What is wrong with Liverpool’s council?

Sean O’Grady looks at the reasons behind the plan to bring Liverpool City Council under the joint control of government commissioners

Liverpool’s mayor, Joe Anderson, who was arrested in December (AFP via Getty)

It may seem surprising, but it is perfectly possible, that is to say legal, for the government to directly intervene in the operation of a local authority, and indeed the power to do so by central government has pretty much always existed, one way or another. The earliest example of such a battle of wills occurred a century ago, in Poplar, east London, when a working-class socialist council refused to put the rates (council tax) up and risked going to prison as a result. The spirit of what was then called “Poplarism”, usually pitting Labour councils against Tory governments, remains in certain quarters to this day.

Yet the most important thing about the appointment by the government of commissioners to oversee Liverpool City Council, apart from its impact on the city and its people, is that it is not really a political, or at least a party political move. There are many examples of such politicking, especially in Liverpool, but here it arises from police investigations and the arrest of five men, including the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, in relation to city council matters.

As a result of that, Robert Jenrick, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, decided last December to exercise the powers granted to him under the Local Government Act 1999, and ordered Max Caller to carry out an inspection of the authority’s compliance with its “best value duty”.

The matters covered by the inspection were the authority’s planning, highways, regeneration and property management functions, and the strength of associated audit and governance arrangements. Having received the report, Jenrick has appointed commissioners to work with the chief executive of Liverpool City Council and the city’s acting mayor to get things back to normal.

Caller, by the way, has long experience as a senior official in local government, and in the last few years has looked into problems at Northamptonshire County Council and Tower Hamlets Council. He seems to be the “go to guy” to clean up a municipal mess, irrespective of party control. There is no suggestion that Liverpool City Council is being victimised on political grounds, despite the city’s often confrontational relations with Conservative governments.

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Indeed, few seem to want to challenge Caller’s “unequivocal” conclusion that Liverpool had “failed in numerous respects to comply with its best value duty”, that it had “consistently failed to meet its statutory and managerial responsibilities”, and that it had displayed a “pervasive culture of rule avoidance”. Who can say what lies behind Mr Jenrick’s remarks that “when selling land, the report states that securing Liverpool City Council’s best interests were not on the agenda”?

The council was “dysfunctional” and therefore change was demanded. One notable reform will be “all-out” elections for all councillors every four years, making a shift in political control more likely than with partial, rolling elections, and thus rendering the political leadership of the city more responsive to the public mood.

The current council leadership did not demur over Caller’s damning findings. Tony Reeves, chief executive since 2018, and the acting mayor, Wendy Simon, said: “We are absolutely committed to acting on the recommendations and accelerating the progress we have already made.”

This is all in very stark contrast to the defiant posture adopted by Liverpool councillors in the 1980s. Then, a Labour council dominated by the Militant tendency refused to cooperate with the Thatcher government’s programme of cuts to spending, set an “illegal rate” (or council tax) and ended up sacking its own workforce – the redundancy notices delivered by taxi across the city, an incident that drew the scorn of the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, in a memorable conference speech in 1985. Liverpool and Lambeth were the most determined to defy the Tory ministers, and “Red” Ted Knight, leader of Lambeth Council, was barred from holding office as a result.

Many other Labour councils, derisively called “loony left” by the Tory tabloids, also put up lesser amounts of resistance to central government at the time, but all were eventually defeated by a combination of bureaucratic and legal manoeuvres, including the appointment of district auditors and the seizure of financial assets through court orders. Apart from that, the Conservatives in 1986 simply abolished the large metropolitan authorities that had been such centres of Labour power and rebellion, including Strathclyde, “the people’s republic of South Yorkshire”, and, mightiest and most troublesome of all, Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council. When the poll tax was introduced in 1989-90, there was another round of arguments, calls for non-payment, and civil disturbances; in due course, the hated “community charge” was scrapped.

Anderson and former chancellor George Osborne in 2016 (AFP via Getty)

Corruption and maladministration have never been rife in British local government, despite some high-profile scandals, such as the Poulson affair. Indeed, parliament and Whitehall have both known their share of sleaze and disgrace, as the MPs’ expenses scandals and the current “chumocracy” and contracts for cronies amply demonstrate. Liverpool, though, has not always been blessed with the best of leaderships, and nor has it enjoyed much sympathy or support in government. At the beginning of the 1980s, when a deep recession sent unemployment soaring, and riots in Toxteth scarred the city, a then-secret memo from the chancellor of the day suggested to his cabinet colleagues that the city be allowed a “tactical retreat”, and not to “over commit” public spending. Many years later, an editorial in The Spectator, published under Boris Johnson’s editorship was breathtaking in its insolence, and has to be appreciated in full. The “peg” was a two-minute city-wide silence for Ken Bigley, a charity worker executed by Isis.

“A combination of economic misfortune – its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union – and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and The Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.”

It is fair to say that many in Liverpool will not forgive Johnson for that, and it was predictable that Jeremy Corbyn did exceptionally well in the city in the last two general elections. But the current problems in Liverpool and its council, mercifully, have nothing to do with the Tories.