LOCAL GOVERNMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 222, 19 September 1929, Page 10

LOCAL GOVERNMENT.

BRITISH LABOUR PARTY'S ATTITUDE. OBJECTIONS TO NEW BILL. EXTENSION OF THE SOCIAL SERVICES. (By the RIGHT HON. ARTHUR HENDERSON.) Our system of local government was described forty years ago as "a chaos of areas, a chaos of authorities and a chaos of rates." It has been, like every other political institution, the product (f tlje processes of growth and change. For the most part it has developed in an unplanned and unsystematic manner, without any clear guiding principle. The Acts of Parliament which called into existence the Poor Law Unions and the boards of guardians in 1834, the municipal corporations in 1835, the urban and rural sanitary districts in 1872 and the county councils in 1888 (to name only outstanding events in local government history), were designed to meet immediate needs; but there has been also a mass of social legislation which has imposed upon tho local public authorities from time to time new functions and responsibilities of the most far-reaching character. Growth of population, changes in the distribution of industry, more rapid means of transit and transport, have at tho same time conspired to modify local conditions. And the result is that the state of chaos in local government described forty years ago has continued to the present day without any serious attempt at reform. Each of the political parties, therefore, has placed the reform of local government on its programmo as an obligation long overdue. I propose here to state tho Labour policy on this question. It is necessary, however, at the outset to say that an exposition of the party policy in relation to local government is complicated by the action of the Conservative Government in intro-

ducing at the eleventh hour a bill dealing with the subject in a way that the Labour party at any rate regards as hasty, ill-considered and incomplete. Co-ordination. If there is one legislative problem more than another which requires to bo dealt with in a careful and unhurried manner, with ample opportunity of considering its complexities, it is this problem of local government reform. It is dealt with in the Government's bill as an incidental .consequence of the plan to relieve productive industry of tho burden of local rates.' In giving effect to the re-rating proposals, the Minister of Health found it necessary to alter the functions and powers of local authorities, but this is a very different matter from effecting the permanent regeneration of our system of local government "by means of a comprehensive and carefully-thought-out policy by which the large number of local authorities that now exist can be reorganised and their work laid out on a scientific, co-ordinated plan.

The fundamental fact about our present system, or lack of system, is that there are to-day a large number of different public bodies with varying powers and whose functions frequently overlap and whose work is carried on within very inexactly lim-

ited spheres, on no settled principles of administration, and with little or no co-ordination between their various services. The geographical areas within which these, various local authorities function are many of' them small, and there is consequently a good deal of overlapping, inequality and confusion, whilst various important services, such as transport and housing, lighting and power, are hampered in their development and jealousies and misunderstandings between neighbouring authorities have often intensified these difficulties. In the provision of public assistance to various classes of persons half a dozen different bodies may be dealing for different reasons with several members of the same family; the dfefects of the Poor Law system are common knowledge. And the guiding principle of reform, ,as the Laboiir' party , sees it, must be unification, co-ordination and extension of the social services carried on by the various authorities, which must themselves bo reorganised and properly equipped for effectivo work. We begin with the Poor Law. Break Up the Poor Law. For a score of years organised Labour has advocated the abolition of the Poor Law—and has meant by that phrase much more than the abolition of boards of guardians or the substitution of one directly elected body by another. In our recent social legislation we have largely recognised that it is necessary to disconnect from the Poor Law the public provision made for the sick, the aged and infirm, and to organise the public health services so as to provide for all persons requiring medical attention and nursing, not as paupers to be deterred and intimidated, but as citiens committed to the public care. We hold that the whole Poor Law organisation, with its apparatus of workhouses, its atmosphere of deterrence, its taint of criminality in the poor, left untouched in its essentials by the present Government's Local Government Bill, is out of date and redundant. Our aim is not simply to break up the Poor Law and to transfer this or that function of the Board of Guardians to one or another of the committees of the town council, but to co-ordinate and merge the services of health and public assistance, and to ; administer them with economy and efficiency, in a different spirit from that which has governed the Poor Law organisation. As a natural consequence of the break-up of the Poor Law, and in keeping with the general policy of the Labour party, the whole burden and duty

