Polly Toynbee, as ever, is spot-on in her paean of praise for Bob Kerslake (We laid Bob Kerslake to rest this week. Think of him – and give the civil service the respect it deserves, 27 July). He was a lovely, immensely wise and thoughtful public servant. He did indeed face the “elite contempt” of Whitehall towards local government about which Prof John Stewart wrote so compellingly many years ago.
As the then leader of Camden council (net budget £300m, 700 different services, rated excellent by the Audit Commission), I recall being asked to talk to aspiring civil servants on their training programme. I advocated for more autonomy for local government but also a requirement for senior civil servants to spend at least two years seconded to local government and/or the third sector, only to be told by one (I kid you not): “The trouble with you lot, is that if we give you more money, you’ll spend it on the mayor’s rose garden.” It fairly took my breath away. Nothing has changed.
Jane Roberts
London
• Tony Travers’s call for more two-way traffic between central and local government, which Polly Toynbee refers to, is absolutely right. As a local government manager, I took part in a very half-hearted “secondments initiative programme” with a civil service counterpart, which boiled down to a two-day visit to our respective places of work. More valuable was a two-week exchange with my council’s twin town in France, where I found a much stronger sense of a unified public service, often reflected at political level in the dual mandates of city mayors with parliamentary seats.
Here, the Conservatives view local government with contempt. If Labour wins the forthcoming election, it will have been out of power nationally for 14 years, with no experience of statecraft. Let’s hope it finds ways to draw on the political and managerial experience in Labour-run councils and mayoralties, and begins to build bridges between the two as Travers advocates.
David Griffiths
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
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