6. The Relationship Between the Centre and the Local

Cutting sensibly should involve some agreement between central and local forces about what should go and why. The Big Society promises a different relationship between the centre and the local. The centre here might mean Whitehall or it might mean County, City or Town Hall. Local means those places that relate to the centre - local authorities, schools, neighbourhoods and so on.

A lot of the rhetoric around the Big Society leads us to imagine a local with more say and more power. Local people must decide what is right for them. The image that follows is of devolution of accountability and responsibilities. But by another argument, in order for it to flourish, the centre should assume more not less accountability. And more not less of certain types of responsibility for local services. Tesco is not a bad place to start thinking about the relationship between central and local responsibilities. It runs about 2,500 stores and provides about a third of the nation's groceries.
 
Most of the business - recruitment, employment, management, purchasing, distribution - is driven from the centre. But to be successful, the business must accommodate variations in local tastes, purchasing power, staff competency and security in the neighbourhoods in which it situates its shops. So the stock, the staff and the buildings differ in small but important ways from locality to locality. (In all likelihood, Tesco will not think in terms of 2,500 places, but in terms of a taxonomy of 20 places where roughly similar things happen.) Tesco responds to the local with sophisticated tools like high quality data to measure demand and sophisticated stock management so that shelves are filled just in time with the things local people want to buy. The shopping chain does not leave these decisions to the local manager.
 
This particular relationship between the centre and the local is driven by accountability to the Board, held by the CEO, to make a profit. Tesco do it this way because it makes them money. What about public sector services? There are about 3,600 children’s centres in the UK, a number somewhat analogous to Tesco stores. (The comparison can also be made with the 30,000 schools in the UK.) Local people provide the money by way of taxes given to the centre. To an extent, the centre sets the standards, provides training for staff and, in the case of schools, sets the curriculum. Crucially, accountability for children’s centres is devolved to local authorities. The centre monitors success but each locality is responsible for that success. A lot of the responsibilities that Tesco keeps at the centre, such as management systems and purchasing arrangements, are devolved to local authorities. Hardly any of the data that Tesco needs to make its business successful, for example on demand and supply and to quality control local vendors, is available to children’s centres, except when the locality thinks it is important.
 
So by this comparison, greater local control could be achieved by the centre assuming more accountability, collecting better data on meeting local needs and efficiently giving the support required to make each children’s centre a success - financial management, training, materials, quality control and so on. In this model, caring about local people does not come from devolution, it comes from thinking about the best way of meeting local needs and being accountable. There are plenty of grounds by which this comparison can be judged superficial or just plain wrong. But it does act as a reminder that in times of economic downturn, it will be necessary to think creatively. We may agree on the goal - better responding to local needs - but there may be many ways of achieving that goal.