In the week that the Government announced its new Localism Bill — supposedly devolving power down to local communities — we were treated to the usual Whitehall sophistry over local authority finance.

Even the so-called finance experts have had difficulty trying to explain a Government settlement that was trumpeted as an average 4.4 per cent cut in spending power but which is, in reality, leaving councils millions of pounds short and forced to close libraries and cut social care.

For Oxfordshire, the figures are even more mystifying. The county is supposedly only 1.87 per cent short on spending power, making it one of of the councils that are least touched by Government cutbacks.

The council, however, is saying that little has changed and it will have to push on with cuts that are way above the cut in spending power announced by Local Government Minister Eric Pickles.

So, where does the truth lie? As usual, it is hard to find underneath the complex web of grants and payments through which local councils are funded and through which Whitehall ensures that localism is the last thing that our councils can practise.

The Government’s recipe for localism appears to be to bypass the local community’s elected representatives and hand the ability to challenge council decisions on local facilities and council tax levels to the community itself.

Well-motivated communities may well benefit from this, and one can imagine that people in this county will challenge our local authorities. There is nothing wrong with that.

It is, however, also a recipe for confusion. It is not inconceivable that you could end up with two conflicting referenda, one in favour of keeping a facility open and another rejecting an increase in council tax.

One also has to wonder why it is right that we should have a right to challenge, say the closure of Temple Cowley Pools by Oxford City Council, but no right to challenge in a referendum a Government decision to close magistrates courts in Witney and Wantage.

For true localism to exist, there has to be full local accountability and responsibility and, as we have said many times before, that cannot exist while Whitehall controls the purse strings and councils are unable to raise the majority of their revenue themselves.

It leads every year to the situation where no one is truly clear who is responsible for the level of taxes and the level of provision for any given service. The buck can be passed between local and national government and most local elections simply reflect the state of national politics rather than a local agenda.

Real localism can only exist if we are freed from the controlling hand of Whitehall. Successive Governments — Tory, Labour and Coalition — have failed to grasp this. In practice they have all done the opposite.