I’m a county councillor. I don’t think I disagree with anything you say.
On bigger patches, there is more to it than just bigger areas. Multi tier systems are very bottom heavy. We have 70 councillors for the county, one per division. But then the district councils have multi member wards that are on smaller geographical areas than county divisions - so our district council has 48 councillors covering the same geographical area as 12 county councillors and my division covers the same area that 5 district councillors do. County councillors typically have more complex casework (social care) and more casework (potholes) and nobody to share the workload with and yet collectively the equivalent district councillors are paid twice as much as I am. Residents know who I am but it can be more tricky to know who your district councillor is or which one to approach when there are several. And it allows some councillors to shirk their duties because it’s not all on them so you end up with bums on seats at that lower level. And this doesn’t help with the public feeling enamoured by local councils and councillors.
So addressing the imbalance and making councils less bottom heavy in terms of where the majority of councillors sit could help even without having to do a massive restructure.
One of the other reasons people know so little is because local media don’t report what is happening adequately. The local democracy reporter system has made it better, but it isn’t perfect. I recently led a debate on trying to improve the repairs of potholes, it had specific suggestions, there was a proper debate, it was voted down by the controlling party, and I issued a decent press release to the local media. Local radio interviewed me briefly but despite running letters and stories about potholes all winter every winter (because everybody loves moaning about potholes) the local paper didn’t publish a single thing about the debate at all either online or in print. Not only do I think they are letting the public down by not reporting council activities, this then puts the onus on me to tell everybody what I’m doing - and I’m good at Facebook and good at leaflets so it happens in my patch - but why should the onus on reporting to residents what the councils and councillors they pay for and vote for are doing be left entirely to the whim, approach and particular politics of the individual councillor?
Another thing you don’t mention that would work is to pay better. Controversial with the public at first for sure but I genuinely think it would help. I can only do this role as a youngish councillor (only relative to other councillors, I’m in my 40s and about 5th youngest on my council) because I have a freelance job on top that pays well and allows me the flexibility needed and I have a partner on a good salary. Most people can’t do it until retirement when they have free time and the allowance is then seen as a nice boost to a pension. But is it any wonder that things can be a bit stale and uninteresting to the public and decisions can be poor when it doesn’t have the diversity and energy and vitality that a true mix of people would bring?
This is all super interesting! Agree with everything you say. I think the media point is interesting - that’s why I think larger LAs would inevitably create more incentives for journalists to pay attention and cover them, even in a deeply terrible media environment. (Like how there are real journalists covering the London Assembly, because it is big/powerful enough.)
Also agree councillors should probably be paid more! This isn’t directly analogous, but I used to be the trustee of a small-ish charity, brought in because I was about 50 years younger than the average age of the others. And given the time commitments, it quickly became apparent why the other trustees were almost all retired.
I live in Manchester and our councillors are paid enough that most of them can switch to part-time at their jobs and be a councillor.
I'm a Lib Dem and back when we were winning a lot of seats locally (ie before the 2010 coalition), I looked into going for the council seriously and figured I could work about three days a week and then spend the rest of the time as a councillor, but I'd have to have complete control of the timetable - so I could attend the council meetings I wanted to, then dive into a coffee shop to work for a couple of hours and then back to the meeting.
While that is (just) financially possible, it's also the case that there are a lot of jobs where you wouldn't have that sort of flexibility.
Manchester is one of the best paid councils in the country. The basic allowance was £18,841 for 2022/23, which is not really enough to do it full time (council Leader is £65,857; deputy leader and cabinet members are £38,616). You can see why British politicians treat moving from Leader of a council to Member of Parliament as an upgrade - even for the best-paid, it's £20K more money.
The other huge problem for local democracy is that we have ended up in this weird situation where many local services that are used by lots of people (schools, GP surgeries, police for the most part) aren't really run by local authorities but they are responsible for social care which takes up a huge portion of their budget (I want to say 75% on average but don't quote me) but which realistically no one votes in elections about because it affects about 5% of residents. Strong arguments for keeping it local (see county councillor on their casework load) but it's not helpful for democracy that all their funding and biggest corporate risks are on things that won't have any impact on elections.
The advantage of Scotland's multi-member constituencies is that if I've got something I want to bother someone about, I can email all 3 or 4 of my local councillors and see which one of them responds. I bet that sort of thing generates word-of-mouth.
I'd be really curious to know what the effects are on responsiveness - are multi-member constituencies more responsive, as representatives compete with each other for the affections of the voters, or does a potential implicit division of responsibilities mean people fall through the gaps?
One way of looking at this would be to look at constituencies where parties run multiple candidates and look at how well each of them does, and trying to track this to incumbency levels etc.
The problem is that parties tell their supporters to vote in a certain order (not always consistently - I heard talk at the last election that in some streets you got told to vote candidate A 1, candidate B 2, but elsewhere the order was reversed), because of how you want to time your candidates getting to the quota.
If you think you can comfortably get both your candidates elected, you want to pile all of your first preferences onto one candidate, and then have the balance of second preferences redistributed to your other candidate. It's fine for the other candidate to get hardly any first preferences because the first candidate will get elected before the second candidate is in any danger of getting eliminated.
If you think it's touch and go, though, you want each of your candidates to start with a healthy amount of first preferences so other parties' candidates get eliminated first; hopefully you'll get some transfers and get elected that way.
So maybe a better metric is to look at parties who ran only one candidate, and look at their performance compared to other constituencies (after accounting for demographics etc. etc.).
The timing of this, on the day that the large Birmingham City Council declares "bankruptcy", and people blame the size of the council for its failures...
Yes, 😬! Though that's also a function of austerity (I say, trying to save face), and if more powers were given to the West Midlands Combined Authority and fewer to Birmingham City Council, perhaps they would be better placed to make strategic investments to perform better in the long run? Though I admit, my arguments don't map on particularly well to, er, the big story today.
Birmingham City Council's budget is £3.8bn and West Midlands CA's revenue budget is £346m. I wouldn't focus on size. I think the key things that need to be balanced are:
Making sure that strategic economic decisions are made at a functional economic area level
Making sure that councils are of a size where you don't have too many councillors and that each one covers an area/population small enough that the workload is manageable and they are accessible.
Making sure that strategic geographies for police/fire/health match onto LA geographies.
Combined authorities do help make the square peg a little rounder although there will always be tradeoffs
I think it's far too simplistic to blame it on the size of the authority, these things are of course always more complicated than that, but people/the media love a short and snappy explanation for anything and everything... even if it's misleading or plain wrong.
The IT system cock up is interesting, and is not just a Birmingham thing - this happens all the time in public services, see the NHS for one glaring example. Genuinely, I wonder why this keeps happening. My dad used to work in IT, and I suspect he would blame the fact that IT solutions designed for a client are rarely accepted and adopted by that client without them trying to tweak it or flat out ignore crucial parts of it, which leads to it collapsing in practice.
Reading this (and re-reading it following the election yesterday), there seems be a suggestion towards a deeper truth not spoken aloud. The reason that people don't care about local government is that voting in local elections has no real import, since things stay essentially the same.
Compare, by contrast, with voting at a General Election. No matter how cynical the "both sides the same" crowd are, a Labour majority will lead to meaningful changes, even if the civil service underpinnings remain the same; it will be a nominally left-wing Minister choosing between policy option A and B, and it will be a nominally left-wing Minister appointing (presumably) other left-wing people to public bodies. National government can meaningfully and noticeably shape people's lives in ways that local government cannot.
Put simply what does local government in areas do which is political? Would the replacement of all existing Conservative Councillors with Greens, or Labour with Reform actually have a noticeable impact
on everyday lives? What do they control - they cannot set tax policies, they do not control spending (since the LA officers set the budget, they scrutinise decisions made by LA officers (rather than being 'in charge').
Surely the answer is to make local government matter - perhaps with more Mayors and fewer councils - and let them do things, even if these are unpopular? It's not a question of structure, it's a question of powers.
I'd be in favour of the economies of scale and scope you get from increasing operational coverage (in particular, and boringly so, when it comes to the premise of a "Local GDS") but I'd want to see more elected representation to go with it. I don't think we appreciate how comparatively under represented Brits actually are when it comes to democracy, especially local democracy. The UK has 1 councillor for every 3600 people. That is better than 9 others and a long way from being the worst in the OECD (that's Korea where it's 1 to 13000). At the other end France is probably OTT where there are over 500k sub-national politicians making for a ratio of 1 to 130. But the rest of the OECD has an average that's closer to 1:2500.
Excellent points. I'd like to add one: put NHS services into local authority remit, and for gods sake match up the NHS and local government geography while you're at it: the NHS Trust I live in is small, but covers /eleven/ local authorities (four unitary, five district, two county), which is a nightmare for co-ordinating services. If local elections were fought on local health services engagement would rocket.
Another good quality of the mayors is their ability to be more regional champions and diverge from their party when they feel it's right for the area, in a way that the whipping system prevents MPs from doing. This makes them a bit more not only likeable but also useful at getting things done. ULEZ expansion wouldn't have happened if Khan was more controlled by Labour high commannd (and I say this as a Starmer supporter), similarly in the West Midlands, I rather like Andy Street despite him being a Tory.
I think you're on to something here...but it takes an awful lot to get mergers through locally when it might involve turkeys voting for Christmas. There have been plans to merge the four different local councils in the Cotswolds for ten years, but I see that Stratford and Warwick are hoping to do the same. Both schemes seem to major on cost-saving, when better planned and run services would be a better PR campaign.
I don't see how the theory of having more elected mayors is compatible with using PR. In general, most parties will not gain a majority of a council under PR, and so will need a coalition [and hence consensus of a majority] to govern. In most areas, a mayor is likely to be elected by a minority of electors. Which one should have the real power?
As an example, even under the current system, Labour have just 11 out of 25 London Assembly members, but won the mayoral vote.
I’m a county councillor. I don’t think I disagree with anything you say.
On bigger patches, there is more to it than just bigger areas. Multi tier systems are very bottom heavy. We have 70 councillors for the county, one per division. But then the district councils have multi member wards that are on smaller geographical areas than county divisions - so our district council has 48 councillors covering the same geographical area as 12 county councillors and my division covers the same area that 5 district councillors do. County councillors typically have more complex casework (social care) and more casework (potholes) and nobody to share the workload with and yet collectively the equivalent district councillors are paid twice as much as I am. Residents know who I am but it can be more tricky to know who your district councillor is or which one to approach when there are several. And it allows some councillors to shirk their duties because it’s not all on them so you end up with bums on seats at that lower level. And this doesn’t help with the public feeling enamoured by local councils and councillors.
So addressing the imbalance and making councils less bottom heavy in terms of where the majority of councillors sit could help even without having to do a massive restructure.
One of the other reasons people know so little is because local media don’t report what is happening adequately. The local democracy reporter system has made it better, but it isn’t perfect. I recently led a debate on trying to improve the repairs of potholes, it had specific suggestions, there was a proper debate, it was voted down by the controlling party, and I issued a decent press release to the local media. Local radio interviewed me briefly but despite running letters and stories about potholes all winter every winter (because everybody loves moaning about potholes) the local paper didn’t publish a single thing about the debate at all either online or in print. Not only do I think they are letting the public down by not reporting council activities, this then puts the onus on me to tell everybody what I’m doing - and I’m good at Facebook and good at leaflets so it happens in my patch - but why should the onus on reporting to residents what the councils and councillors they pay for and vote for are doing be left entirely to the whim, approach and particular politics of the individual councillor?
Another thing you don’t mention that would work is to pay better. Controversial with the public at first for sure but I genuinely think it would help. I can only do this role as a youngish councillor (only relative to other councillors, I’m in my 40s and about 5th youngest on my council) because I have a freelance job on top that pays well and allows me the flexibility needed and I have a partner on a good salary. Most people can’t do it until retirement when they have free time and the allowance is then seen as a nice boost to a pension. But is it any wonder that things can be a bit stale and uninteresting to the public and decisions can be poor when it doesn’t have the diversity and energy and vitality that a true mix of people would bring?
This is all super interesting! Agree with everything you say. I think the media point is interesting - that’s why I think larger LAs would inevitably create more incentives for journalists to pay attention and cover them, even in a deeply terrible media environment. (Like how there are real journalists covering the London Assembly, because it is big/powerful enough.)
Also agree councillors should probably be paid more! This isn’t directly analogous, but I used to be the trustee of a small-ish charity, brought in because I was about 50 years younger than the average age of the others. And given the time commitments, it quickly became apparent why the other trustees were almost all retired.
I live in Manchester and our councillors are paid enough that most of them can switch to part-time at their jobs and be a councillor.
I'm a Lib Dem and back when we were winning a lot of seats locally (ie before the 2010 coalition), I looked into going for the council seriously and figured I could work about three days a week and then spend the rest of the time as a councillor, but I'd have to have complete control of the timetable - so I could attend the council meetings I wanted to, then dive into a coffee shop to work for a couple of hours and then back to the meeting.
While that is (just) financially possible, it's also the case that there are a lot of jobs where you wouldn't have that sort of flexibility.
Manchester is one of the best paid councils in the country. The basic allowance was £18,841 for 2022/23, which is not really enough to do it full time (council Leader is £65,857; deputy leader and cabinet members are £38,616). You can see why British politicians treat moving from Leader of a council to Member of Parliament as an upgrade - even for the best-paid, it's £20K more money.
The other huge problem for local democracy is that we have ended up in this weird situation where many local services that are used by lots of people (schools, GP surgeries, police for the most part) aren't really run by local authorities but they are responsible for social care which takes up a huge portion of their budget (I want to say 75% on average but don't quote me) but which realistically no one votes in elections about because it affects about 5% of residents. Strong arguments for keeping it local (see county councillor on their casework load) but it's not helpful for democracy that all their funding and biggest corporate risks are on things that won't have any impact on elections.
The advantage of Scotland's multi-member constituencies is that if I've got something I want to bother someone about, I can email all 3 or 4 of my local councillors and see which one of them responds. I bet that sort of thing generates word-of-mouth.
I'd be really curious to know what the effects are on responsiveness - are multi-member constituencies more responsive, as representatives compete with each other for the affections of the voters, or does a potential implicit division of responsibilities mean people fall through the gaps?
One way of looking at this would be to look at constituencies where parties run multiple candidates and look at how well each of them does, and trying to track this to incumbency levels etc.
The problem is that parties tell their supporters to vote in a certain order (not always consistently - I heard talk at the last election that in some streets you got told to vote candidate A 1, candidate B 2, but elsewhere the order was reversed), because of how you want to time your candidates getting to the quota.
If you think you can comfortably get both your candidates elected, you want to pile all of your first preferences onto one candidate, and then have the balance of second preferences redistributed to your other candidate. It's fine for the other candidate to get hardly any first preferences because the first candidate will get elected before the second candidate is in any danger of getting eliminated.
If you think it's touch and go, though, you want each of your candidates to start with a healthy amount of first preferences so other parties' candidates get eliminated first; hopefully you'll get some transfers and get elected that way.
So maybe a better metric is to look at parties who ran only one candidate, and look at their performance compared to other constituencies (after accounting for demographics etc. etc.).
The timing of this, on the day that the large Birmingham City Council declares "bankruptcy", and people blame the size of the council for its failures...
Yes, 😬! Though that's also a function of austerity (I say, trying to save face), and if more powers were given to the West Midlands Combined Authority and fewer to Birmingham City Council, perhaps they would be better placed to make strategic investments to perform better in the long run? Though I admit, my arguments don't map on particularly well to, er, the big story today.
Birmingham City Council's budget is £3.8bn and West Midlands CA's revenue budget is £346m. I wouldn't focus on size. I think the key things that need to be balanced are:
Making sure that strategic economic decisions are made at a functional economic area level
Making sure that councils are of a size where you don't have too many councillors and that each one covers an area/population small enough that the workload is manageable and they are accessible.
Making sure that strategic geographies for police/fire/health match onto LA geographies.
Combined authorities do help make the square peg a little rounder although there will always be tradeoffs
I think it's far too simplistic to blame it on the size of the authority, these things are of course always more complicated than that, but people/the media love a short and snappy explanation for anything and everything... even if it's misleading or plain wrong.
The IT system cock up is interesting, and is not just a Birmingham thing - this happens all the time in public services, see the NHS for one glaring example. Genuinely, I wonder why this keeps happening. My dad used to work in IT, and I suspect he would blame the fact that IT solutions designed for a client are rarely accepted and adopted by that client without them trying to tweak it or flat out ignore crucial parts of it, which leads to it collapsing in practice.
Reading this (and re-reading it following the election yesterday), there seems be a suggestion towards a deeper truth not spoken aloud. The reason that people don't care about local government is that voting in local elections has no real import, since things stay essentially the same.
Compare, by contrast, with voting at a General Election. No matter how cynical the "both sides the same" crowd are, a Labour majority will lead to meaningful changes, even if the civil service underpinnings remain the same; it will be a nominally left-wing Minister choosing between policy option A and B, and it will be a nominally left-wing Minister appointing (presumably) other left-wing people to public bodies. National government can meaningfully and noticeably shape people's lives in ways that local government cannot.
Put simply what does local government in areas do which is political? Would the replacement of all existing Conservative Councillors with Greens, or Labour with Reform actually have a noticeable impact
on everyday lives? What do they control - they cannot set tax policies, they do not control spending (since the LA officers set the budget, they scrutinise decisions made by LA officers (rather than being 'in charge').
Surely the answer is to make local government matter - perhaps with more Mayors and fewer councils - and let them do things, even if these are unpopular? It's not a question of structure, it's a question of powers.
I'd be in favour of the economies of scale and scope you get from increasing operational coverage (in particular, and boringly so, when it comes to the premise of a "Local GDS") but I'd want to see more elected representation to go with it. I don't think we appreciate how comparatively under represented Brits actually are when it comes to democracy, especially local democracy. The UK has 1 councillor for every 3600 people. That is better than 9 others and a long way from being the worst in the OECD (that's Korea where it's 1 to 13000). At the other end France is probably OTT where there are over 500k sub-national politicians making for a ratio of 1 to 130. But the rest of the OECD has an average that's closer to 1:2500.
(I should probably turn this slightly chaotic thread into a more coherent blog post https://www.twitter.com/bmwelby/status/1770065637320110193)
Excellent points. I'd like to add one: put NHS services into local authority remit, and for gods sake match up the NHS and local government geography while you're at it: the NHS Trust I live in is small, but covers /eleven/ local authorities (four unitary, five district, two county), which is a nightmare for co-ordinating services. If local elections were fought on local health services engagement would rocket.
The local government reform hook got me too. Unbelievable.
Another good quality of the mayors is their ability to be more regional champions and diverge from their party when they feel it's right for the area, in a way that the whipping system prevents MPs from doing. This makes them a bit more not only likeable but also useful at getting things done. ULEZ expansion wouldn't have happened if Khan was more controlled by Labour high commannd (and I say this as a Starmer supporter), similarly in the West Midlands, I rather like Andy Street despite him being a Tory.
Worth the subscription if only to support the wild and touching hope that it’s local government that will make people hop over the paywall!
It worked for me. I’d meant to subscribe, hadn’t and then couldn’t resist reading the rest of this article over my breakfast 😁
I think you're on to something here...but it takes an awful lot to get mergers through locally when it might involve turkeys voting for Christmas. There have been plans to merge the four different local councils in the Cotswolds for ten years, but I see that Stratford and Warwick are hoping to do the same. Both schemes seem to major on cost-saving, when better planned and run services would be a better PR campaign.
[A bit late to the party on this one!].
I don't see how the theory of having more elected mayors is compatible with using PR. In general, most parties will not gain a majority of a council under PR, and so will need a coalition [and hence consensus of a majority] to govern. In most areas, a mayor is likely to be elected by a minority of electors. Which one should have the real power?
As an example, even under the current system, Labour have just 11 out of 25 London Assembly members, but won the mayoral vote.
Chess Boards….. unbelievable, when I heard it announced on the news I thought it was April 1st…