Local power in responding to COVID globally

By Peter Warrington

When looking at whether local authorities, including those in Cambridgeshire, have had the ability to respond to COVID in the UK, it can be useful to make comparisons internationally as to how different extents of powers for local governments have enabled different responses to COVID-19. Here I will look briefly at some of these to provide an answer – Has more local government power to respond to COVID-19 internationally been more effective than in the UK?

The UK and England

Power in the UK is decentralised through a system called “Devolution”, under which the different constituency nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) are afforded legislative and executive power to exercise wide-ranging power as devolved to them in law, in Scotland and Wales these are defined in law by a list of specific “reserved areas”.

Legislative and executive power in England still however largely rests in the hands of government in Westminster. ¹

Some power in England, Scotland and Wales is further devolved to county councils, district councils and unitary authorities. Other local government structures such as combined authorities and the Greater London Authority are out of the scope of this document. Councils are generally responsible for “social care and provide some aspects of transport, housing, and education” as well as “a range of neighbourhood services including libraries and waste collection.”.² They are additionally afforded the power to be able “to do anything an individual can do provided it is not prohibited by other legislation”³

Councils have played a role in the following areas:

• Providing community support and coordination hubs as mandated by national government, providing a coordinated volunteer response to provide support to people in local communities, for example with providing food to those self-isolating.

• Administering local grants to businesses, such as those that have had to close as a result of restrictions

• Providing business support and advice

• Communicating with communities

• Employing COVID marshals to enforce COVID restrictions

• (Starting December 2020) Community testing to help identify asymptomatic cases, local authorities being able to target this testing

• (Since July 2020) Engaging in Contact Tracing and notification where national Test and Trace has been unable to reach contacts of those identified as COVID positive⁴

Government has been criticised in how it has allowed local authorities to respond:

• Not providing enough funding to support local authorities at risk of financial failure during the pandemic, limiting their ability to respond. ⁵

• Test and trace services being led centrally rather than by local public health teams who know their communities⁶, with local authorities being felt ignored.

• Community testing facing large backlogs, unable to keep up with demand

• Local restrictions being ineffective⁷ and these decisions not being made with the contribution of local authority input.⁸

Much of the following analysis has been based on ”THREE APPROACHES TO HANDLING THE COVID-19 CRISIS IN FEDERAL COUNTRIES: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland”, a chapter of the book “Coronavirus Politics: The Comparative Politics and Policy of COVID-19”. It is available on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11927713.1.

Germany

Germany is considered a Federalised nation, and is described as such in law.⁹ Federalism is “a system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government” where “generally, an overarching national government is responsible for broader governance of larger territorial areas, while the smaller subdivisions, states, and cities govern the issues of local concern”.¹⁰ Federalist countries include the United States, Brazil, Russia and of course Germany.¹¹

Germany’s federalist system organises the nation into 16 states which have executive and legislative powers over most matters, apart from those reserved by the federal government. States for example have the power to legislate over education, policing and public housing, while they share powers over welfare, and notably for this research, civil law and public health.

Germany is further organised into 402 administrative districts, which have power over areas such as welfare, roads and economic investment, and are even further organised into ~11,000 municipalities each ran by a council and a mayor. These administer programmes authorised by federal or state government and have the ability in basic law to regulate on all their own affairs within the limits of the law.

Initial government action in Germany was therefore taken by state and local governments, some of the first actions being taken in the state of Bavaria which banned events with more than 1,000 participants on March 10^th 2020, while “in the following days, the majority of states decided to close schools and nurseries”. Bavaria was the first state to introduce a “stay at home” order. This early response came under criticism for being “confused”, with calls for more centrally aligned restrictions.¹²

A coordinated response was taken federally with the agreement of federal and states governments to close nonessential shops, sports facilities and schools while introducing restrictions for restaurants. Later restrictions to ban gatherings of more than 2 people and to only leave home for specified reasons were also introduced.

Generally, states and other lower levels of Government has played a integral role, significantly more decentralised by the UK:

• Testing was ran by local states while following national guidance, people with COVID symptoms being tested by a GP or at a test centre¹³.

This has meant that it was “well placed to deal with sudden increases in demand” with an “excess capacity of about half a million tests a week”, compared to the UK which was “overwhelmed at several points during the pandemic”.

Testing has mostly been conducted by private, self-governed organisations.

They however have mostly conducted fewer tests than the UK per capita.

• Contact tracing was conducted by a local health authority network, being able to utilise local health teams in communities to track and test contacts in a decentralised manner.¹⁴

Germany experienced less deaths per capita for the first wave in the period till the 30^th September. 114.37 deaths per million to the 30^th September in Germany, but 637.03 deaths per million in the UK.¹⁵

Their response during the first wave has widely been described as a success, due to the country’s good public health system, and their development of high testing capacity and containment, something that was made possible in part by Germany’s localised approach, as cited in the media. However, as Germany stated to face its second wave, things did not look as positive.

During the 1^st wave, Germany saw a peak of only 510 deaths in a day in April 2020, but during their prolonged 2^nd wave through November 2020 to present, has seen a peak of 1,734 new deaths in one day in January 2021.¹⁶

The German Government responded by reintroducing some lockdown measures in December¹⁷, followed by a more restrictive lockdown later that same month – this lasted until March 1^st 2021 where schools reopened and restrictions began to be eased.¹⁸

Some in the media described the situation as “out of control”, for example the New Statesman in December 2020 which cites complacency as a reason Germany saw a resurgence in COVID transmission, but to a greater extent the failure of the initial November lockdown and the underestimation of the virus in the 2^nd wave.¹⁹ These do not however seem to be a fault of a localised or federalised approach.

That being said, in April 2021, the Federal German government did agree with the federal states to transfer power to impose curfews and closures to the federal government. This was cited as being necessary due to the fragmented way in which different states imposed restrictions.²⁰

Overall, I do not see this as a testament to the failure of local responses to the pandemic, rather a reflection of how a unified set of restrictions is the most effective way of responding to a similar level of transmission rates across a country, where local governments still have the power to target support, testing and contact tracing to respond to the pandemic most effectively. I believe this is therefore an area where Germany has succeeded.

Addendum - Funding

Related to: Local Government funding and the pandemic

I’d like to also briefly touch on local government funding, something that is an important part in being able to understand local authorities’ ability to respond during the COVID pandemic.

Germany is generally considered to have better funded local authorities than in the UK. For example, a report from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants rates local government “ability to pay for long-term obligations” in Germany as 10% better than in the UK and their “Ability to pay for the existing level and quality of services now and in the future” as 24% greater, as shown in the figure below.²¹ In the UK, grants from Government have been cut by 38% between 2009/10 and 2018/19, where some authorities are at risk of financial failure and 94% of single tier councils are expected to reduce service budgets.