I was speaking about opportunities which we lost in the area of local government reform in the seventies. I was doing this not in a sterile way but in trying to illustrate that there is a capacity in the local government system, with a little bit of wit and a good deal of political goodwill, to change the system dramatically without necessarily involving any major changes in funding or involving any major changes in the roles played by the various elements in Government. I was referring to the White Paper of 1972 which dealt with the finances of local government and saying that that White Paper was a fine document but one which, like so many other good documents, got caught up in the maw of political debate, and at the end of the day nothing was done about it.
I was dealing with chapter 10 and the controversial issue of central Government grants to local government, which is a problem to this day. We all know that the system of funding local government is less satisfactory than we would have desired it to be, and that inadequate as the funds are which transfer from central to local government, they transfer with so many strings attached that the capacity of any local authority to make creative use of those funds is entirely negated. Although schemes are set up by this House and arrangements are made by the Minister, local authorities have to wait until the money trickles down and have to get involved in administrative arrangements between central and local government which wastes the resources of the State. The chapter concluded that something needed to be done about grants, that we needed to operate a system of block allocations within which there would be a great deal of freedom for the local authorities.
In section 9 the Minister is equipping himself with powers to devolve functions on the local authorities. I hope he will provide the finance for that too.
Alternative taxation systems were considered and it is interesting that the whole issue of poll tax was examined and was ruled out administratively and politically. Local income tax, local sales tax and site valuation ratings were all examined and rejected. The chapter concluded that the Government were forced inextricably to the conclusion that there is really very little latitude to change the financial structures of local authorities.
The balance of the White Paper dealt, broadly speaking, with efficiency issues. Some changes were proposed, including a move to programme budgeting in the local authority areas. We moved at that time to programme budgeting in those areas and I do not know if it was an improvement. Many members of local authorities would suggest that it was a distinct disimprovement.
While the 1971 White Paper on reorganisation contained points with which many could quibble, points which I publicly criticised, with the benefit of hindsight I think that White Paper and its companion on finance represented the best shot we have ever had at restructuring local government at a critical period and putting it into a state which would allow us to work for the benefit of the country. Both documents deserve calm and informed debate. By and large calm and informed debate is the last thing they received. There was a characteristic knee-jerk reaction in many local authorities. Councillors of all parties, including our own, were responsible for this. The Opposition parties during the course of the general election campaign, which quickly caught up with the debate, had a destructive field day rejecting every proposal out of hand without proposing suitable alternatives. This collective irresponsibility condemned local government to two decades in the wilderness. I do not suggest that there was anything unusual about that. Unfortunately that is the way politics are fought in this country. When one is in Opposition it is easy to propose everything and to destroy things put forward by Government and when one is in Government it is difficult to understand one's action in Opposition let alone the actions of those who oppose one.
There was a more thoughtful response from one quarter, the Institute of Public Administration. The Institute, then at the height of its prestige, looked at the issue of local government reform and what we needed in essence from our local government. A committee was appointed under the chairmanship of Professor Basil Chubb charged with the task of preparing a response to the White Paper. Major figures in the area of local government, including Tom Barrington, Des Roche, Michael Flannery, then county manager of Wicklow County Council, and Richard Haslan, then county manager in Limerick, and now a lecturer in public administration in Cork, were on that committee. Many of the people on the committee at that time had played a distinguished part in the evolution of thought on public administration here. The committee's report, while not an official document, represents a major contribution to the debate and its recommendations which I have dubbed elsewhere as being the father of the latest advisory committee report, makes interesting reading. There is a continuity between the propositions made by that committee and the latest advisory committee report. The advisory committee report can be traced directly to the Bill before us. The Bill has roots going a long way back. The issues that are dealt with in the Bill have been well debated and it is not, as Deputy Bruton suggested here last night, premature to move those issues at this stage into law.
The local government document issued by that committee opened with one of the best discussions on the general principles of local government to be found anywhere. These included proposals that the scope of local government should be progressively broadened to cover the widest possible range of public services with a view to decentralising government. Some commentators in this House made the valid point last night and earlier today that in a very small country there is still an extraordinary degree of centralisation, an extraordinary distance between the people and Government. It is extraordinary that as other states are moving towards decentralisation, towards a better relationship between the state and people, this State has been inextricably locked into a colonial system of public administration which really belongs to a 19th century colonial power. They suggested that one of the major reasons for progressively broadening local government was to afford the opportunity for real decentralisation of government.
