Cllr Adrian Pascu-Tulbure is a councillor for Parsons Green and Sandford in Hammersmith and Fulham.
It would be churlish for me – as, I suspect, for most people of a conservative disposition – to wish Reform ill in its quest for greater efficiencies in the local authorities it now controls. Very clearly, councils are wasting money up and down the country, be it on gimmicks, poor contracting, vanity projects, delusions of grandeur, Delboy-style wheezes, or a lack of joined up thinking. Fixing that, and the mentality behind it, is a good thing.
Blowing taxpayers’ money up the wall is a long-term Labour speciality and we all have our pet examples. In my home turf of Hammersmith and Fulham, for instance, Labour spent a year, and about £360k, putting obstacles on one of the local A-roads so that drivers would have to swerve round them, which apparently improves road safety by making drivers concentrate harder. Seven crashes later, they’re still maintaining that drivers perform better in a higher-risk environment. But, it must be said, in national government, we Conservatives have also found ourselves lured by the expensive but eye-catching announcement, all too often designed to curry approval from people who’d never vote for us anyway.
So, in theory, I should be foursquare behind Reform sending in the abominable no-men into Kent County Council. But even a cursory reading of Reform’s “bring out your dead” letter spells out all too clearly how this will end.
In brief, Council officials are being asked to hand over documents that may have a bearing on contracts, framework arrangements, capital expenditure, liabilities, the use of reserves, and any red flags raised by internal or external auditors. These can be electronic or on paper (hooray!) and should cover finance, procurement, audit and contract data, as well as minutes and correspondence on major decisions, internal investigations and whistleblowing reports, and the delightfully vague “any additional documents that might be of assistance”. What matters most is that all documents be “relevant”.
It is difficult to think of a request less likely to yield its desired result.
For a start, it makes it clear that Reform hasn’t done its homework, by, for instance, bothering to work out how much of this is already in the public domain (answer: quite a lot). It offers gaping get-out clauses, most obviously on relevance, which, astonishingly, is left to Council officials to decide, but also on commercial sensitivity. It asks for useless material: minutes of procurement meetings will offer precisely zero in the way of detail, which shouldn’t be surprising.
The request betrays a worrying lack of knowledge about the structure of the Council, addressing it “to whom it may concern” rather than formally tasking a senior officer. It misses out a great deal of Council activity that should be in scope and does nothing to ask whether certain activities or initiatives need to be taking place at all. Most bafflingly, it assumes that Council officials – some of whom will be in genuine fear of their livelihoods – will cheerfully pass over evidence that an avowedly hostile entity, as Reform is, can then get political mileage from. If someone is threatening to blow up your house, do you give them the keys to the basement?
As with all aspects of government, dealing with officialdom has its techniques, especially if you’re seeking to fundamentally change it. In this instance, a close reading of annual reports and accounts, auditors’ reports and recommendations, committee minutes and procurement announcements would produce a much stronger starting point: you won’t necessarily know the answers but you’d at least know what specific questions to ask. Councillors can then use their roles on key scrutiny committees – many of which are broadcast online – to ask those questions. (Smart ones might occasionally co-opt colleagues from other parties to launch multi-pronged attacks.) Freedom of Information is sometimes clunky but, used in the right way, can be remarkably effective. Above all, real effort has to be put into building relationships with key Council officials – who have, on occasion, been known to be responsive to constructive opposition.
Unfortunately, all of this is hard and detailed work. It demands a general’s eye for strategy and a streetfighter’s nose for tactics. But that’s no less than taxpayers deserve.
I may be wrong. This might be the first move in a brilliant ploy designed to generate creative tension between Reform administrations and their officials. But my fear is that it is more a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread – and yet more evidence of an unserious approach to politics from a Reform party more interested in making noise than delivering results.
And if that is the case, then it also, tentatively, points to an area where Conservatives can create a genuinely distinct offering – and start winning back trust on our own terms.
