Hollowed-out local government can no longer cope

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

As Rachel Cunliffe of the New Statesman was told by an MP in her piece on broken systems of accountability in Britain

You can read her piece here (and also her Bsky Thread here) which involved a site visit to Shefford, Beds with the local MP for the area, Alistair Strathern (whose constituency is named after the Hertfordshire market town of Hitchin – perhaps more familiar to Cambridge residents as the junction where the A10 and also the Cambridge-Kings Cross railway service joins the main north-south national transport arteries as you head towards the capital. Which also makes the constituency a prime target for developers targeting the London commuter market too.

“During the 20-minute drive from Shefford town centre to Hitchin Station, we passed at least six examples of… …new-build housing estates their councils have refused to adopt.”

Above Rachel Cunliffe, New Statesman Magazine, 23 July 2025

“In Shefford, I visited Old Bridge Way: a 220m stretch of road through an industrial park connecting an estate of some 1,000 homes to the centre of town and a Morrisons. I stood there for ten minutes watching non-stop traffic navigate a maze of potholes six inches deep. Central Bedfordshire Council says this is not its responsibility, as it doesn’t actually own that part of the road. Who does own it is an open question: the company responsible for it was liquidated in 2024″

Cunliffe (2025)

Want to see what Old Bridge looks like from G-Streetview on the ground?

Above – Potholetastic Old Bridge Way in Shefford, Beds, which no one seems to be responsible for

“No – really, whose responsibility is it given that lots of people use the road to get to the supermarket?”

A question for local government law specialists? Alternatively, write to your MP and put that question to the Department for Transport or the Deputy Prime Minister and see what response you get.

Perhaps a more important question would arise if someone got injured as a result of a road not being maintained by anyone, one that is used frequently by a food-buying public.

Who is legally liable? Because when you look at the junction of the High Street and what is effectively a road to an industrial park, the image captured by GSV in August 2024 doesn’t show any road signs saying that the road is not a public highway that is maintained by the responsible council.

“What a mess!”

This is what happens with disempowered local government enfeebled by decades of centralisation, austerity, and compulsory outsourcing.

“What happened to civic pride?”

You cannot have civic pride in a system imprisoned by the structures of the above-three.

And potholed roads are a symptom of all three. A town and transport planning system that allows the abuses exposed in the Grenfell Inquiry rubberstamped by a success of low-calibre ministers and politicians meekly scrutinised by successive Parliaments unwilling to change their outdated and archaic structures, systems and processes made it easy for profit-hungry firms to ‘externalise’ as many of the costs onto someone else. Hence the ability of developers to establish short-lived limited companies for the purposes of planning and construction, before liquidating them upon completion and extracting the profits/wealth. As for any faults and failures? Responsibility evaporates with the liquidation. There is no return address as the firm responsible has ceased to exist.

“Shouldn’t the local council take over?”

Presumably the local council / highways authority has its own legally-enforceable terms and conditions that developers have to meet in order for roads to be adopted. If a developer does not meet those conditions, why should the local council be penalised financially for the questionable practices of the building industry?

“Does Cambridge have similar problems?

It does, but by the sounds of it not on the scale that Central Bedfordshire seems to have. One significant reason for this is the role of civic society organisations. Or more specifically, CamCycle – which is red-hot on scrutinising planning applications relating to cycling infrastructure. Such has been their growing level of support and membership growth that they have been able to employ a core team of staff including a specialist infrastructure officer who engages directly with developers before planning applications have been submitted, thus ‘designing out’ some of the problems that other places are faced with.

But not everywhere has the critical mass of residents that provide a fertile recruiting pool of informed and motivated members willing to scrutinise these things in/with significant numbers and expertise. Which is why relying on a charity/civic society solution can never be enough to meet what should be provided for through general taxation.

Ideally what should happen is there should be remedies in place for councils to complete the work and then bill/sue the firms and ultimate financial beneficiaries of the development responsible.

The problem there is that the ‘pro-business’ environment that ministers of the main parties like to promote – eg ease of establishing new firms, and ‘light touch regulation’ allow for the opaque, over-complicated, and hard-to-scrutinise ownership structures to be established. On top of that, there is a significant professional services industry happy to advise. For a price. You only have to look at one very high profile proponent of this – the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was heavily criticised after he left Parliament for establishing such a complicated set of structures for his post-ministerial work. That article was written in 2009. Fast forward nearly 15 years later and the institute that bears his name has the feel of a very large and affluent public policy institution. Have a read of the institution’s consolidated accounts submitted to Companies House on 23 Oct 2024 here.

Note I’m not commenting or providing an opinion on the work of the institute. Looking at the directors’ statements in the consolidated accounts, the work of the institute is so diverse and wide-ranging that even in a brief internet search you will find some excellent pioneering work with some of their projects alongside things at other extremes that make you wonder what on earth they were thinking.

“What’s all that got to do with hollowed-out local government?”

Given the influence of TBI on the present Labour Government, it’s unlikely that the changes needed in the regulation of business and commerce will result in the simplification and consolidation needed to enable transparency and accountability in the scenarios seen in Shefford.

One reason why Alistar Strathern MP made the pitch to Ms Cunliffe for her article was that in the run up to the last general election, housing was a huge issue in the constituency he contested – so much so that The Guardian covered it here.

“Canvassing in one of the town wards, Alistair Strathern, the [then] Labour candidate, spoke to seven households in one street who had recently arrived from north-east London – three from the same borough of Waltham Forest.”

Above – Robert Booth for The Guardian, 26 June 2024

In the case of Mr Strathern, he will be more than aware that the people moving into those properties are highly likely to be ‘swing voters’ – and that if Labour fails to deliver significant improvements for new home owners of substandard private housing, there will be more than enough alternatives waiting to snap up their votes – on both the right and left of politics.

I hope Ms Cunliffe follows this article up with an examination of what a renewed and empowered local council could be

I.e. one that could ‘deal with’ the multiple issues she has raised, and in a manner that does not require having to approach central government for assistance.

Because that for me is the problem of party political culture that Labour is struggling with in Whitehall: The centralising instincts of sending in the cavalry to deal with an issue that is best dealt with an empowered local council.

I found out the hard way just how limited that model actually is during my civil service career both in the old Regional Government Office in Cambridge (that covered East Anglia) and in Whitehall itself. As much as I really liked going on visits outside of central London – in my 20s I’d accept any invitation going. Opening a front door? I’m there! Opening an envelope? No event too small! It reflected my own personal insecurities at the time – wanting to be surrounded by people who would be nice and friendly to you. (This was a time when the Government was spending heavily on community investment and regeneration)

This time around, the Government does not have that network of regional offices. It’s still not clear how the departmental-specific civil service ‘campuses’ dotted around the country are meant to function. That said, the record of the regional offices was not great – for a whole host of reasons which I’ve written about in many blogposts over the past 15 years!

Ultimately there are two specific things that need looking at:

  1. What are the legal powers and functions (in particular the enforcement functions) that local councils need in order to deal with the problems locally and not go cap-in-hand to ministers?
  2. What are the financial and resource requirements needed to deliver on 1 above, and how should those be provided for? (Eg through funding from central government by a complex mathematical formula, through the creation of much wider powers of local taxation and revenue-raising (such as the tourism taxation powers Scotland now has because the Scottish Parliament legislated for it. See also empowering resident foreign nationals to vote in local elections who otherwise pay taxes but don’t get to be represented. ‘No taxation without representation’ etc).

That will then give MPs such as Mr Strathern some ideas to put to policy-makers in government departments to come up with solutions for ministers to present to Parliament.

Food for thought?

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: