The Measurement of Central Control in England and Wales

I N a recent paper Page’ has made a stimulating contribution to the literature on British central-local relations. With specific reference to the agency model of the role of British local authorities he develops a critique of earlier works by Boaden’ and A ~ h f o r d , ~ which claimed to test the validity of the agency model. The key point made by Page is that a necessary prior condition to such tests is that the objectives of central control are correctly specified. Thus, although Boaden claimed that ‘central control is less apparent in policy outcomes than might be supposed’ because of the wide variation he found in expenditures per capita in five services in England and Wales, Page points out that the centre may welcome diversity in such expenditures per capita. For example, with respect to the phenomenon of variations in expenditures per capita Page produces some evidence that the Scottish Office has placed pressure on Glasgow District to spend funds in a manner which would increase its deviation from the national average of expenditure per capita on housing. However, Page’s main conclusion is that the Scottish Office, via the instrument of expenditure guidelines issued to each Scottish local authority since December 1975, is ‘more concerned at present with controlling overall expenditure rather than individual items of local budget^'.^ Thus Page concludes that, because this is the dominant objective of central control in Scotland, the best measure for testing the validity of the agency model with respect to Scottish local authorities is the extent to which these authorities’ expenditure was influenced by the expenditure guidelines. The extent of this influence is measured by means of a regression model with two independent variables-GLG, the percentage rate of growth between 1975/76 and 1977/78 in Scottish District Council expenditure implied in guidelines, and HLS, a dummy variable reflecting the stringency of the guidelines. In this paper we attempt to evaluate to what extent a similar claim can be made with respect to the system of central-local relations in England and Wales, not only for the period covered in Page’s article but also with respect to the changes introduced since the election of the Conservative government in