Councillor calls for education and social work to be centralised

EDUCATION and social work services should be centralised because local authorities can no longer afford to pay for them, a member of Highland Council’s ruling administration has said.

Veteran councillor Roddy Balfour claims it would save local authorities a fortune, saying both services are like "a rope around our neck".

"We need to have this debate," he said.

"We need to rationalise the modern local authority set-up.

"When we were operating under Westminster it was a good system; more localised issues were devolved to the district councils. But the picture has changed completely.

"Education and social work – the big spenders – should be centralised.

"Large county councils have no role in government any more, so it’s a layer of government we can do without. "Reporting to Edinburgh would be more desirable and cost saving."

At a community level, thinking has tended to be against centralisation, critics citing the dilution of local views, influence and expertise when it comes to providing critical services.

The creation of single national police and fire services – and particularly moves to centralise control room functions – was widely opposed and there was an outcry at proposals to bring all of Scotland’s enterprise bodies, including Highlands and Islands Enterprise, under a central board.

On a visit to Inverness this month Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie also raised fears of a "creeping merger" of NHS services, a move he said would inhibit the ability to make decisions appropriate for the Highlands.

Highland Council education chairman Andrew Baxter said Councillor Balfour was right to call for a debate on the issue, agreeing about the frustration of having to provide for services while "the resources required aren’t forthcoming from the Scottish Government".

But he also argued that Scotland’s education secretary John Swinney had recently "backed down on plans to strip away any local say" on education "mainly because Highland Council led significant opposition to his proposals".

He said: "We’ve seen how disastrous removing local control of our police forces has been, leading to a faceless and unresponsive bureaucracy that thinks one size fits all.

"Cllr Balfour is right that we should have a debate but it should be about how we can devolve more powers to councils with the funding needed to deliver these vital services."

Liberal Democrat group leader Alasdair Christie also insisted that education and social work are "best delivered locally, best governed locally and best scrutinised locally rather than 150 miles away in Edinburgh".

And SNP group leader Maxine Smith said: "I’m sure parents and those elderly or otherwise in need of care want to be able to contact someone locally to deal with their issue, not someone hundreds of miles away."

Conservative group leader Andrew Jarvie said: "The SNP have ruined our once world-leading education system. Centralising education and social work is the last thing anyone would trust them with."

And Labour group leader Jimmy Gray questioned Cllr Balfour’s maths.

"Roddy infers we can automatically remove expense by transferring it, which is economic nonsense," he said.

"We need to strengthen not weaken local government – a fact recognised across all of Europe."

A Holyrood spokesman insisted that over the past decade the Scottish Government has demonstrated a commitment "to empowering communities and the importance of regional decision-making".