One of the big political topics of 2010 was the start of Crawley Council’s Review of Management Options for Leisure and Cultural Services. This review continues and addresses a core area of Council services, which while discretionary, are hugely important and valued right acrossCrawley. The Council’s substantial investment of public money demonstrates a clear commitment to leisure and culture inCrawley.
As a New Town,Crawley needed a lot of facilities to be built up from scratch. Most visibly, we have seen the delivery of Tilgate Golf Centre, The Hawth and three leisure centres, culminating in the state-of-the-art K2 Crawley. It has been interesting to see the types of operation used for these and other facilities across the town. The golf centre is owned by the Council and commercially run with a third party. K2 Crawley is owned by the Council and run as a trust with a third party. The Hawth is both owned and run by the Council.
All of these facilities have and continue to enjoy consensus political support, although their initial delivery has sometimes not been quite so clear-cut. Approval for The Hawth in the 1980s required the votes of the then Conservative Opposition to get through, and our commitment to the venue remains undiminished today. It is recognised that arts and culture provision require large subsidies to thrive and our use of Council Tax revenue reflects this fact.
Across these and other Council services, we have diversity in the method of provision despite hang-ups inBritainabout the words ‘public’ and ‘private’. Ultimately what matters is the quality and value of service delivery rather than who provides it. Too often we have tedious debates about ‘public’ and ‘private’ provision together with absurd and sometimes coded assertions that one method is always better than the other.
Part of the problem stems from the historically polarised debate between national Conservative and Labour politicians around ownership. There was once a view that nationalisation was some kind of panacea, representing ownership by and for the people. In reality, it was just a form of compulsory public or state ownership. We, the public, had to nominally part-own some huge state corporation whether we wanted to or not. In return, we got no say in running the company beyond five minutes in a polling booth every five years. What we did typically get in many cases was our share of the annual losses.
Often the companies before nationalisation were described as being privately owned but it could also be argued that they were publicly owned by those people who chose to purchase shares in them. That was the difference. These companies registered on the Stock Exchange were part-owned by those members of the public who chose to do this.
Both Labour and Conservative viewpoints have historically got in the way of the best service provision. Services do not always have to be directly run. Nor should there be a bias towards private provision as unhelpfully promoted by the Conservatives’ old CCT (Compulsory Competitive Tendering) legislation. It is the outcomes that matter and we get the best of these through a mixed economy for service provision.
Councillor Bob Lanzer, Leader of Crawley Borough Council
18th January 2011