In May’s local elections, most of the attention will fall on the larger contests: the devolved elections in Scotland and Wales and the major local authorities. Less noticed, however, will be the smallest units of local government, parish councils, whose elections rarely attract much scrutiny, and their decisions even less. They generally operate outside of urban areas, with about 40 per cent of the population of England living within their domains – a substantial minority of the country. Parish councils are funded by their own tax, a precept, which is collected alongside regular council tax by the larger council of the area.
It is here, in these quieter corners of the system, that some of the more curious examples of public spending can be found.
Last week, I was sent a communication between West Oxfordshire District Council, and a resident and parish councillor, Charles Amos, relating to the parish of Eynsham. It suggested that a single visit to the local public toilets cost the taxpayer £8.69, not far off from a tenner. A strikingly large figure, but a reliable one. The facility costs an approximate £10,515 a year to operate and is used just 1,183 times annually.
Yet how much does the user actually pay to use the facility (after paying their precept, if they’re a resident)? Twenty pence. This it seems fair to say, is not an especially efficient ratio, being a mere 2.3 per cent of the cost of the whole.
It does not seem that Eynsham is entirely unusual. A broader review by the district council suggests that public conveniences across West Oxfordshire require a substantial subsidy – amounting to roughly £270,000 a year, even after user charges are taken into account. In some locations, the cost per visit rises still further, exceeding £11.
The issue, in other words, is not confined to a single facility. It appears to be more general.
To its credit, the council is not unaware of the problem. The same review proposes that a number of the least-used and most expensive facilities – including Eynsham – should be transferred to district councils or closed altogether if no such arrangement can be reached.
In other words, the system can eventually correct for these imbalances, but that correction comes only after the costs have already been incurred and, in some cases, allowed to persist, and after pressure from engaged parishioners and councillors such as Mr Amos.
No one expects a public toilet to operate on a commercial footing. These are not profit-making enterprises, nor should they be. Cleaning, maintenance and the general costs of keeping a facility open to the public all add up. In that sense, the existence of a cost is neither surprising nor objectionable.
The question is not whether public toilets, or any other service, should cost money but whether this is the lowest cost at which the service can reasonably be provided and whether the taxpayers are informed and holding local authorities accountable.
Parish councils offer a useful test case. They are small, often lightly scrutinised and operate with relatively modest budgets. In theory, that freedom should allow for more responsive, efficient decision-making. In practice, the Eynsham example suggests something more ambiguous.
What parish councils often show is that discretion alone does not guarantee efficiency. Without clear oversight or sustained public attention, even small decisions can drift away from reasonable cost. Where legal constraint is weak, public scrutiny must be strong.
This matters beyond a single village or a single service. Much of the debate around local government assumes that if larger councils were freed from their statutory burdens, they would naturally allocate resources more effectively. Parish councils provide a glimpse of what that world might look like, since they are already operating with that freedom.
Reform’s struggles to reduce spending in the larger (mostly county) councils it has controlled since May 2025, although often framed as a failure by the media, should really be seen as a strategic gain for the cause of local government reform. Failures to find major savings should be seen not as an indictment of a Doge-like approach, but as proof of the need to go further and remove the burdensome statutes that make meaningful savings possible.
Yet this point should be tempered by the reality of how those areas of local government which are less constrained tend to operate when the public don’t hold them to account: with the inefficiency and complacency which is the perennial temptation of public office. Removing the pressure of central government diktat will only unleash local productivity and efficiency if it is directly replaced by the pressure of taxpayer scrutiny.
That is not to say that every expense of this kind is wasteful. Faced with the realities of building maintenance and staffing, it may well be that heavily subsidised facilities are the only practical option. But that case needs to be made and rigorously tested.
Despite the public’s willingness to complain about local government, it is notoriously difficult to engage them with it
At the parish level, such scrutiny seems sadly lacking. A report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance last year highlighted a survey which found that from 2017-18, 38 per cent of parish councillors were co-opted, 33 per cent were elected unopposed and only 29 per cent won an election that was actually contested.
Despite the public’s willingness to complain about local government, it is notoriously difficult to engage them with it. For the foreseeable future, parish councils will likely continue to operate as they always have, quietly, and often without much scrutiny. Yet it is in these settings that the habits of public spending can sometimes be most easily observed, and the ‘right-wing’ think tankers and party activists hoping to unleash the patent potential of local authorities after some future bonfire of the statutory requirements would do well to learn from the microcosm of the parish council. If you want to lift the burdens of central government, you need first to find a way to increase scrutiny from the public.
The £10 toilet is, in one sense, a minor curiosity. In another, it is a small but telling example of how discretion can be exercised without real constraint. If local government is to be taken seriously, even those councils with the smallest budgets must ensure taxpayers are not left with a bum deal.
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