The paper will be presented in the “Public Law” session and it is titled “Rethinking the English territorial constitution A diagnostic of the root causes of local financial distress”.
Dr Eugenio Vaccari (Senior Lecturer in Law, Royal Holloway, University of London) and Prof Yseult Marique (University of Essex (UK), FöV Speyer (DE), UC Louvain (BE)) are pleased to announce that our proposal “Rethinking the English territorial constitution: A diagnostic of the root causes of local financial distress” has been accepted by the organisers of the 2023 SLS Annual Conference for the Public Law subject section.
More than a decade of austerity in English local government has squeezed local entities such as local councils to their utter financial limits, as the recent “bankruptcies” in Slough and Thurrock have illustrated. The National Audit Office predicts more to come.
It could be argued that less money has become available to local government to deliver increasing demands, such as the ones triggered by the cost-of-living crisis, the explosion of social care, or the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, a fuller diagnostic of these crises points in the direction of other factors.
Our case-studies suggest that the legal reforms implemented since 2010 have had a detrimental impact on local finances, particularly for their changes to the rules on addressing local conflicts of interest, on organising auditing processes at local level and on ensuring adequate local accountability mechanisms. This diagnostic, designed to advance the academic debate on the English territorial constitution, identifies two long-standing problems in English local governance: first, inappropriate incentives for local government to take inconsiderate financial risks with exotic investments to the detriment of a longer-term perspective on the local well-being (understood widely in social and environmental terms); secondly, the lack of transparency in the very governance arrangements organising the outsourcing of local services and the development of real property in the local government.
Based on selected case studies of local “bankruptcies” and financial pressure points, this paper argues that rethinking deeply the English territorial constitution is needed. This paper assesses to what extent the announced Levelling Up Agenda and the Labour suggested reform to address spatial inequalities across England (one of the largest inequality situations across the OECD, according the NAO) address the governance and direct financial strains evidenced in the case studies, and what more is needed to rethink the English territorial constitution.
