Prime Minister Ishiba announces “doubling of local development grants” ⇒ Consultants flocking to the grants & local governments being preyed upon… What is the solution?

Satsuki Katayama: “It’s getting to the point where it’s like, ‘You’re paying for consultants…'”

One of the policies that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called for in the recent lower house election, in which the LDP suffered a crushing defeat, was to “restart regional development.

It was in 2002 that the government launched its regional development program with the aim of overcoming the decline in local populations and correcting the concentration of population in Tokyo. In his October 4 policy speech, Prime Minister Ishiba looked back to 10 years ago when he served as the first minister in charge of regional development and boasted of his achievement of “establishing grants to promote regional development, which are distinct from previous grants,” and proposed doubling the number of grants for regional development.

However, in a late-night (September 28) debate program on the same day that the new LDP president was elected, “Live TV till Morning! on the same day that the new LDP president was elected (September 28), Satsuki Katayama, who also served as minister in charge of regional development, referred to regional development and made the following comment.

When you make various menus for local development grants, local governments do not do anything outside of the menus. When I told them to write their own plans, the plans gradually began to look like, ‘You’re paying a consulting firm. We want to change this.

In many cases, the goal of local governments has become to obtain government grants, and they often ask consultants to draw up the business plans necessary for application. As former Minister of State for Regional Development Katayama seems to be aware, what is behind local governments’ dependence on consultants?

In the field of urban planning, around 1970, when local governments wanted to develop new projects, they would order planning from universities.

After ’00, various grants and subsidies for urban redevelopment were established, and since the start of regional development, the government has raised the bar for the documents it requires local governments to submit. Since the government, as well as universities, are finding it difficult to cope with this situation, I believe that there is a growing tendency to request consultants to do the work.”

Professor Toru Nakayama of Nara Women’s University, who specializes in urban planning and is an expert on municipal policies, points out that, “The enactment of the Act on Decentralization of Government and Local Authorities has made it easier for local governments to submit their own documents.

With the enactment of the Law for Decentralization, the central government has abolished “subsidies with strings attached” that stipulate how they are to be used, and has replaced them with lump-sum grants that can be used freely by local governments, but this has not happened.

The Digital Rural City National Concept Grant (Digita Grant), which was renamed under the Kishida administration, is a prime example of such a grant.

In order to obtain a grant for local development, a local government must prepare an application according to a uniform national manual prepared by the government. For municipalities that do not have the know-how, it is quicker to leave the task to consultants who know the patterns of the application forms.

On the other hand, local governments are short of manpower due to the reduction of staff as a result of administrative reforms.

Since the Heisei merger (1999), the number of employees in municipalities has decreased remarkably. It is clear that it is becoming more and more difficult to plan community development within the local government in terms of human resources.