John Marriott

By John Marriott Columnist

For many years now governments of all political colours have seen fit to centralise more and more powers to themselves. The result of this has impacted directly on the councils that in the past were the major providers of the kind of services that have improved the lives for generations of our citizens. Today they are a shadow of their former selves, whose lack of influence is clearly reflected in poor turnouts in local elections.

There have been promises to reverse the centralisation of powers and to devolve many of the powers back from where they have been taken over many years. So far, the progress has been painfully slow.

Whatever services that remain the responsibility of local government still have to be paid for. Traditionally the bulk of the funding came from central government grants, based on a formula devised and administered in Whitehall. The rest came from revenue and a smaller contribution from the recipients of those services.

Some of you may remember the dreaded ‘Rates’. In 1989 in Scotland, and in 1990 in England, these were replaced by a charge on each person whose name appeared on the electoral register, called officially the ‘Community Charge’, but forever known as the ‘Poll Tax’, while a uniform business rate was collected locally and but transferred directly to central government to be returned in part in the form of a grant, which covered anything up to two thirds of expenditure.

Well, I’m sure many of you can remember the trouble the Poll Tax caused, particularly in Scotland. Many people tried to avoid paying it by simply not registering to vote. Others took to the streets.

The Tory government, faced with a resurgent Labour Party and probably coming to the end of its natural life, quickly replaced it in 1993 with the Council Tax, which looked very much like the hated Rates, based as it was on domestic property values at the time but still only accounting for around a quarter of council spend.

There has never as yet been a Council Tax revaluation in England so what we currently pay, despite increases over the years, has not actually kept pace with the increase in property prices over that time.

The strains are now really beginning to show. The 2010-2015 Coalition Government used its austerity programme to cut its central grant progressively and used the so call ‘Council Tax Freeze Grant’ to bribe councils not to raise Council Tax.

The result was that a council like Lincolnshire, which accepted the grant, was forced massively to reduce its staff and many of the services it provided, Libraries being just one example, in an attempt to protect so called ‘Front Line Services’, such as Adult Social Care.

The irony is that, had Lincolnshire not accepted the freeze grant over the period of its existence and had raised its part of the Council Tax by the permitted 1.99% annually (around £2 per week on a Band C property), it would have been around £30 million better off!

Now the present government has decided virtually to abolish the central grant by the beginning of the next decade, while offering the sop of allowing councils to retain most, if not all, of the uniform business rate. Already the cracks are getting wider.

Northamptonshire County Council has just issued a ‘Section 114 Notice’ banning all new expenditure, while the UK’s richest county, Surrey, has been hit by a £100 million cash crisis. It’s reckoned that nine out of ten authorities will go over budget this year.

Lincolnshire has just proposed an increase in its take of the Council Tax of just under 5%. Can you imagine the howls from certain quarters if these ‘true blue’ councils had been Labour controlled? Also, in Northampton’s case, the similarity with our own county council is frightening. Could it happen here?

Clearly something has to change and it has got to be how we fund local government if we want it to survive in any meaningful form into the future. Now I know that some people will blame those people we elect to run our local services, as Northamptonshire’s seven Tory MPs have done.

Certainly our councillors do come in all shapes and sizes and abilities; but those few who actually run the show have usually got there on merit. The allowances they are paid, which some claim to be either excessive or indeed unnecessary, are actually extremely modest. I certainly wouldn’t expect anybody to put the time in that many councillors do without any remuneration.

So Local Government Finance is desperately in need of major reform. The Council Tax is clearly no longer fit for purpose.

A revaluation would undoubtedly produce howls of protest, especially where it would penalise those people who, whilst living in large properties, may have a restricted income. Adding a few bands on the top would make little difference.

The only tax worth a damn is one that takes proper account of an individual’s ability to pay and that has got to be some form of Local Income Tax. However, even this would not be the complete answer in places like Lincolnshire where incomes are traditionally lower than in other parts of the country. Some form of grant system would still be required and possibly a small ‘Property Tax’ based on land values.

That’s not to say that financial savings can’t be made. As far as Lincolnshire is concerned, we really do not need a county AND seven district councils.

Similar largely rural areas like Wiltshire, Cornwall and Northumberland, to give just three examples, have posted significant savings by replacing their county and district councils with a unitary authority.

There was talk of a consultation exercise with the public when I was part of the ‘Administration Group’ between 2013 and 2017. What happened to that? However, even Unitary Authorities appear now to be facing tough choices as well.

As Oscar Wilde famously remarked, the cynic is the person, who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

There will undoubtedly be a few of you out there, who fit that bill. However, whether we like it or not, if those of us who can are not prepared to pay more, then the services on which many of us rely could be history.

John was a councillor for thirty years, finally retiring in 2017. A schoolteacher by profession, he served on the North Hykeham Town Council (1987-2011), the North Kesteven District Council (1987-1999, 2001-2007) and the Lincolnshire County Council (2001-2017). He was also a County Council member of the former Lincolnshire Police Authority for eight years until standing down in 2009. In 1997 he was the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham. He is currently not a member of any political party.

By John Marriott Columnist

I am sure that quite a lot of us can recall a serious brush we’ve had with what politicians are increasingly calling OUR NHS. I certainly can and cannot thank the health professionals enough at Lincoln County Hospital for the treatment I received just over two years ago. I and my family have in the past used private medicine as well, and my wife and I used ‘public’ medicine when living in Canada and Germany. Believe me, pound for pound, we get a fantastic deal out of our NHS, so, for goodness sake, let’s make sure it gets what it needs to continue to provide at least its current but ideally an even higher level of health care into the future.

