It’s the complaint of our times that “things are not working any more.” The list is endless: NHS waiting times, school performance, waste recycling, housing, ferries, air traffic control, drug rehab, potholes, the transition to renewables.
The basic problem is government “austerity,” or better put, a mismatch between what people expect from their public services and what they are prepared to pay for through taxation. But if that’s too difficult to face, the easier option is to consider how we could organise things better. The SNP government has been giving some thought to the matter this week. In addition to the usual call for an independence referendum, it outlined a scheme to reorganise local government.
It proposed scrapping the current 32 local councils and replacing them with six regional authorities and up to 120 community councils. It’s open to consultation on the details of where the regional boundaries would be and which towns would have local councils. There would also be special arrangements for the islands.
The idea is that the regional authorities would have greater powers devolved to them from central government – an echo of Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism”. So they would be in charge of education, housing, economic development, transport and waste collection. The local councils would be responsible for planning, licensing, family support, leisure, sport and culture. Current ward councillors would serve on both their local council and the regional authority. Small towns would get their Council Chambers and Provosts back.
The consultation exercise also throws into the mix devolving some of the powers of the 130 “quangos” or government agencies, such as Scottish Water, the Environment Protection Agency, Nature Scot and Creative Scotland. This would be part of the efficiency drive to cut the Scottish government’s £2bn black hole in current expenditure and the £5bn shortage in capital expenditure. And, almost as an after-thought, social care, is also to be part of the reorganisation.
It all looks pretty radical to me and I wonder if anyone is really up for such recasting of the state. We have, however, been here several times before. In the 18th century we had shires and parishes. In the 19th century we had County Councils and Burgh Councils. In the 1970s the Tory reforms gave us the Regional and District Councils which preceded the current single-tier structure created in 1996.
The general trend has been the centralisation of power and it will be fascinating to see how the financial arrangements turn out in the present reconstruction. No mention is made in the consultation of taxation. Will the regional authorities and the local councils both have powers over local taxation? That is the true test of how democratic the reforms will be.
Let’s take two examples from this week’s news of how the new system might work. Drug related deaths have risen again to 1133 in 2025, the highest rate in Europe. The causes and cures spread through many layers of government – alleviating poverty, drug regulation, policing, education, the NHS and social work. Will they all work together better to get that death rate down?
Waste industry leaders have warned that rubbish could pile up in the streets unless something is done about better recycling before all 10 landfill sites are closed at the beginning of 2028. Scotland currently recycles 44 per cent of its household waste, behind England (47 per cent) and significantly behind Northern Ireland (50 per cent), Wales (58), Germany (60) and Sweden (90). I wonder how each layer of the new system would tackle the various issues involved: funding, packaging, incineration, public education etc
Reorganisations are expensive in the short-run and, as I say, they do not get at the root of the problem – spending and taxation. Nor do they address the human weaknesses that often cause systems to break down. But if reorganisations make us feel better and give new life to public services, then let’s try another one. At least we’d be doing something more than moaning about broken Britain and squalid Scotland.
