The latest suggestion in Northamptonshire is for the local university to pick up the role that the bankrupt Council can no longer perform. I am all for civil society doing what it can to be socially aware, but the fact is that local authorities cannot be replaced this way for two reasons: scale and kind.
In terms of scale, a local Council has such a range and scale of responsibilities that other organisations cannot replace unless someone, central government, provides funding to do so. Anyone who thinks otherwise is falling for David Cameron's Big Society narrative years after it was tested to destruction in 2011.
In terms of kind, the proposal ignores the key of ELECTED local authorities in making political decisions around the use of resources. Resources are always the subject of competition between different lobby groups that quite legitimately want more. It is the job of elected local councillors to decide how much each of the available resource each group/cause gets. This has always been true but comes into much sharper relief because of the unprecedented pressure created by the Tory government's decision to load cuts disproportionately on local government.
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