When we get bombarded with facts and figures from all sides it is hard to work out which ones to believe. Many so called experts, and especially politicians, tend to use them rather like a drunkard might use a lamppost, namely for support rather than illumination.

All I know is that, as Joni Mitchell once famously sang; “…you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”

. We pay less of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product – for the uninitiated, the total value of goods and services produced in a country in one year) on health care than, for example, France or Germany and considerably less than the USA, albeit that the health care system in these countries is insurance based.

There are those who still advocate an insurance-based system over here. Indeed, that was the system favoured by the Tories when the NHS was founded by the Labour government after WW2. It took the 1956 Guillebaud Report, which Churchill’s post war government commissioned to look into the long term funding issues of the service and which found the system introduced by Labour to be the most cost effective, to get them to change their minds.

That report concluded: “The advance of medical science continually places new demands on the service and the standards expected by the public continue to rise”. How true that turned out to be.

I’m slightly older than the NHS, which this year celebrates its 70th birthday, so I don’t really know what things were like before, except by watching shows like Dr Findlay’s Case Book and reading the odd historical article.

Medical care was clearly a patchwork affair as we went through the first 45 years of the 20th century. Many practitioners gave some of their services free of charge, whilst earning their living from ‘private patients’. Charitable organisations often provided basic cover where the ability to pay did not exist or was limited. Medical cover for the majority was often the survival of the fittest.

All that changed after 1948; but persuading what has been and still is in many people’s opinion one of Britain’s most powerful Trades Unions, the British Medical Association (BMA) to play ball was almost beyond the capabilities of even the charismatic socialist Health Minister,

Aneurin Bevin. “I stuffed their mouths with gold” was how he described winning over Consultants, by allowing them to continue private practice in addition to their duties in the NHS. Many opponents even argued that, with free prescriptions, the ‘poor’ would simply empty pharmacists’ shelves. But that didn’t happen.

So, here we are 70 years later with another ‘winter crisis’ in our hospitals, and with both Labour and Tory politicians blaming each other for this.

I don’t think I am alone in wishing that all political parties would just get together and come up with a depoliticised plan to put things right instead of trying to score brownie points off each other.

I notice that the Lib Dems are currently proposing a “cross party health and social care convention” in addition to their well publicised 1p on the basic rate of Income Tax; but the chances of getting the bigger parties to sit down together are pretty slim, particularly while Labour thinks it’s got all the answers and, pardon the pun, momentum.

As regards who should be footing the bill for improvements, most people, when asked, say that they would be prepared to pay higher taxes for better health care. The proviso for many is often so long as it’s other people who are paying. That luxury may not, nor should be available any more.

When the NHS was founded, life expectancy was much lower than it is today. Most male adults were lucky to reach 70. The fact that final salary pension schemes are largely considered no longer sustainable actuarially should be setting alarm bells ringing. We are living longer and many of us are carrying chronic health conditions into old age.

Operations and procedures that would have been considered science fiction even a generation or so ago are now commonplace and many of them, including the latest wonder drugs, cost a lot of money. We probably do need a Royal Commission to come up with a long term plan; but that would take an age to be set up and to report. We obviously need action now.

Perhaps we need to transform National Insurance contributions into a Health Tax or perhaps we need a brand new tax ring fenced purely for Health and Social Care.

I’m not saying that money is the only answer just as I am not convinced that the NHS could not do things differently. Following the failure of the disastrous Lansley reforms we need a fresh direction of travel. Combining Social with Health Care is an obvious step in the right direction.

We also need greater emphasis on healthy living. When you are young you often think you are going to live forever; but those young and not so young people binge drinking in city centres at the weekend or downing a couple of bottles of plonk per night at home are storing up a load of problems for themselves and society in general sooner than they think.

Then there is the fairly sedentary lifestyle that many of us have, with obesity levels, especially amongst children, far too high. It’s back to ‘education, education, education’, as someone once famously said.

If we are going to put large extra sums of money into Health and Social Care, we should not be just expected to be trawling other countries in search of their home trained health and care professionals.

We need to train more of our own.

At least as far as doctors and nurses are concerned we should offer more bursaries on the condition that, once they qualify, they should be obliged to work for a specific time in the NHS in places where the greatest shortages are before considering working in the private sector or abroad. Failure to comply would mean that they would be legally required to pay back the money, our money, they had received.

Also, do you always have to have a degree to nurse? I’m not knocking qualifications, but surely empathy is equally important.  If not enough potential nurses come forward, perhaps we need to follow Bevan’s example when faced with a similar recruitment crisis in 1948 and give them more money. They certainly deserve it!

Another issue that needs to be tackled is the accessibility of GPs and other community based services. The closure, for example, of the Monks Road Walk-In-Centre mystifies many people, me included, especially when a consultation exercise produced massive support from the public for its remaining open.

I would say about the people who organised it and clearly ignored its findings that there is no wonder that many people have no confidence in those appointed to oversee health and other public services.

You may recall the old proverb, ‘Health is better than Wealth”. Diseases like cancer are no respecters of status or rank. There will probably never be enough money to satisfy all health demands but it seems pretty clear to me that what we are paying at the moment is just not enough.

Whilst I did understand the thinking behind the austerity strategy, Health and Social Care is one area of our daily lives at least where this strategy needs urgently to be reversed.

John was a councillor for thirty years, finally retiring in 2017. A schoolteacher by profession, he served on the North Hykeham Town Council (1987-2011), the North Kesteven District Council (1987-1999, 2001-2007) and the Lincolnshire County Council (2001-2017). He was also a County Council member of the former Lincolnshire Police Authority for eight years until standing down in 2009. In 1997 he was the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham. He is currently not a member of any political party.