Westminster chief Peter Rogers has announced his top priorities for councils. He tells Stuart Spear how he arrived at them and what will happen next
You would think that trying to reduce the 60 policy areas surrounding environmental health and trading standards to five core national priorities would be an impossible task. But Peter Rogers, the chief executive of Westminster Council tasked with reviewing local government enforced legislation, says it was relatively simple. At one point, he said, it was like playing the children’s game Top Trumps – as soon as you found one priority another would appear and trump it.
The report was produced at speed: Mr Rogers was appointed at the end of November and it hit the desks of local government chief executives three months later as Chancellor Gordon Brown accepted its recommendations in his Budget speech.
Sitting in his office on the sixteenth floor of Westminster city hall with a panoramic view of Buckingham Palace and the Millennium Wheel, he reflects that the speed of his review proved its strength. “It meant that people could not assemble evidence that does not exist,” he says. “We involved local authorities through a series of rapid regional seminars and we also used an electronic survey, which was completed rather than sitting on a chief executive’s desk. It was a quick and productive way of getting views and the evidence.”
Mr Rogers’ brief was to define the policy areas that regulatory services are responsible for, to discover which were the most important to local citizens, business and local and central government. Then, using an evidence base, he had to recommend the five most important to be adopted by all local authorities, based on the level of risk they pose to the population.
Alcohol claims 22,000 premature deaths a year (see box below) so licensing made it into the top five, as did air quality, food hygiene, improving health in the workplace and fair trading. With BSE and foot and mouth a recent memory and avian flu threatening to cross the species barrier, a sixth priority slipped into the review – animal and public health. Mr Rogers admits this was a fudge, justified because of the devastation animal disease outbreaks cause to communities. He describes his final list as “five plus one” and is pleased there has been no vocal disagreement. “So far no one is actually shroud waving about the priorities,” he notes.
Housing evidence
However, some in the environmental health community have questioned how fair trading made it into the top five and yet housing, with about 200,000 households in the private rented sector estimated to contain a “significant hazard”, failed. The review’s author admits it also surprised him: “I came in with a preconceived idea that housing regulation would feature very heavily and, quite simply, the evidence is not there to support it.”
Mr Rogers believes this may be because the housing health and safety rating system needs time to be integrated. But he suspects there is another, potentially more serious reason why the Department for Communities and Local Government was unable to provide him with the data: lack of enforcement activity. “There is evidence from local authorities that the legislation is clunky and cumbersome to use, which is something that the Local Better Regulation Office is going to have to pick up on as there may be good reason to change the way it operates. It is important that this is reviewed. There are an awful lot of people that live in that sector and an awful lot of people might be affected.”
So why include fair trading, which some believe a strange choice given the potentially life-threatening nature of the other four? Mr Rogers agrees it “has a different feel about it” but he is not ranking the priorities of importance. He points to evidence that it is the elderly who are most affected by scam purchasing and that the impact on them is disproportionately severe. As the ageing population grows, he believes fair trading will become an increasingly serious problem.
Flexible priorities
He also points out that the five priorities are not set in stone. “I do not regard risk assessment as something you just do every three years,” he says. “If there is evidence of emerging need then one of them would drop off, but that would rely on evidence at the time of the review.”
The publication of the Rogers review follows a number of other reports on better regulation, many of which originated from the Treasury. It began with the Hampton review in 2005, recommending a new approach to regulation, with the emphasis on securing compliance rather than routine inspections. Then the Macrory review on regulatory penalties called for a lighter touch on compliant business with proportionate penalties for rogues.
“If you link those reports through to Lyons and the idea of devolution in the local government white paper then it all comes together,” says Mr Rogers. “The opportunity arose to look at reducing the central burden so that, rather than expecting local government to do everything with limited resources, we should focus on what is important nationally and then allow local discretion. This is consistent with both Lyons and Hampton: you focus on the things that make a real difference and you do it on an evidential basis. That is complemented at the back end with a system of penalties. Macrory is the backstop, Hampton is at the front end and my report looks at how you make it all work.”
New relationship
So how does the local government white paper’s vision of devolving power to councils fit with his five priorities? Surely his review contradicts the principle of allowing them to shape their activities and decide how to achieve outcomes?
“I think that the two principles do gel,” says Mr Rogers who points out that it was local government that originally asked for a set of core priorities from central government. He believes that at the heart of this new relationship between central and local government is a partnership where knowledge and information is shared. If, for example, local authorities believe one of the priorities needs to be reassessed then they should provide central government with the evidence.
“It’s part of a journey. When you teach children to cross the road you don’t take them to the M6, you build trust and confidence before you let the reigns go entirely. This may not be where we end up but I think it is a significant shift towards local control and local autonomy,” he explains. “This is not about holding someone to account, which is where the Lyons agenda touches on this. It is actually about making it work as a single tier of government rather than all these multiple levels.”
He does agree, however, that the Cabinet Office’s Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO), which he expects to be monitoring local government priority setting, will need to tread carefully. “I think there will be a need for returns and I think that is where guidelines will come in to ensure the LBRO is clear about what it expects against these priorities,” says Mr Rogers. “But they need to be very careful about not being over-prescriptive so they end up introducing backdoor bureaucracy, which means you provide as much information as before but on fewer priorities.”