The second argument the committee put forward was that decentralisation would facilitate access to government by the people for information and the redress of grievances. Every public representative here knows the abnormal pattern of complaint behaviour, where anybody who has a complaint against any public body will seek out councillors, TDs, Senators, town commissioners and so on, and lay the complaint before them. Everybody in this House knows that the arrangements that pertain here are abnormal and that although handling of constituency cases is a fundamental part of any democratic system, it goes to extremes in this case. Deputies know that the multi-seat constituencies mean that not only does one party compete with another but Deputies of the same party compete with each other for the constituency service task. We know that this is wasteful, that it wastes the time of the public sector agencies who must, as Deputy Barry Desmond pointed out in this House in a paper he circulated not too many years ago, handle the same issue time and time again from different representatives. It is also demeaning to the people to have to go and knock on a series of doors to get their rights.
In 1981 I did an analysis of the case loads of 115 TDs serving in this House. Some of the results were published in the paper "The High Cost of Complaining Irish Style" and in they were quite shocking. It was my first real introduction to politics. I was a civil servant, a mere humble academic at the time. It struck me forcibly time and again as I spoke with Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil backbenchers that public representatives were on a treadmill and many of them had talents which they wanted to use in this House as legislators but they could not do so as they would be judged on their capacity to deliver a letter about housing, a drain or a pothole. We all know that is the truth. The reason we have that abnormality is that our system of public administration is centralised and removed from the public. Ministers of various Governments have made efforts to redress this during the past ten to 15 years but we have a long way to go. One way of giving the people a proper service and properly representing them is by decentralising Government and pushing functions away from the centre. We have ready made bodies who can handle those functions and they are the local authorities. As I said, this was suggested as far back as 1982.
The third reason put forward for being conscious of the need for changes in public administration at local level was citizen participation. The point has been made already by a number of other Deputies that our local government structure is essentially a Victorian or late 19th century administrative system. The attitudes which informed public debate in the late 19th century are different from the attitudes which inform public debate in the 20th century. People want to have their views represented. This is done on one level in the Dáil and at another in the local authorities but the views of a wide range of voluntary bodies do not find an expression in local authorities.
I attended a public meeting last night to discuss a proposal that a road be constructed through the Glen of the Downs, an abhorrent proposal. The meeting was attended by the representatives of various local groups and by people who have a very good track record in journalism and on environmental issues. The question was asked, why did the local authority not come to talk to them about that matter? It was pointed out by one person that there is no way that this can be done. Decisions are handed down and local authorities do not encourage participation. As we are all aware, there is a huge network of voluntary organisations, specialists and enthusiastic people with knowledge and experience, yet the system does not encourage participation in the decision-making process.
The fourth point made was it would enhance the capability and performance of local government as a force for economic, social, environmental and cultural development. Those words were written in 1971 and they are as crisp, as clear and as relevant today as they were when they were first put on paper. The document went on to argue that "present day conditions demand not fewer and larger authorities but representative authorities". The Minister is arming himself with the power to transfer functions to the local authorities and to broaden the range of local authorities not to narrow it. I take issue with Deputy Yates who made reference to a secret agenda. He may know something that I do not but I do not see a secret agenda in this.
A three tier system was suggested with an apparatus for decision-making at regional, county and district level. Such a proposal is also made in this Bill. It has been proposed that we take the first step to create a relevant system of local government which would take us through the rest of this century and on into the 21st century. The Minister's proposals are in line with what was proposed in the document, More Local Government. It proposed a new system which should make provision for associating nominees of voluntary bodies with electoral bodies at one level of authority. This is not yet visible in the Minister's proposals but I suggest it could be achieved very easily under the structures he has proposed.
The document went on to suggest that the system should be devised with a view to aiming at a uniform delivery of services and flexibility. Finally, it argued that in the new local government system strong emphasis should be laid on local autonomy, on a partnership between local authorities and central Departments rather than on domiance of local authorities by central Departments. If we examine section 9 of the Bill we will see that the Minister has proposed a provision which will allow us to do precisely that.
Having set out the principles, the report went on to examine, once again, the structure and operations of the system. A three tier structure, with a fourth element, community involvement, was one of the major proposals of the document. It is a great tragedy that that proposal was never discussed and that the document has been on the shelf gathering dust for 20 years. It was proposed that at community level there should be community councils representing voluntary organisations and the people at large and that these bodies would not be formal statutory decision-making bodies. However, they would play an important role in communications between the people and the statutory agencies. It was also suggested that they be allowed to nominate a member to the district councils, the district councils being the first sub-county level of statutory local government.
