Birth Of A Nation

My column in today's Post focuses on Birmingham City Council's campaign for greater freedom to make its own decisions. It may sound like a dry topic, but what council leader Mike Whitby is proposing is a radical change - with local authorities overseeing health and police services.

That doesn't mean councils would directly manage everything any more than Ministers in London do at the moment, but they would decide the top priorities for health spending and control police authorities, the bodies which oversee police forces.

My gut instinct is that devolving power down to local level is a good thing. Councillors have more idea what's going on in their local area than Government Ministers representing constituencies across the country.

In practice, many decisions are already made at local level by officials, but most people have no idea who they are and, unlike councillors, we don't have the power to sack them if they do a lousy job.

But when I discussed this with a colleague today, she dismissed the idea on the grounds, to put it crudely, that she didn't trust local councillors to do a decent job. Whether or not she had a high opinion of national politicians, she had an even lower one of their local equivalents.

Is this a common view? Can Coun Whitby and his colleagues be trusted to oversee our NHS?

Birmingham City Council certainly intends to keep pushing its ideas, and may have some success, as both major parties nationally are talking about devolving more power to councils - so we may find out whether they are capable or not, before too long.