Comment: 03.06.2010

Keren Suchecki

Pickles, with his track record of taking a hatchet to public spending, is in the right place... I predict he will want to set an example to other departments and will not take up the option to defer cuts, but will implement them with minimum fuss, minimum delay.

‘Our public sector reform programme is designed to cut costs while improving standards, and to enable social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups to play a leading role in delivering public services and tackling deep-rooted social problems… our reform agenda is designed to empower communities to come together to address local issues.’ (David Cameron, 2010)

‘It will be necessary to involve the wider public in determining the nature of council services. The council must allow direct control over many activities to devolve to other forms of community organisation. These may include: public/private partnerships (e.g. community trusts), direct user organisations (e.g. school governing bodies or housing cooperatives), private associations (e.g. housing associations)… and the council must divest its powers to allow new forms of accountability and public participation in the policy arena.’ (Eric Pickles, 1988)

Sorry if there seems to be an echo in the room, but I thought it was worth comparing these two statements, made over 20 years apart, to see show progressive the new government really is.

The first paragraph is an extract from Building a Big Society which lays down Cameron’s vision for mending ‘broken Britain’. The second paragraph is an extract from the policy paper Eric Pickles used to slash Bradford Council’s budget by £22m between 1988-89, the first year of his five-year plan to cut the budget by half, shed a third of the workforce and reduce the council to a contracting service sitting only a few times each year. His extreme conservatism brought him high praise from Maggie Thatcher and effectively secured his future in the Tory party.

Nick Clegg, pretending he’s compromised very little, recently said: ‘The interesting thing I have discovered over the last week is that we have been using different words but we mean similar things, what I call liberalism David Cameron calls the Big Society.’ My worry is that the Tories are using the same words they did 20 years ago and that they still mean exactly what they did back then.

As secretary of state for communities and local government, Pickles brings a wealth of local authority experience and a strong tradition of getting his own way with a ‘minimum of fuss, minimum of delay’ (his words to describe how he intended to introduce the poll tax for which he saw ‘no credible alternative’): witness the dropping of home information packs with 24 hours’ notice.

The coalition has appointed a mix of Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers across most departments (albeit with the Lib Dems as tea boy in most cases), but not in the DCLG. To assist him, Pickles has Grant Shapps, minister of state for housing and planning, and Greg Clarke, minister for decentralisation (or local government, but not as we know it Jim). So, no namby-pamby compromises going on there then.

Pickles, with his track record of taking a hatchet to public spending, is in the right place with £780m being cut from the DCLG, the second-highest figure in the government’s spending cuts. In addition the £700m to be saved on ‘quangos’ and £830m from the business department probably means the end of regional development agencies and thus much more suffering across the regeneration arena. I predict Pickles will want to set an example to other departments and will not take up the option to defer cuts, but will implement them with minimum fuss, minimum delay.

I’ll admit my head is easily turned by a politician with a regional accent, a working class background and a non-Oxbridge education (heaven knows I started off smitten with Hazel Blears, who turned out to be a nothing more than a flouncy little show-off). But I’ll need serious wooing before I agree that Eric Pickles running the DCLG will be good for communities. This is a man who’s been rewarded very well for stringently applying hard-line Thatcherite policies, and who lets nothing get in his way.