I have seen something akin to this operating in Austria. The city of Vienna has city, State and district governments with some unpronounceable German titles and provision has been made for local involvement. For example, planning matters are first discussed at this level and ideas can be thrashed out before the formal decision-making process is entered into. People there feel that they have an input in those things which affect them.
I could give two extraordinary examples in my own constituency to highlight the need for public involvement. A proposal to locate a factory in the village of Kilcoole was misunderstood.
The statutory agencies did not explain to the local community what they had in mind. As far back as November 1989, I asked both the council and the Industrial Development Authority to explain what they had in mind to the local community who feared that they would have another chemical plant on their doorstep which would present them with problems. Out of this debate and misunderstanding litigation followed and, ultimately, the factory was lost without a rational debate having been held or the people of the village having been treated like mature adults with a capacity to sit down and understand complex matters and see them through. There was a breakdown in communications, not on the part of the people, who had a right to defend their interests, but rather on the part of the statutory agencies and the proposers.
Another problem has arisen with regard to the proposal to locate an interpretative centre and a visitor's centre at Luggala. The people of Roundwood were not consulted. However, the Office of Public Works do not have a mechanism to consult with people but they are going to have to learn to evolve such mechanisms. If we had accepted what was proposed in the document, More Local Government, in 1971 we would not now be facing these problems but rather would have a clear set of communication channels between the public and the decision-making bodies.
The document also suggested that the first level of statutory formal decision-making bodies should be district councils which would correspond roughly with the existing county electoral areas. Typically, these would be centred in towns and would cover not just the town but the town hinterland. Perhaps this is what Deputy Yates was referring to when he questioned the delay in holding urban elections. I am not sure if his fear has any basis but I would make the point that we need to review the boundaries of urban authorities. As we are all aware, towns, in particular those on the east coast, have grown very dramatically in recent times. Deputy Yates instanced the case of the town of Bray which, thankfully, is booming and expanding and very rapidly. However, there are many attendant problems and part of its hinterland is neither in the town nor the county. Something needs to be done about towns like Bray. The relationship between the town hinterland and the town needs to be represented better in local government.
Had we taken the idea of district councils based on the existing urban councils and built on it in 1971, we would have resolved many of the problems that towns, particularly in the greater Dublin area, have had in the last ten years of growth and development. Membership of these district councils would be made up in the majority of cases by members elected through the ordinary local government process, as I have mentioned. In the position that was first put forward there was also a suggestion that district councils who were below the statutory level would be able to nominate members. Would that not be sensible for us at least to consider now?
Under the proposals county councils were to retain their central position and the report recommended that no substantial changes should be made in the status or functions of the county councils, including county borough corporations. County councils would remain the planning and executing authorities for the major local government services for housing, roads, sanitary services and so on. The document went on to suggest that county councils would in time become the administrative centres for a broad range of public services and a system of committees on the analogy of a VEC or county committee of agriculture would provide a linkage between the services. An executive board comprising the county manager and county officers of the services concerned would attend meetings of the county council and the county manager would be given general responsibility for the co-ordination of the public services in his area.
Part VII of the Bill contains miscellaneous provisions. Somebody indicated tonight a mistrust of the concept of special committees and joint committees. The concept of special committees and joint committees need not be negative. It can be used as was proposed in the document More Local Government. It can be used progressively to improve the delivery of services, to create a more efficient and more effective local government. That is surely what we all want to achieve.
Above the county level the committee envisage a third level of local government, the regional authorities. Here the report recommended that formal statutory recognition be accorded to the regional pattern which has emerged from the Local Government (Planning and Development) Act, 1963. This would mean giving statutory authority, powers and duties to the regional development organisations as a necessary step towards establishing regional centres for four categories of essential functions (a) strategic major planning, (b) economic development, (c) co-ordination of public service generally and (d) provision of certain services.
The Minister is providing in this Bill a framework in which regional development organisations can be recreated with a statutory purpose and a statutory function. We all know that the RDOs which were set up in the sixties played a very positive role but that ultimately, because successive Governments in which all parties in this House have participated failed to give them a statutory basis, they withered away and became little more than talking shops. They had no statutory functions. They could not recruit their own staff. They could not decide their own budgets. They were dependent on the charity of the donating councils. They were dependent very much on the enthusiasm of the members, and no matter how much enthusiasm they could muster, after 20 years of sticking it out in the wilderness, the enthusiasm was on the wane, the RDOs withered away and now they are gone. Abolishing the RDOs letting them slip was a mistake. The mistake was not letting them slip; it was in not increasing them, not building on them, not giving them a statutory basis. That argument had been around for 20 years, and I am pleased beyond my capacity to express it, that the Minister in this Bill has taken powers to create new RDOs on a statutory basis.
