At a recent round table, civil servants identified many challenges in implementing the coalition’s policies on localism. There’s the difficulty of holding accounting officers responsible for spending while their powers are weakening; the risk that local decisions damage wider public interests; the complexity of measuring services’ results rather than methods; the courage required for the centre to stand back when things go wrong locally; and the problems around ensuring that increased local transparency genuinely leaves local people better informed. Seen from the centre, the localism agenda is not a straightforward one.

Seen from the local end, the problem is quite different. The agenda – touted as weakening Whitehall to the benefit of councils and local people alike – is being seriously damaged by the centre’s reluctance to let go, while the localist policies that are being pursued risk making local decision-making slower, more complicated, and less strategic.

Taking this latter point first, the dismantling of the government’s regional infrastructure weakens our ability to pursue conurbation- or subregion-wide strategic schemes – at least until the Local Enterprise Partnerships are well established. Meanwhile, plans such as those for free schools, elected police commissioners, GP commissioning and community-led planning sidestep local authorities to create new, alternative power-bases at the local level. This is all well and good – but local authorities have both statutory responsibilities and democratic mandates to operate in all these fields, where they will play a key role in shaping the environment for these new community-oriented initiatives. The potential for logjams, deadlocks, and decisions compromised to the point of pointlessness must be obvious to all those who’ve worked in an environment of dispersed decision-making, overlapping responsibilities and competing mandates – such as the civil service, for example.

In the end, though, it’s the reluctance of departments – and this emphatically means ministers along with civil servants – to sacrifice their own powers to the localism agenda that is most deeply undermining the policy. Sometimes, ministers’ local interventions are designed to block council revenue-raising schemes: last August the transport department obstructed council plans to introduce workplace parking levies, for example, while communities secretary Eric Pickles has – as this week’s ‘Frontline’ interviewee points out (see p24) – barred councils from fining people who fail to recycle. But sometimes, the centre’s objections seem to be rooted in a gut feeling that local authorities are not to be trusted, and must be scrutinised closely to ensure they’re not doing anything daft.

Witness the new list of local authority data reporting requirements – a list which, notwithstanding Tory denunciations of Labour’s onerous reporting burdens, appears to be far more demanding than the one it replaces. Why must councils – already professionally audited – move from annual to quarterly reporting of ‘revenue outturn’? Why does central government need the results for every single water test conducted on private water supplies? Why are there at least four new indicators designed (ironically enough, given that localism is meant to reduce central strictures) to ensure that councils are passing powers down to local people?

Asked what datasets they really, really need from councils, departments have increased their requirements. Meanwhile, Eric Pickles is insisting that local authorities must axe admin jobs to protect the frontline – a paradox that is not lost on local authorities.

To be fair to the Conservatives, they’ve seldom pretended that localism is about empowering councils: both Pickles and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude have been clear that, for them, the agenda involves leapfrogging councils and passing powers directly to local people.

But the Liberal Democrats have a very different interpretation of localism – and they’ve been thoroughly outflanked. It is probably time they looked behind them; for as things stand, council cuts and the localism agenda are weakening local authorities and strengthening alternative local decision-makers – while leaving many central powers untouched and increasing the reporting burden on councils. Civil servants may have concerns about how to pursue all the aims of localism, but the results of pursuing only some of its aims are more worrying still.

Matt Ross, Editor

Written by Matt Ross, CSW