Nobody cares about local government – but we can make them

Four ideas to improve local authorities

Bins squat like a toad across British politics.

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I hate to say it, but I really like my local Tory councillor.

Yes it really is only two years since my partner and I, both lefty-liberal types, reached our mid-30s/early 40s, bought a house and moved out of London to the Kent commuter belt.

I didn’t think we’d go native this quickly either¹.

The problem is that our councillor lives locally, and is very good at doing councillor stuff. He’s excellent at the “getting potholes filled in” part of the job, and is active on all of the local Facebook groups, engaging with his constituents and helping them with their problems.

He’s even helped us directly. By feeding our cats when we go on holiday.

This isn’t an act of extreme electioneering on his part, it’s just another thing he does for work and we pay him money to do it. I recognised his face on a cat-sitting website when I searched for our local area, and I quickly realised that I should definitely book him over the other candidates.

My rationale was smart: Unlike the other cat-sitters in the area, he’s not a total rando who I would be letting into our house and trusting to care for Hashtag and Boudicca². And as he’s a councillor, that’s an effective heuristic for “is he a responsible adult?” compared to the median person off the street.

Plus in the best case scenario, if he later becomes Prime Minister, I’m going to have an incredible anecdote. And in the worst case scenario, if he inexplicably were to somehow harm our beloved cats, I could dedicate my life to destroying his political career. That’s a level of accountability that a one star review on the cat-sitting app simply can’t compete with.

But here’s the awkward thing: Despite him being really good at his job, and despite having personally met him and had him help us out… I didn’t vote for him in last May’s local elections³.

This was for three reasons.

First, because despite my drift towards political moderation in my old age, I still situate my politics somewhere in the haze of the liberal-left. I just don’t think I could ever bring myself to put my cross in the Tory box.

Secondly, like basically everyone I was, of course, voting mostly on national issues, and wanted to ‘send a message’ to the current government that I think they have bad ideas and are doing a bad job.

And finally, there’s the reality that despite being someone who cares about politics more than 99% of the rest of the population, the awkward reality is that I don’t know that much about my area’s local politics.

Sure, I know which party is in control of the council, and I could probably hazard a guess at some of the most contentious local issues, but I don’t follow the happenings on my local council very closely at all. Has my councillor been speaking in debates? What have been his contributions to various policy debates locally? I’ve got no idea.

This strikes me as a problem. But luckily I don’t think I’m the only person failing here.

According to some annoyingly ancient 2005 polling by Ipsos-Mori⁴, 26% of people said they know “nothing at all” about the work of their local councillors, 54% said they know “not very much”, 17% said they know “a fair amount”, and 2% “a great deal”.

Then we have to factor in that a significant number of people in those latter two groups were surely lying because they wanted to sound clever when a pollster phoned them up (what I’m trying to get everyone to call the Anneliese Dodds Bullshit Coefficient).

And even if we imagine a fantasy world where since 2005 there has been an uptick in engagement with local issues, it seems unlikely to me that the numbers would be much higher⁵. Not least because there is no sign of an uptick in the turnout for council elections, which you might assume would increase if people were more interested.

In fact, nobody caring about local politics is pretty much something we just accept as a golden rule in British politics. And this doesn’t seem to good to me as someone who cares about achingly worthy stuff like the health of local democracy.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, because there’s no law of physics that states that most people have to be disengaged from local government. It’s just a consequence of the way our politics is structured that most people care even less than they do about Westminster.

So rather than sit down and try to learn about local issues and become more engaged with my local area like a good citizen, I’ve instead been puzzling through this problem in my head.

And as a result, here are four ideas for how to actually make people care more about what happens in their local council.

This is where the paywall kicked in originally, so if you read beyond this point and enjoy it, please consider smashing that subscribe button. That’s right, I really am gambling that ⭐️local government reform⭐️ is what is going to get the subscriptions moving. So subscribe now to discover all⁶ of the answers to our local government woes.

1. Larger local authorities

There are currently 317 local authorities in England alone, ranging from unitary authorities to district councils. And believe it or not, each is tasked more than just vetoing house-building. Each has to deliver services to residents, like social care, social housing, maintaining the roads and, of course, sorting out the bins.

However, few councils are able to think much bigger than delivering the meagre services they do, because of a combination of a lack of political power, and a lack of money.

And this is particularly unfortunate when it comes to bigger, strategic issues, like when infrastructure is needed that will often cross the boundaries of multiple local authorities. So if you want to make any big money investments, you either have to solve a tricky coordination problem with multiple other local authorities with their own politics and incentives. And to pay for it, you probably have to get Westminster involved.

So given this, I think there is a strong case for making local authorities larger, by combining the many dozens of existing local councils, or creating new bodies that cover larger regions that have a shared geography and shared interests.

The fruits of doing this aren’t even hypothetical. Transferring powers upwards has worked great for London and Manchester.

In London, the creation of the Greater London Authority was part of the reason we got the London Overground and cycle hire, and too much power being stuck down at borough level is why the rollout of Boris Bikes⁷ is maddeningly inconsistent across the capital.

More recently there is the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which mashed together basically ten unitary authorities. And it is currently in the process of finally getting a grip on Greater Manchester’s public transport, with the launch of the “Bee” network signalling a new era of public transport that is actually coordinated so that people might actually want to use it.

There are conceivably other advantages to larger local authorities too, and I think that it is worth considering scaling up powers that have been traditionally very locally controlled too – like bins and planning.

Why? Because with so many small councils, it is inevitable that some of these councils are going to be crap. In recent years, some, like Thurrock and Northamptonshire have even had to effectively declare bankruptcy, with terrible consequences for local services.

If we had bigger councils, I think it is likely that the quality of governing, and the quality of management and service delivery will improve. Because instead of each council having to build a competent staff to deliver any given service, it’d be easier to find highly skilled, competent professionals.

In fact, there are already examples of this. For example, there are several groups of London councils who have clubbed together to take care of the bins in their boroughs – and as a result is able to take advantage of economies of scale and more professional management.

And as for planning, as things currently stand, councils are completely failing to build enough houses. Many councils have not even agreed on a “local plan” for housing and land use, which they’re supposed to be legally obligated to do⁸.

But if we had bigger councils, in addition to more competent management, there would be more incentive for Westminster and the press to hold councils to account (because they’d be large enough to pay attention to). And even better – because larger councils would cover much larger regions, it would be harder for NIMBY micro-politics to dominate the political agenda.

In any case, I’m obviously not the first person to suggest making local government bigger. Since the Cameron (or more specifically, Osborne) era, the creation of these more regional governing bodies has been periodically something the government has shown an interest in. And now we have a bunch more combined authorities – which have generally happened because councils have got together and asked nicely.

So what I’m arguing for is that the government in Westminster should be more aggressive in creating new, regional bodies. Don’t wait for the councils to ask. Because bigger can actually be better.

2. More devolution

One obvious criticism of me proposing bigger and fewer local authorities is that I’m calling for more centralisation, which depending on the issue may be undesirable. However, I think once you have more effective governance at an intermediary level it will make it easier for the central government in Westminster to hand over more money and power, while remaining confident that it will be wielded by competent adults.

And this is important, because Britain is almost absurdly over-centralised, with Whitehall making all sorts of decisions that are absolutely mental things for people in central government to concern themselves with.

The most recent high profile example of this was, of course, the announcement that the government would be making a “major investment to transform [the] future of English chess”.

Leaving aside the wisdom of supporting chess⁹, what made this particularly stupid was that the package of measures would be worth whole… £1m. Yes, that’s “million” with an “m”. And despite being worth approximately “fuck all” in 2023 money¹⁰, the Department of Levelling Up has been forced to come up with an entire complex bidding process for councils to apply to if they want a slither of the cash. And it ultimately means that someone sat in London will be picking 100 local parks around the country that are going to be blessed with the installation of… chess tables.

At this point, I could probably say “I rest my case”, end the post here. But I do think more devolution is important. With more regional local authorities, Westminster could hand off powers analogous to those held by the Scottish government¹¹.

That could mean local authorities could have a direct hand in, for example, coordinating commuter rail services, including setting fares and planning routes, so that transport plans could feed directly into development plans. Or perhaps we could even let people who live slightly closer to the parks decide exactly where to place the chess tables.

3. Proportional representation in local elections

Every so often, someone will attempt to reheat the issue of electoral reform and put it on the political agenda. Last year, Labour activists tried it at conference, only to be roundly ignored by Keir Starmer.

And of course, if you talk to a LibDem for long enough, after you’ve explained that you gave up watching Doctor Who during the Matt Smith era¹², they’ll inevitably start trying to persuade you of the merits of Single Transferrable Vote.

But what I don’t really understand about people who care about this is why they focus the vast majority of their campaigning energy on reforming Westminster. It’s local councils where the case for proportional representation (PR) is both much harder to argue with, and easier to theoretically implement.

Why is the case stronger? Because in some areas, there isn’t really much multiparty democracy going on.

Take the London Borough of Newham, for example. Last year, Labour won 64 of the 66 available seats, with only 61% of the vote. And the election before, in 2018, it won every seat on the council with just 67% of actual votes cast.

Working backwards, Labour’s dominance was scarcely ever challenged. It won the lot in 2014 and 2010 too. And 2006 was particularly weird, as Labour suffered a devastating overwhelming victory, winning a paltry 54 of what was then 60 seats, with only 41% of the vote¹³.

And aside from one brief period of 1968 until 1971 when a Residents Association took the council briefly into No Overall Control, Labour has overwhelmingly dominated local politics since the borough was created in 1964.

Though Newham might be an extreme case, it is not the only one. For example, in 2019, Labour won 53 of the 54 seats on Leicester City Council. And though there are (as best I can tell) fewer examples of overwhelming Tory hegemony, there are plenty of councils where one party has effectively run the council for literally decades¹⁴.

And even if it happens to be the party that you support that is in power, this doesn’t strike me as great for local democracy.

Why? Because if you want your vote to actually make a difference in Newham, arguably it is better to not bother voting, and instead join the local Labour Party, entangling yourself in factional in-fighting from the inside.

My worry is that this basically makes local government less responsive to actual citizens, as it at best forces councillors to look inwards at their internal party politics, and at worse incentivises complacency. And it also makes it harder to punish a bad council (or, let’s be optimistic, reward a good one) if the number of seats they win is only vaguely linked to their performance at the ballot box.

Obviously you could make similar arguments about MPs in Westminster. There are certain constituencies where you could slap a correctly coloured rosette on literally anyone and have them win the seat. Even Lord Frost, and he’s awful. That’s why I’d vote for “yes” in some imaginary Westminster PR referendum.

But what I think makes the status quo so bad for councils is that there isn’t even much of a meaningful connection between a council performance and how people vote. Which in sum means that councillors are basically completely unaccountable: In swathes of the country, there is no meaningful political opposition from other parties, and councillors basically retain their seats by pure luck, reflective of how their national party is doing, instead of their actual job performance.

And if we had PR at a local level¹⁵, maybe people would feel like their vote actually matters that little bit more.

4. More elected Mayors

I feel like this will be my most controversial opinion, but I really like directly elected Mayoral systems for local government. Why? Because unlike councillors, people actually know who the Mayor is.

Case in point: I’d bet there are many people reading, myself included, who can name the Mayors of London and Manchester (bonus points for West Midlands and Liverpool), but who would struggle to name the Leader of their local council.

And this matters. Because though opinions on one individual’s performance is a crude metric, it’s at least some form of accountability at a local level for the actions of a council. So having a Mayor as a figurehead, who rises or falls based on the performance of a local authority at least has some democratic logic to it.

There is, of course, a downside to having a big Mayoral figurehead, and that is that it a role that can be alluring to demagogues and arseholes.

But this isn’t just a bug, it’s a feature: A strong Mayor can provide a counterweight to power in Westminster – look at Andy Burnham’s interventions, or how Boris used the Mayoralty to build his own profile.

But more importantly, a directly elected Mayor carries with them a personal mandate to get shit done, in a way that a dithering council, staffed by nobodies and operating on a more consensus-driven model does not.

We’re seeing this play out at the moment as Sadiq Khan is using his personal mandate and profile to push through the ULEZ expansion, in the face of fierce opposition from both the government and (more quietly) his own party leadership.

Though it may still be a battle that he ends up losing, the fact that he has been able to actually make something happen, and the fact that new things will be tried, seems to me like a good thing. Similarly, once again Burnham’s creation of the Bee Network is something that is being driven forward, partially because of his own mandate and force of personality.

So if we want to do councils to be more ambitious and do more – I think more Mayors is part of the answer.

Accountability means… accountability

So those are my ideas for improving local government, and making people care about it.

There is, however, arguably a trade-off implicit in my ideas above. If they are good and successful ideas (I’ll let the experts figure that out), the upshot would be that councils would be more responsive, and more involved with the needs, desires and opinions of their local electorate.

And this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The obvious example is on planning, where one of the major reasons we’re not building enough new homes is because local councillors are often barraged by residents opposing building pretty much anything. Do I really want to local people to have effectively more power?

Leaving aside the broader planning issue, where my view is that the process needs to be reformed by Westminster, to give councils fewer veto points¹⁶, I do also naively think think more responsive councils could also be good for the O’Malleyist cause.

Because if we can build a system where:

• Local authorities can deliver more (because they are larger)

• People care more about what their councillors are doing (because they have more powers)

• Politicians have to fight for every vote (because PR)

• People actually know who their local politicians are (because Mayors)

…Then hopefully that’s a recipe for a much more broadly engaged citizenry – so at the next planning meeting, it won’t just be the handful of weirdo obsessive NIMBYs¹⁷ driving the agenda. Perhaps a broader range of voices might be represented too.

Phew! That was a long one! Don’t forget to subscribe to get more of This Sort Of Thing direct to your inbox!

1. Another point for Team Structure in the agency/structure debate.

2. I defy anyone to name a pair of cats with more discordant names.

3. I must admit I am a bit nervous that he’ll eventually find this post and be so offended he won’t cat-sit for us in the future.

4. If anyone can point me towards any more up-to-date research, I would genuinely love to hear about it. I previously touched upon this in a 2016 piece for the sadly departed CityMetric, and after some digging, including an FOI to DCLG, basically found very, very little research on how much people know about local government.

5. Obviously since 2005 we’ve had the rise of social media and the creation of local Stasi-like Facebook groups where people engage with their neighbours, and conceivably their councillors, on important local issues like “who parked in my space?” and “those completely normal people are behaving suspiciously”. And since 2010 we’ve seen local authorities ravaged by austerity, which might have drawn more attention. So I think it is conceivable that people pay more attention now – though this isn’t reflected in turnout.

6. *Some.

7. Yes I know Boris isn’t responsible for commissioning them, nor did he have much to do with their rollout, but that’s what everyone calls them anyway. It’s like how when one of our cats vomits on the floor me and my partner say “someone’s done a Lord Frost on the carpet again”.

8. Insert ranting about Theresa Villiers here.

9. You might remember that the motivation behind it appears to be a sop to Rishi’s personal interest in chess. Which is why when I’m Prime Minister, we’re going to put ska-punk and British TV idents and continuity on the National Curriculum.

10. That’ll get you almost two weeks worth of shopping from your local supermarket at the moment.

11. It’s also notable how almost absurdly under-powered the Mayor of London / Greater London Authority is. All he basically has control over is a bit of transport and a bit of policing. And this is a problem in both directions. Sadiq Khan can’t even pedestrian Oxford Street, because the road is technically managed by Westminster Council.

12. For a show aimed at kids, it was utterly maddening how you basically needed a PhD in Doctor Who Lore to understand what was going on by the end of it.

13. As I understand it, this weird outcome was because of George Galloway’s Respect party, which was big in East London at the time. And it appears to have taken a decent chunk of the popular vote across the board, but was only able to break through and win three seats. (The other three were won by the Christian Peoples Alliance, in case Newham politics weren’t already weird enough.)

14. I don’t really have a broader point here but I do find it interesting that in places like Japan and Mexico, you have broadly functioning democratic institutions yet basically the same part in government all the time.

15. Let’s say PR with Scottish characteristics, so that we can retain the pot-hole filling and cat-sitting constituency link, while actually reflecting vote totals.

16. I need to do more reading, but the zoning model appeals to me over our existing vetocracy, where you allocate a certain rules to certain areas, and if you want to build something that meets the criteria within, it’s very hard to turn down.

17. This is not a slur on NIMBYs. On the other side, the fact that I have opinions about planning makes me a weirdo obsessive – and the fact that you’ve just read a couple of thousand words about local government reform makes you one too. Sorry.