18 - Making Local Regulation Better? Marketisation, Privatisation and the Erosion of Social Protection

Summary

Introduction

Since 2010, what had previously been New Labour's approach to business regulation – ‘better regulation’ (who could possibly object?) – has become turbocharged under conditions of ‘austerity’. Within this onslaught on the social wage, even those local services which attract popular support have been vulnerable, not least some of those which fall under the rubric of regulatory services. For example, one of the areas compromised by ‘the cuts’ since 2010 has been fire protection: In December 2018, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services reported that fire safety inspections across England had fallen by 42 per cent since 2010–11, according to the new watchdog for fire and rescue services – a somewhat chilling fact in the light of the fire at Grenfell Tower in June 2017 which killed 72 people and devastated the lives, for the rest of their lives, of many more (Tombs, 2019). Perhaps most alarmingly in light of Grenfell, the same National Audit Office (NAO) report noted that the government had ‘reduced funding most to fire and rescue authorities with the highest levels of need … as defined by the social and demographic factors’. In other words, the cuts to fire and rescue services have fallen hardest on the poorest – just like all austerity cuts (Cooper and Whyte, 2017).

More generally, since the cuts began to bite, capacity to enforce regulation of businesses at local authority level – designed to enhance social protection in areas such as food safety, pollution control, trading standards and workers’ health and safety – has fallen into virtual disrepair. This is because most councils – albeit not the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, the wealthiest local authority in England, within which Grenfell Tower, and its relatively poor residents, stood – have reached rock bottom in terms of their ability to maintain services (Ryan, 2017). As an Environmental Health Officer in Merseyside put it to me, ‘we are at that point now, public health and protection is being eroded’.

But this is not simply a sorry tale of anti-regulatory zeal, of austerity and cuts, of the non-enforcement of regulation, nor simply of the broader undermining of social protection. Rather, this is about a process of the long march of profit-seeking institutions through what was public service and public provision – a process characterised by privatisation, marketisation, de-democratisation and deregulation for the business world.