He believes if this happens it will be picked up by the better regulation taskforce, which has been showing an interest in his report and is studying how government operates. In his concluding recommendations he also warns that government should not be tempted to use part funding or “seed monies” to introduce new priorities by the back door outside the prioritisation process.
Local priorities
While the Rogers review was asked to define five national priorities the report emphasises this does not mean councils can just ignore local policy areas. The review collates evidence around 18 short-listed local policy areas, which include other aspects of environmental health, including, noise nuisance, housing, contaminated land and transport safety. To qualify, local priorities should generate high levels of concern, be something that councils can impact independently of each other and be a cause of significant harm within a local authority area.
Local area agreements
Mr Rogers argues that to attract funding regulatory services will need to cluster their local priorities around the local area agreement themes of safer communities, children and young people, healthier communities, and economic development and environment. “This is about environmental health stepping up and making their case internally,” says Mr Rogers. “I feel that environmental health and trading standards underestimate their importance on community welfare. If you talk about people’s lives then you change perceptions about budgets, talk about enforcement and it creates a very different sort of feel. Public health is a strong argument, the number of prosecutions is not.”
Given that the 2007 local government spending review is set to cut funding by 3 per cent per year with a focus on cashable efficiencies is he not worried that cash-strapped councils might just opt for his national priorities and ignore local need? “Any local authority that chose to do that would find it very difficult to get re-elected, in fact a lot of the local priorities drive satisfaction rates locally. Councils are still accountable for failure and you will need evidence to justify why you did not regard an issue a local priority.”
The implementation of the smoke-free law in July is likely to be the top priority for local government over the next few months yet it gets no mention in the review. This, explains Mr Rogers, is because it is emerging policy, which is yet to be proven and so outside the terms of his review. He also questions what impact the smoking ban will have in health terms. “I do agree that it may reduce some of the passive elements of smoking, but it certainly won’t deal with the life chances of smokers who carry on smoking elsewhere. A case has to be made about the impact of enforcement on changing behaviour compared to educating people. Then again, you could just price it off the street.”
Challenges ahead
So what next? Mr Rogers has already instructed Westminster Council’s regulatory services to demonstrate how they intend to change their work to meet the requirements of his review and how they will be able to evidence their outcomes.
He believes there are a number of challenges to emerge from his report. The first is to the various professional institutes, including the CIEH. “It is up to the institutes to see how they can work together and how they will make sure there is consistent application of professional standards to help the LBRO in its monitoring.”
His second challenge is to the LBRO itself and the Local Government Association to start disseminating good practice so that in six months’ time there will be five or six models for other local authorities to follow so that the ultimate aim of bringing poor-performing authorities in line with the best will be achieved.
To download full report: www.rogersreview.org.uk/
Harm caused by the Rogers’ priorities
- Alcohol licensing
- One-in-five violent incidents occur in or around public houses
- Up to 22,000 alcohol- related premature deaths per year
- 17 million working days lost through alcohol-related absence
- Circa £0.5bn in NHS A&E attendance and ambulance costs (up to 35 per cent of total costs) alcohol related
- 61 per cent of the population perceive alcohol-related violence as worsening
- A quarter of the population consider drunk or rowdy behaviour a very or fairly big problem in their local area.
The hygiene of food businesses
- 329 deaths can be anticipated as arising from food business operations (almost one death per day)
- 535,500 cases of food borne diseases (1,467 per day)
- Over 12,000 hospitalisations (33 per day)
- Both businesses and citizens considered this policy area a priority to ensure food safety and local authorities themselves considered this to be a top priority
- £900m total costs to the economy in 2005 (including costs to the health care system).
Improving health in the workplace
- 560,000 workers per year experience an illness or ill-health condition caused or made worse by work in LA-enforced sectors (4 per cent of workers)
- 147,000 people per year start an episode of work-related illness or ill-health in LA-enforced sectors (410 people
per day) - £360-£610m costs to employers of ill-health in 2001/02 in the LA enforced sectors
- Cost to the economy of several billion pounds each year.
Fair trading
- Estimated £8bn harm to consumers per year
- £3.2bn lost to scams per year, 3.5 million victims per year
- £30m lost to rogue doorstep sellers who target the elderly, and cause severe distress
- £1.3bn costs due to theft of intellectual property per year
- Businesses saw this as a priority.
Protecting animal and public health
- Extent of harm is severe, not only in risk but in actual cases over the last decade
- £8bn costs due to foot and mouth outbreak
- Over 0.1 per cent of UK GDP total resource costs to the economy due to the BSE crisis
- Circa £1.5bn total public expenditure costs in the first year for industry compensation payments
- £3.9bn from disposal of 8.5 million cattle aged over 30 months
- £600m per year due to BSE crisis and ban of exports of cattle and beef for over 10 years
- Damage to local communities and social networks in affected communities
- Requires LAs to carry out co-ordinated action to be effective
- Existing delivery is fragmented undermining the control system.
