Local Democracy Notepad

Just a quick one to round the week off. I missed this post yesterday on Paul Waugh’s site.

I won’t accuse George Osborne of cowardice for saying this because he’s hardly unique in this respect:

But he left the best til last. When asked if there was any chance of following up this localist agenda by giving councils more of their own money via loc govt finance reform, the ghost of the poll tax hovered over his reply:

“Let me put it this way. Local government tax reform is something that we might leave to a third or fourth term..”

But it does sum up the problem, doesn’t it? I don’t think you could read that story and not see that local policies are seen as anything other than a pawn in the Westminster game – one that’s played out mainly for a small highly valued demographic of swing voters who have to be reached through the prism of the reporters on a handful of national newspapers.

Pic: Okko Pyykkö - click for attribution.

Anthony has beat me to a response to the new Green Paper today, so I thought I’d develop his scepticism about the appetite for ‘scrutiny’.

For me, the interesting question is – as ever – around the whole notion of representation.

Town Hall Matters has lighted on this question and that post returns to a theme that Jenni Russell picked up on a few weeks ago (covered here at the time, and subsequently as the subject for a session at Reboot Britain) albeit with a focus on local rather than Westminster politics.

THM asks:

“…is a desire to scrutinise really what motivates people to become councillors?”

The post then goes on to recount that John Denham wants to…

“…make council leaders ensure scrutiny is a core function and that it is adequately resourced.”

This raises a significant question – one where I suspect common sense would conflict with the current public mood. Read the rest of this entry »

Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry. Read the rest of this entry »

MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.

Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.

“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly.

We’re offering these because we believe that innovation doesn’t just affect business and public administration. It often offers the potential to break out of a political stalemate.

Like the stalemate that politicians, journalists and bloggers are in. Like the stalemate between declining local newspapers and local authorities.

Every senior politician says that they want to devolve power down to local government. Local government says that it wants more power devolved from the centre.

But every politician also knows that this will never happen as long as the public blame central government for poor local services. Innovators can help local authorities raise their game, create new communications channels and start to address this problem.

Politicians know that they face obstacles when they want their departments to raise their game. Whether it’s the risk-averse veto groups in middle management or procurement rules that reward box-ticking rather than imagination, they know that the easy answers have all been tried.

These are small administrative hurdles rather than big political ones. Politicians and innovators can tackle these problems together.

Politicians also know that – if they yield to demands for a more participative politics – that they run the real risk of disenfranchising large sections of the population that are prepared to vote in elections, but that don’t have the ability or the confidence to fight their corner as active citizens.

Politicians will need to call for help from politically-aware innovators if they are to meet demands for participation while preserving the universal franchise.

In many cases, it isn’t just innovation, but political innovation that is needed. Politicians can offer the leadership, but they need to know that innovators are focussed upon their problems – and not just commercial and administrative ones.

It’s time for innovators to help get politicians out of the political stalemate that they are stuck in. Most of these issues will not simply be solved by a general election and a change of government.  They involve the kind of game-changing ideas that have altered so many other sectors of public life.

You can book your tickets for Reboot Britain here. If you’re interested in any of these issues, scan the schedule for more information on them, or please visit www.picamp.org and meet some of the session initiators. I’m hoping to encourage them to just flesh out what they are planning to talk about on this site a bit in advance of the event next Monday.

Denham: Centraliser or soothsayer?

Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government:

“So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver better services and increased public confidence.”

He goes on:

Let’s have a public confidence test by all means, but let’s not make it absolute: do you have confidence in local government? Let’s make it relative: who do you have more trust in, local or central government?

Wonder what the result would be…?

I’m not sure I understand Jon’s argument here – and particularly the way it morphs from one about quality of service and public confidence into a slightly opportunistic political one about trust. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently convening a number of sessions at a Nesta conference on the 6th July called ‘Reboot Britain’, running a strand called ‘PICamp’ – Political Innovation Camp.

I’m looking for local government communications staff that have had any experience or thoughts about the changing relationships with the local media – and particularly issues around the politics of this.

I don’t mean the left/right/Lib/Lab/Con politics, I mean questions like….

• the politics of neutrality and incumbency – if local government communications staff aren’t going through the filter of professional journalists, will this cause problems from a democratic point of view?
• are local on-line communities – often very effective ways of communicating – suitable mediums to use to interact with people? Are such groups an effective substitute for traditional communications through the local press? Are they, perhaps, simply havens for unrepresentative sub-groups of local society?
• is there a way for councils to use social media to improve the quality of local democracy – or is it a minefield that is best avoided? And would an unwillingness to engage create a vacuum of any kind?
• how far are the local government rules on political communications being applied in an inflexible way? Does the uncertainly around this result in local government – particularly councillors – being unusually inactive in this space? And how can local authorities provide a leadership role in on-line communications without becoming de facto political press-officers?
• the politics of decentralisation: The changing relationship between local government and the mass media may provide scope for councils to change the way they communicate and reassert the primacy of local government in addressing local problems. Is there a political opportunity to promote the ‘decentralisation’ that all of the political parties claim to want?
• getting the obstacles out of the way. How can we remove the barriers that stop institutions from interacting?

These sessions have already attracted some great participants – the interest has gone well beyond my expectations with some real innovators putting their hands up to participate as well as a smattering of interest from prominent local and national politicians as well as mainstream-media journalists.

The schedule is still being finalised at the moment, but I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone with practical experience, or with considered views on any of these subjects – particularly from councillors or people working in local government communications / democratic services / electoral services?

If you have any ideas for sessions at this strand of Reboot Britain, please visit the PICamp site, register and let’s hear them?

Responding to the Guardian’s reader-survey about reshaping our democratic settlement, David Blunkett offers a good illustration of the cognitive polyphasia that colours so much public debate of these issues:

“With one breath we say we want less legislation and more active politics based on a participative political activism and decentralisation; and in the next breath we call for more legislation, for parliament to sit throughout the summer, and by dint a further disconnect of those who, in the hothouse of Westminster, become more detached from the communities they represent.

We want electoral reform, but then we want to ensure that MPs are properly connected to a constituency somewhere outside London – which, of course, means a defined, single-member community that they can represent and who can hold them to account.

In other words, we are full of contradictions. We want someone else to be responsible. We want to give power to the members of the Westminster parties. Or do we? Is it not the “people” we want to empower?

We want it every which way. We want someone else to blame, someone else to shoulder the contradictions and, of course, when we get a new leader (and therefore a new prime minister), what do we want? We want them out.”

If there is one good thing that could come out of the current crisis in confidence surrounding politics, it would be a greater understanding of the causes of political centralisation.

Sadly, I can’t see it being the major theme myself….

(other polyphasia-related posts here)

Continuing Brendan O’Neill’s theme about the reduction of politics to the question of how efficiently politicians can tick the ‘democracy’ box, Simon Jenkins picks up on the calls for fewer MPs and councillors:

“The difference is that most democracies have many tiers of ­representation on which voters can vent their rage. The Germans run almost constant election campaigns for someone to something. The French ratio of voters to elected officials is 120:1. In Britain it is more like 2,600:1. The overwhelming majority of Europeans can name their local mayor or another official whom they can hold to account for most of their public services. In Britain the only representative people can begin to name is their MP, and barely half can do that. Britain is democracy-lite.

As a result, MPs carry a hopeless burden of responsibility. They must be national, regional and local representatives, chairmen of planning, social services and education, local health ombudsmen and elected mayors in all but name.”

He continues…

“We might think that the best response to the present crisis is to have more tribunes, unleashed to operate at every tier of government from parliament to parish. Yet both Brown and Cameron want fewer, both fewer MPs and fewer councillors in the form of unitary authorities. They want to take Britain from being the least democratically answerable nation in Europe to being even less so.”

Richard Pope, Francis Irving and Julian Todd have developed a site – The Straight Choice – that allows you to upload election leaflets as they come through your door – with the intention of promoting consistency and honesty.

It’s an interesting idea. And – as you come here partly because you often get unpopular arguments, let me suggest another one:

That the demand for consistency from political parties often has the unintended consequence of promoting political centralisation. Surely it’s a good thing if Lib-Dems in Truro are saying something different to Lib-Dems in Anglesey?

(hat tip: Kathryn on Facebook).