JUST after I was elected mayor, I was told that I must never forget how important it was for the council to work with its partner agencies.

I replied that it might be a good idea for us in the council to start working together ourselves and erase the demarcation lines that separated one department’s hallowed turf from another’s.

I have learned a lot since then.

Most people still think their council is the same outfit, responsible for what’s good or bad about their area. But how it delivers its services has changed beyond measure.

We’re always being told we could do better, though, usually by government ministers.

This week, as reported by this newspaper, we had extraordinary comments from Business Secretary Vince Cable about the shortcomings of Local Enterprise Partnerships, the public-private regeneration bodies involving councils and businesses, that his own government set up.

His remarks typify the kind of off-the-cuff, unthinking put-down that passes for dialogue from government these days. We’re all in it together, and all trying to get the country out of the same hole, remember.

But behind every foot-in-the-mouth minister, there is a civil servant – well, probably a team of them – steering him or her in the wrong direction.

As I look at the changes we’ve wrought in local councils, the way that staff in the NHS have responded to reform and the way the business community has embraced its role in regenerating communities, I see organisations that have adapted well to big changes.

None were afraid to do something new.

When I look at the civil service, the real and permanent government of this country, I see something different.

Just after Tony Blair was elected I remember a retired mandarin being interviewed.

The Prime Minister, he said, could exercise almost unlimited power and influence but he did it in a system that allowed him only this much leeway. His gesture indicated a space of around 12 inches.

And that, he might very well have added, is how we like it and how it is going to stay.

Read any press story about government budget cuts. The starting point is never what’s for the greater good, it’s about a turf war between departments.

In other words, it’s about maintaining the status quo, the hierarchy and the boundaries.

Sadly ministers are willing recruits in these battles, not peacemakers.

I’m sure the cuts in Whitehall are as real and difficult as those in the Town Hall. But they’re not leading to a similar culture change.

As long as the civil service recruits the same kind of people in the same way and relies on “what worked before” to face problems of a kind and scale we have never previously encountered, we will flounder.

Local government gets things wrong, sometimes horribly so. But when I look at an organisation that did nothing while the MPs’ expenses scandal festered under its nose, I am not going to meekly accept lectures.

The government preaches localism. It should be about devolving power to accountable, elected bodies whose credibility stems from their willingness to work with local communities and businesses for the common good.

But that will only work if they tell the mandarins they don’t have a monopoly of wisdom and just for once allow us the freedom to determine our destiny.