Opinion

City council's delusions of grandeur getting grander

IN FINANCIAL terms, Belfast City Council is a surprisingly small organisation. It spent £175 million last year, slightly less than Invest NI or Translink and a fraction of the budget of the Housing Executive.

The existence of those quangos explains why our councils are relatively inexpensive. In Britain, local government is responsible for transport, housing, education, policing, social care and most of the other things we entrust to Stormont. By contrast, our councils have little else to do but collect bins and run leisure centres.

This is the point Channel 4's Dispatches programme missed in its Monday night expose of council extravagance.

Dispatches identified Belfast City Council as the second-highest spending local authority in the UK on both luxury cars and foreign trips, placing it roughly between Birmingham and Glasgow city councils in profligacy.

However, Glasgow City Council has an annual budget of £2.5 billion while Birmingham City Council has an annual budget of £3.5bn, 20 times larger than its Belfast counterpart.

So when Belfast City Council spends £140,000 a year on luxury cars or £36,000 a year on foreign travel, around the same as Glasgow and Birmingham, that is absurd not just because Belfast has a far lower population but because it does not serve its population in any way that might excuse such grandiose fripperies.

Britain's major local authorities should correctly be compared to Stormont. Northern Ireland's councils should correctly be compared to England's parish councils, which somehow manage to exercise almost identical functions without needing a chauffeur-driven BMW 7 Series for the lord mayor and often without needing a mayor at all.

Unfortunately, Belfast City Council's delusions of grandeur are only getting grander. Belfast's new lord mayor, Sinn Fein's Mairtin O Muilleoir, intends to publish a 'mayor's manifesto' for his year in office despite holding a purely symbolic title. Creating simple and decisive Boris Johnson-style executive mayoral posts for Belfast and elsewhere was considered during talks on council reorganisation, until it was realised there would have to be deputy executive mayors and other counterproductive power-sharing complications. So even after the creation of the so-called super-councils, with their extra territory and additional (though still limited) powers, decisions will continue to be taken by elaborate all-party committee structures while figurehead mayors engage the public with gestures.

This worst-of-both-worlds arrangement is why the committee members go on so many foreign trips, the mayors have so many nice cars and the 'democratic and corporate management' bill for Belfast City Council is a whopping £12m a year.

Although it is relatively small, Belfast City Council's financial impact remains significant given how little it delivers.

Last year, councillors talked at length about an unfunded 'investment programme' pumping £150m into the economy but nobody ever talks ever about how almost all the money the council pumps into Belfast must be pumped out of Belfast first.

In Northern Ireland, rates are split roughly 50/50 between Stormont and the councils. The £126m Belfast City Council made from the rates last year cost a typical householder £40 a month and a typical city centre shopkeeper £12,500 a month. A further £37m the council collected in fees could largely be seen as a cost of red tape and duplication.

Because Belfast City Council spends proportionately so much of its budget pretending to be important (20 times more than Birmingham, for instance) it could significantly lighten its load on householders and shopkeepers through straightforward cuts to the type of ridiculous waste identified by Dispatches.

Only one council in Northern Ireland's modern history has ever made a virtue out of such parsimony. DUP-led Castlereagh Borough Council, described for two decades as Peter Robinson's personal fiefdom, drove down costs relentlessly while continuing to provide core services. The approach was popular and assisted the rise of both the DUP and Mr Robinson, yet even with their rise the approach did not spread.

Castlereagh was the most meaningless geographical unit to emerge from the last local government reorganisation, with no historic town at its heart and a mix of suburbs even less coherent than Newtownabbey.

Perhaps this lack of civic identity allowed residents and representatives to more easily see the council as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Perhaps the new super-councils will have a similar advantage, as their unwieldy multi-town sprawls focus attention on the administrative practicalities.

But the omens from the multi-town Craigavon Borough Council are not good and in Belfast, which will only have more excuses for self-importance, the omens are extremely bad.