Lambeth’s children suffered because of the council’s war on Thatcher

As if Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and other places were not enough, last week we had another local authority child sex abuse scandal, this time from Lambeth. The child sex abuse inquiry’s damning report concluded that for years councillors and local authority managers in the borough were too indolent, too concerned with politics, and at times too compromised with local pressure groups, to take steps to protect some of the most vulnerable children in their care. The sufferers, as ever, were the children.

Meetings, inquiries and promises to do better from Lambeth and other councils up and down the kingdom are a certainty. But it may be time for some more blue-sky thinking. True, any decent state needs to look after the young, the old and the vulnerable. But should we be giving this job to local authorities at all? Quite apart from the fact that a number of them seem to have done it very badly, there are several other reasons for a rethink.

For one thing, in contrast to the leisured days of 1948, when the numbers needing looking after were much smaller and councils less bloated and politically riven, it’s difficult to see the present system as enormously efficient. There are it seems around 150 authorities in England with responsibilities for social services. That potentially means 150 separate but equal bureaucracies, each headed by one or possibly two directors (one for children’s services, one for adults), all probably earning well in excess of £100,000 per year plus their support staff. This doesn’t seem to be a very effective use of public resources, even if it does give council-hopping members of the municipal managerial class scope to play off one authority against another to their own profit.

Nor is the function of local authorities as social care providers some ancient feature of the constitution. Elected municipal authorities in England have existed for less than 100 years, and those in Northern Ireland never really at all. And even in England councils essentially got in by a side-wind, as a by-product of the twentieth-century process of democratising local administration and prising it from the hands of local bigwigs. And so in 1930 councils took over responsibilities from the boards of guardians previously elected by local ratepayers. The process was completed by legislation passed in 1946 and 1948, which firmly placed on them responsibility for children and others who were unable to fend for themselves.

Moreover, however democratically accountable local authorities may be, it’s worth thinking about the limits of local democracy here. When Aneurin Bevan presented the idea of the NHS to the Cabinet in 1945, he deliberately took healthcare away from local authorities, a number of which had previously provided it. And rightly so: as he said, this was something that needed central planning through regional bodies, rather than being subjected to local political control by elected councils with other fish to fry.

There is a strong argument that exactly the same reasoning – that your treatment should not depend on your postcode – applies to social care. Whether care is free or not, children, the old and those who can’t fend for themselves should be entitled to be looked after to a centrally-administered standard, whatever the political composition of the local authority they live under. It’s all very well to have popular votes on matters of genuine social choice, such as planning permission and whether the high street should be replaced with a state-of-the-art shopping mall. So too with genuine expenditure choices: voters should decide whether municipal money buys a new swimming pool or a new car park, or whether they prefer a leisure centre to a discount on their council tax. But looking after children, or the old or disabled, is a duty, not a discretion. As with health, there is no reason for subjecting it to the vagaries of local politics: there is no more reason for elected local politicians to be involved in the choice between funding a swimming pool or a children’s home than there is to let them decide whether or not a city gets a new acute hospital.

Indeed, this is one area where, to put things bluntly, too much local democracy can be positively bad. In Telford and in Rotherham, where authorities failed to intervene despite very credible stories of abuse of children under their care, there is a strong suspicion that this was largely due to elected councillors’ disinclination to rock the boat and offend particular local interest groups. In other words, the safety of children played second fiddle to political manoeuvring, and predictably came off worse. In Lambeth this was true in spades. The Jay report has left us in no doubt that Lambeth’s elected councillors in the 1980s and 1990s were not only incompetent but obsessed with their political battles against Margaret Thatcher, and in addition were determined to avoid crossing the trade unions; and that because of this the children under their care were left to fend for themselves. Councillors are of course entitled to play politics; but we have to make sure that this is not at the expense of the most vulnerable.

If councils won’t do as protectors of the weak, who should do the job? This isn’t easy. But there is something to be said for a central government body, perhaps with regional outgrowths, taking responsibility for providing children and others with the social care they need – as is the case in Northern Ireland, where the job is done by five regional trusts. True, this may be top-down government; but it is arguably top-down for a good cause. The ability to roast a government minister for any failings is likely to do a great deal more than any number of inquiries made, or initiatives undertaken at the insistence of government, by cash-strapped local authorities.