32 times like some conjuring trick with mirrors. To make things worse, buried within this structure, a web within a web, is another structure comprising Scotland's 14 health boards. It is a top-heavy, expensive, counter-intuitive labyrinth and there is a better, sleeker and cheaper way to do it: cut the number of councils from 32 to – at most – 10. There may even be a case for going further.
The potential benefits are vast. First, the financial savings. Naturally, there would be an initial bill for ripping the system up by the roots, but this would be an upfront cost and one worth bearing for the longer term benefits, not least of which would be the pruning of that £20m annual bill for the councils' chief executives.
Secondly, a new structure of 10 or fewer councils would reflect how Scots live. Drive out of Glasgow into the suburbs and beyond into the countryside and you'll pass many different council boundaries. These dividing lines were introduced by the Tories in the 1990s in a misguided attempt to neuter Strathclyde Regional Council and they are entirely arbitrary. Scots, in the age of the car, live and work in much bigger areas – and our democratic bodies need to reflect that.
Talking of which, there is another powerful, democratic reason for slashing the number of councils. Opponents of change often talk about the need for localism – the sense that those making decisions should live near those living with the consequences of those decisions. But talk of localism ignores the fact that Scots have zero affinity with their councils – the low turn-out for council elections would support this. Councils are not special or cherished by Scots – they are merely a means to deliver services and that needs to be done as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
New, larger councils would almost certainly deliver these services in a more coherent way too. Services such as planning and tourism would range over areas much larger than the current tiny, shrunken council regions. There would also be no need for time-consuming and expensive inter-council co-operation either and with NHS boards abolished and taken into the new structure, there would be potential improvements and efficiencies in health too.
So could this change happen? Certainly, the fact that shrinking local government down to size has been talked about since at least the 1960s would suggest resistance will be strong, but 32 councils in a country of five million residents, and even fewer council tax payers, is unsustainable.
And doesn't this feel like the right time to do it? After all, national and local government have been imposing cuts on us – the worst of which start this week. Why don't we reverse the process and cut the local government structure too?
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