Conservatives promise radical reform

    Iain Duncan Smith has pledged to fund the recruitment of 40,000
    extra police officers by cutting spending on asylum seekers and
    refugees by two thirds as part of a radical shake up of local
    government services, writes Derren
    Hayes.

    The Conservative leader said that, if elected to power, his
    party would cut the £1.5bn spent on the asylum system because
    it could be “better spent on more police”. He said the
    current system would be replaced with annual quotas for refugees
    with genuine claims.

    Speaking at the Local Government Association annual conference
    in Harrogate yesterday, Duncan Smith also promised to scrap the
    Comprehensive Performance Assessment and Best Value schemes.

    He told local government delegates that Best Value was
    “heavy handed and places too many restrictions and
    inspections on councils” and that it was a “perverse
    logic to promise autonomy to those councils already performing
    well” as happens with CPA.

    A task force on community government set up by the Conservative
    leader is already looking at alternatives. “At its simplest,
    I think an annual financial audit, written in plain English and put
    into the public domain, would ensure people are still able to check
    up on the performance and delivery of their local council, while
    doing away with the excessive burdens councils currently
    face.”

    Duncan Smith went on to promise places on rehabilitation schemes
    for all young drug addicts. He said every young heroin and cocaine
    addict would be given the option of drug rehabilitation therapy,
    run and delivered by local groups using a variety of methods, as an
    alternative to prison.

    “For years we have either turned a blind eye to young drug
    addicts or treated them as criminals, ignoring them for years and
    then locking them up in prisons when they commit a crime,” he
    said. “We do little to get them off the habit and to stop
    them offending – no wonder we have the highest rates of
    recidivism amongst young offenders.”

    Duncan Smith said a Conservative government would scrap regional
    quangos and launch an immediate review of the new local government
    finance formula, which was introduced in April.

    The Labour local government group accused Duncan Smith of vowing
    to do away with the tools that had been used to assist councils to
    improve, and of being “long on rhetoric and short on
    substance”.

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