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By Root 2805 0

I moved Ken Baker to Education and brought in Nick Ridley to replace him at the Department of the Environment. Nick brought a combination of clarity of thought, political courage and imagination to the questions surrounding the implementation of the new system. His vision was that local authorities should enable services to be provided but, unless it was truly necessary, local authorities should not provide those services themselves. The main business of modern local government should therefore be regulation — and not too much of that — rather than owning assets and competing with private sector businesses. One way of ensuring this was through the community charge which, by bringing home to people the true cost of local government, would maximize the pressure for efficiency and low spending. Complementary to this was the expansion of competitive tendering of local government services which would result in more contracting out to the private sector. Nick’s 1988 Local Government Act required that refuse collection, street cleaning, the cleaning of buildings, ground maintenance, vehicle maintenance and repair and catering services (including school meals) be put out to tender.

It was entirely consistent with this rigorous approach that Nick considered it illogical to retain capping powers, except perhaps during the transition to the new system. But I felt we needed this safeguard. He also wanted to introduce the community charge more quickly than Ken Baker had envisaged, believing that the sooner local authorities could be made truly accountable the faster we could go in bringing local government back onto the right lines. Nick had always opposed dual running and in the end he persuaded the rest of us to abandon it — though, as I shall explain, not without a little help from the Party in the country. The political arguments against dual running were powerful. Having two local taxes instead of one, even if only for a time, would have been a gift to our opponents; it would have been expensive and difficult to administer; and it would have postponed the very accountability our reforms were about.

During the winter of 1986–7 Parliament legislated to introduce the community charge in Scotland from April 1989. In February 1987 Malcolm Rifkind won our agreement to drop dual running in Scotland, though a safety net was retained, and it was on this basis that the Party north of the border fought the 1987 election. The community charge was an important issue during the campaign there. Our results were disappointing but Malcolm Rifkind wrote to me afterwards that the community charge had been ‘neutral’ in its effect and that it had at least defused the rates problem. In England and Wales the community charge was hardly an election issue at all.

Nevertheless, immediately the new Parliament met it became clear that many of our back-benchers had got the jitters. On 1 July the whips estimated that while over 150 were clear supporters, there were nearly 100 ‘doubters’, with 24 outright opponents. There was a real danger that over the summer recess many of the doubters would commit themselves against the charge altogether. Nick’s response was characteristically robust: to propose that we drop dual running, drastically cut down the safety net and attack the London problem by direct action to reduce ILEA’s costs. But he met strong opposition from colleagues, particularly Nigel, and in the end we compromised on dual running for four years with a full safety net phased out over the same period.*

It quickly became clear that this had not done the trick. At the Party Conference in October speaker after speaker attacked dual running and back-bench opinion was also very strongly opposed to it. All this made a strong impression on us. We argued it out at a ministerial meeting on 17 November, and decided that dual running should be abandoned except for a very few councils, all but one of them in inner London. We also ended the full safety net, setting a maximum contribution of £75 per person from the gaining authorities, so that their gains came