On the structural side, the report recommended special arrangements for the Dublin area which are not unlike the proposals in this Bill. It suggested that the district county regional structure would accommodate the needs of the county boroughs and the Gaeltachtaí.
On the operation side, the report was critical in the extreme of the system of control of local government by central Government. I mentioned that one of the members of the Radcliffe-Maud Committee when preparing the great report on local government reorganisation in Britain in the sixties visited Ireland and found that beyond a doubt the Irish system of local government was the most restrained, restricted and controlled system of local government in the world. In a document I have which looks at the control mechanisms which are available on an administrative basis through the statutory agencies in this State, the one thing that is dramatic and jumps off the page is that since the State was founded we have used every bit of administrative ingenuity at central Government level to expand the control mechanisms on local government.
We give hundreds of millions of pounds to State-sponsored bodies. We are quite prepared to hand out millions of pounds to voluntary agencies. Last week we had a debate here on Cheeverstown House; we handed out £20 million to a private charity. We have nothing like the levels of controls on those agencies, charities, private operations, State bodies, that we operate on local authorities. It is extraordinary that we have established a rigorous, wide scale system of checks and controls on local government which has its roots in the 19th century.
Many of the central controlling attitudes which pertain in the central Government departments to local government are throw-backs to former age. The attitudes really are the folk memory in the Custom House of the 19th century. They went in with bricks and mortar. There is a centralist attitude there —aprés moi le deluge; after me the deluge; that is the attitude central Government administrative bodies take to local government. We are not prepared to give 5p to a local authority without some string attached to it. Not only is that fundamentally stupid because it prevents people who might be able to do something relevant to local needs do it but it is fundamentally stupid because all the controls that go with those strings cost money.
Local engineers do work which is then inspected by engineers from the Department of the Environment, and even though a plan has been discussed at local level, it has to be discussed yet again by administrators in the Department of the Environment, then it crosses over to the place where all wisdom resides, the Department of Finance. Somebody who could not find the location of the project on a map says, "gilly-gilly" and it is then put in train.
Consider a VEC building a school. Take the 12 or 13 different steps they have to go through with the Department of Education. That adds not just tens of thousands of pounds but, over the years, millions of pounds to the cost of projects does not improve the projects one whit. This structure was based on 19th century attitudes and it exists to this day.
The document More Local Government saw the control system as having four fundamental and pernicious ingredients. The first is a large, very detailed corpus of law on the Constitution, powers, duties, finance, staff etc., of the local authorities; second, detailed financial controls which seem to have no relevance to the 20th century; third, administrative controls which have even less relevance and, finally, controls by courts and by quasi-judicial bodies.
The consolidation of existing law was proposed in 1971. Much of the existing body of law was seen as expendable. It was suggested in the document that the ultra vires doctrine in particular be swept away and replaced by a comprehensive enabling statute empowering the local authorities to act in wide terms. That is precisely what the Minister, Deputy Flynn, is proposing in this Bill. It is the first time I have seen the concept of ultra vires mentioned in a statute before this House, it is the first time I have ever heard anybody giving legal expression to the necessity to abolish the concept of ultra vires and restating in a positive way the fundamental powers of the local authorities.
The document suggests that financial and administrative controls should be liberalised. In general, the report recommends that the relationship between central Government and local government should be one of partnership rather than the relationship between controller and the controlled. Anybody reading the report of the Advisory Committee on Local Government Reorganisation and Reform which was produced in December 1990 and released in March 1991 will be struck by its close relationship with the document More Local Government. Anybody who takes the Bill we are examining today and then goes back to the advisory committee report and then puts the two side by side with More Local Government will see that for the first time we are moving in the direction that the specialist committee of the IPA suggested in 1971.
Through 1972 and 1973 politics displaced reform, expediency dethroned logic. The White Papers presented an ideal opportunity to political parties to pillory the Government. I am not saying that had we been in Opposition we would have been any better. That is the reality. We all score points off each other and the good things which should be done are left undone. The 1973 general election called a halt to the reform movement. The new Government realised as well as everybody else the plight into which local government was sliding, but they were trapped in a sense by their own rhetoric of a few months earlier and that rhetoric rendered them paralysed. I remember this well because I was then an official in the Department of Finance. Honest efforts were made to work out how to extricate ourselves from this mess. Many valid solutions had already been rejected. U-turns could not be done and those solutions could not be represented. A rather pathetic little document was produced by the then Minister for Local Government in 1973 which rejected the proposals put forward in the White Paper, as the Government were quite entitled to do. It ignored the recommendation in the IPA report which I regard as less sensible and put nothing effective in place of all these recommendations.
