Boundaries

I have two working lives, as a coach and a town clerk, and boundaries mean different things in those roles.

As a coach I have to respect the boundaries my client sets, and also the professional boundaries — as a coach I don’t do therapy, or any other kind of service that isn’t coaching, although I will always signpost. Those two types of boundaries, set externally and ethically, are central to being a coach.

As a town clerk those boundaries of expectation and ethics are a subset of all the boundaries I have to work within. The geographical boundaries of English local government are in the news at the moment as a result of the work of Michael Kenny and Jack Newman whose overlapping maps of boundaries resemble a series of time shifting maps of Britain’s various polities of the dark ages.

These are the dark days for English local government. From about 1999 onwards the boundaries of local government have been shifted and changed not on the basis of any clear vision or masterplan but on the political whim of government. Sometimes those decisions have been about political advantage, sometimes as consequences of other political ambitions, and sometimes they’ve been purely functional.

The boundaries aren’t just geographical; powers reside in different places, and part of the skillset of a clerk like me can be identifying where powers lie, who controls them, and how they can be deployed to meet local challenges. That’s fun for me, and it makes my job worth doing, but for those who local government serves, it’s like trying to deconstruct the Silmarillion.

The constant urge in current day local government to look back to the proposed re-organizations of the 1960s and the ensuing re-organizations of the 1970s as if they were a new phenomenon is myth-making. It’s also in a real sense a way of looking only at he boundaries, and where those soft boundaries of power and agency lie, and drive, (and have driven) change in local government. One of the first law cases that caught my attention when I started studying law was one with place at its heart — Magor and St. Mellons vs Newport Corporation.

The story behind the legal dispute was fascinating; essentially, parts of Magor RDC and St Mellons RDC were to be incorporated into Newport to enable the town (as it was then) to expand. As a result a new council called Magor and St Mellons was to be created out of whhat was left. The relevant act of parliament meant that, as a result, Newport did not have to pay compensation, whereas, if the two councils had continued to exist separately each would have received compensation for the loss of income. Law students will remember the case for the clash between Lord Denning’s attempt to do what he thought parliament would have done if they could have imagineed these circumstances, an approached rejected by the House of Lords in the most brutal legal language.

The key issue for me, here, is that the local government changes proposed in Magor and St Mellons were in the late 1940s, and in the context of Newport seeking to grow as a counterbalance to the designation of the neighbouring area of Cwmbran as a new town. Cwmbran had grown, in local government terms, in the 1930s, because of the incorporation of Llantarnam UDC into Cwmbran, incorporating neighbouring parishes as it went. As places changed, so local government changed with it, and it was ever thus. (I’m well aware, incidentally, that some of the 1930s local government changes were about viability as well as about growth — the key point is that change was organic, and ongoing.)

Boundaries aren’t just metaphysical issues or historical markers. Often they’re obstacles. For example Berwick’s neighbourhood plan has stalled because of an obscure dispute about the boundary of between Berwick and East Ord. They’re separate parishes, at the moment, but in effect they’re the same place. There is no simple process for fixing that, and any community governance review is likely to provoke conflict, and that slow, incoherent process is likely to be an obstacle to place making with a vision of the future. Thus isn’t a new theme for me; it’s quite a while since I wrote “You can argue, plausibly, (buy me a coffee and I’ll do it) that lines on maps no longer describe the communities we all live in, which are better described by the intersections of our lives and interests, but for local government purposes, only the lines on maps count.”

I still stand by that, but I work in local government, and local government needs to be much better at recognising that boundaries need to be rooted in places as they are experienced by people, even if that results in place governance that isn’t as efficient as the treasury would like it to be, or boundaries that shift more fluidly as places change.