of dealing with the unemployed would be transferred from local'authorities to a national scheme. The nucleus of a national organisation for the able-bodied unemployed already exists in the machinery of the Ministry of Labour. It would'go far, in our opinion, to ease the situation in what are known as the "necessitous areas" if provision for the unemployed ceased altogether fo be a local charge, and was combined with measures designed to prevent unemployment under the control of national departments; and would, in fact, extend this principle of national provision not only for the unemployed, for widows and orphans, the disabled and the aged, but to other local services. Larger Units. , An important question in this connection is the maintenance of roads. On this hitter point the proposals in the Government's Local Government Bill seem to us to fall far short of what is necessary. Nobody will deny that the present system of* highway administration is unsatisfactory. It places control in the hands of more than 1800 separate highway authorities (in Eng-

land and Wales), many of whom have entirely inadequate resources cither for maintenance or improvement. A real reorganisation of local government would involve the transfer to the central authority of responsibility for maintaining and extending roads and highways that are in fact national lines of communication, subject to safeguards of the traffic control rights of local authorities, and the readjustment of local and State finances as regards other categories of roads. In dealing with this aspect of the general problem of local government reform, we are brought to face the question of enlarging the unit of local administration. Labour policy is indeed based on the necessity of reorganising the areas of local government. For many important functions and services the existing areas are altogether too small, and much of the inefficiency, overlapping and friction would be obviated were the areas enlarged in consonance with a general plan of re-

organisation. The area ot effective local government in respect of many of the existing services, such as electricity supply, water, and transport, is 110 longer that represented by the existing units of administration; in our view, even counties and county boroughs may be too small for some administrative purposes. We would enlarge the units, of local administration on a definite plan, with the object of bringing suitably placed urban and rural areas into a single unit of democratic control without destroying the autonomy of these areas, in regard to matters which affect each of them differently. State and Locality. On the important and complicated question of local rates, the Labour party will seek to readjust the relations between local and national finances with a view not only to relieving the burden of rates, but to increasing the resources of local authorities. We maintain that rates should be relieved by transferring to the State, as I have explained, the cost of poor relief to the able-bodied unemployed, and the expense of maintaining main roads, by extending and increasing government grants and by levying rates on land values. That the present rating system is unsatisfactory 4s a fact which the Government itselfhas recognised, but we do not regard the derating proposals of tho Local Government Bill as a real solution of the problem. Tho system of Government grants i? very haphazard in its incidence; it lias been pointed out, for example, that a grant is given for tuberculosis treatment equal to 50 per cent of the cost, as is also the case with maternity and child welfare —but fever hospitals get nothing, and there is no grant for essential services such as sewers and

scavenging; police get a 50 per cent grant, but not fire brigades, and so on. These are anomalies which show that the whole system of grants-in-aid requires to bo overhauled, and we should undertake the task with the object of ensuring effective minimum standards of local administration and of developing many important services which cannot be efficiently carried on-without grants-in-aid on a more generous and scientifically planned scale than obtains at the present time. Finally, policy of local Government reform contemplates a considerable extension of municipal trading services. We have framed a Local Government Enabling Bill with this purpose in view. The principle of municipal trading is now firmly established. It has been invoked by a Royal Commission as regards the distribution of coal, and is obviously capable of further extension. Payment of Service. It will be seen that the Labour party'* policy involves a material development of the functions and responsibilities of local authorities. It is, in our view, one of the highest forms of public service. We consider it necessary, therefore, to make it possible for citizens of every class —men and women —to render efficient service in this direction, and, in order that they may do so, to make provision for the payment of necessary travelling expenses and subsistence allowances. The principle is recognised in the Scottish Local Government Bill, and we propose that it shall bo generally applied. On the basis of these reforms, we believe that the way will be opened for a great expansion in the work of local authorities and that decentralisation of many administrative and inspectorial functions that now burden the central departments of our national Goverment will bo facilitated.