When the Coalition Government of 1973-77 took office the ball was at their feet in regard to local government reform and they kicked the ball to touch. Increasingly during that period the crisis in local government mounted and displaced concern for the structural side of the problem. The obvious thing was to implement at least some of the proposals in the 1972 White Paper or bring in some of the proposals put forward in the five excellent reports which had been produced by the interdepartmental committee on local government finance and taxation.
The Government instead got involved in tinkering with local finances. First they made an honest effort to address some of the problems. They introduced the housing subsidy paid to local authorities to help tackle the problem of growing rents. Then they became involved in the systematic removal of health charges from the local rates. These were at best stop gap measures. The Government of the day were obviously not armed with prescience and could not possibly know we were entering a priod of hyper inflation which would particularly affect local government. Local government is more sensitive to inflation than virtually any other activity in the State because of the high labour content of services.
Aware of the growing storm, the Government commissioned the ESRI to produce yet another report. That report, the Copeland Walsh report, returned to very familiar ground. The problems in the valuation system of local finance were outlined, the impact of remissions and exemptions was addressed and yet another rating system in the reform mode emerged as the recommended system for local finance, with a nod in the direction of the possibility at some stage of a local income tax.
The Government were now in a corner. In September 1976 the Cabinet took a momentous step and decided that the rates would have to go; they would be phased out over a number of years. The decision to abolish rates is interesting because it is inextricably linked with the concept of local government reform. The popular conception is that the decision emerged from the Fianna Fáil election manifesto of 1977. This is not true. The idea had been around for some time. I understand it was publicly discussed for the first time as far back as 1973 when the late Deputy George Colley suggested in an RTE programme that since the rates could not be reformed they would have to go.
By the 1977 general election the three major parties were agreed that the rates were to go. The only difference related to how soon. Early in 1977 the Government took the first step and started to shift the burden of domestic rates from the householder to the shoulders of the Minister for Finance, the Exchequer and ultimately the taxpayer. I say this in no recriminatory sense. I want to establish with clarity once and for all that if abolishing the rates was a fallacy and a fundamental error, it was a fundamental error into which we all walked with our eyes wide open.
The next major step in local government was the Local Government (Financial Provisions) Act, 1978, which transferred the burden of rates from councils to the Minister for Finance and, in effect, to the general taxpayer. This Act introduced in sections 10 and 11 additional swinging controls on local government. The provisions put into effect with a striking vengeance the philosophy that he who pays the piper calls the tune. The Taoiseach of the day, Jack Lynch, said that ultimately if the central Government taxpayer is to pay for local government services the central Government taxpayer will have to call the tune.
By 1978 when the domestic rates were abolished the bulk of local authorities were heading into a financial abyss. The 1978 provisions merely helped them on their way. It is not that there is anything truly unique about the concept of central Government transferring resuorces to local government. We have an idea that because the Department of Finance via the Department of the Environment fund the operation of local authorities the Department of Finance should control each and every action of the local authorities. That does not necessarily follow. Fund transfer from central Government to local government without strings works well in The Netherlands. The problem here is that there is such a dearth of resources available to the Exchequer that it could never painlessly transfer to local government the level of resources which cash hungry authorities demanded, particularly when the pleasurable decision to spend at local government level was being removed from the uncomfortable reality of having to raise the cash to fund the spending.
Extremly high levels of inflation and escalating local costs meant that in the early eighties the parties in Government found reform of local finances back on the agenda with a vengeance. The imposition of service charges introduced originally by Labour as a management function became the next "band aid" to be applied to the major wound. Introduced, I think, by Deputy Spring and brought into effect by Deputy Kavanagh, service charges were said at the time to be an interim arrangement. Those of us with a sense of history will recall that income tax was introduced on this island as an interm arrangement. It was introduced here and throughout the rest of the United Kingdom as a temporary expedient to fund the Napoleonic wars. Somebody forgot to tell Revenue.
Having introduced service charges, the Government commissioned the NESC to produce another report on the financing of local government. The report proposed a series of actions which were not unlike those already proposed in the Copeland Walsh Report. In 1985 the Coalition Government of Deputy FitzGerald also went on to produce their own rather sad little document, a policy statement on the reform of local government.
