Local Democracy Notepad

Wonderful pop-up social enterprise thinktank Popse (possibly the first pop-up thinktank ever, but certainly not the last) popped up in London’s Exmouth Market from 9-13 May.

Among other hot topics was a proposal from the Waterways Project that a community ‘right to manage’ (or a ‘presumption in favour of community management’) should join the existing proposals in the Localism Bill. Read the rest of this entry »

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Just a short observation, in the light of Matthew Taylor’s post about the RSA’s work in Chelmsford that is being launched today.

“….a vision for the town centre must be based on a rich understanding of how people see and use the area and how they might be willing to change that view if the centre itself changed. We need to explore what could the town centre’s identity could be, and from that answer to develop ideas for embedding this identity in the physical and social fabric.”

It’s interesting that democracy is often understood to mean an engagement in party / pressure-group politics, or the clash of ideas and opinions. Local authorities will shortly have a statutory obligation to ‘promote democracy’ – which we are expected to understand as voting in elections. It means a promotion of the work of councillors and our right to participate in their decisions (and sometimes, our ability to force things onto the agenda with petitions).

We are told that we have a right to be consulted more often in more creative and professional ways. In other spheres, we see decentralisation and even the very word ‘democracy‘ conflated with the promotion of local councils. The democratic innovations are often around ‘citizens juries’ or ‘participatory budgeting.’

Most of this is, of course, a good thing. But it seems to me that the most valuable expression of democracy is our ability to shape our immediate environment. Our streets, housing, hospitals, schools and so on. The one where every one of us has something valid to say, and has experiences of having done so. Where the process of shaping our surroundings has created conversational networks that we can return to in order to solve new problems. Where there is less of a legitimacy gap between the general public and the professional or the expert practitioner.

It’s the one area where we can be guaranteed to know things that the experts don’t. Where we can bring them great ideas that they would never dream of, and that we can add the caring dimension that – with the best will in the world – town planners and architects will never have.

There’s my argument in a nutshell: Town Planners. Architects. See what I mean?

The RSA are looking for a number of other local areas to work with them in this way – it’s a great idea, and one that I hope will shape the whole question of ‘democratic renewal’ more than it does currently.

I’ve just read through the new Strengthening Local Democracy Green Paper, and I can’t sum it up better than Talking Heads did in their 1977 hit, Psycho Killer. Not the refrain “better run, run, run, run away”, but the verse:

You start a conversation you can’t even finish.
You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.
Say something once, why say it again?

The first line is doubly apt – it’s optimistic (at best) to publish a consultation document ten months before a general election. It’s optimistic and unproductive when the document itself contains reams of prose on the benefits of democracy, without taking any of its thinking through to a logical conclusion.

The document treats strengthening local democracy as equivalent to strengthening local councils. That’s part of it, but a long way from being all of it. There is also, for starters, increasing the awareness of local political issues in the public, increasing turnout at local elections, making councillors more representative and more ambitious for their role, and promoting better debate and discussion at local and national level.

To be fair and balanced in my brutality, Conservative thinking on the issue is no better – as evidenced by the ragbag of populism and councillorism in their Control Shift paper. Both parties seem to be unable to think up sustainable and coherent initiatives to strengthen the political environment within which local councils work.

Back to the condoc. What little novelty it contains is around scrutiny. John Denham (or Hazel Blears, who knows?) obviously thinks scrutiny is just the thing to revive local democracy and make councils meaningful again. The Total Place initiative will tell councils how much public money is being spent by local bodies in their area, and scrutiny committees will have new powers to oversee local public services, including the utility companies, and scrutinise their budgets (p.18).

I suppose this might be good material for a green paper called “Strengthening local councils a bit” but it seems to be asking scrutiny committees to sprint before they can walk, whatever warm words there might be about duties to fund them sufficiently (p.21).

Let’s admit that good scrutiny can make a difference to local delivery, and refocus Whitehall-minded bureaucrats on the pressing local issues. It’s a promising area. But in how many authorities is good scrutiny being practised right now? How many councillors would rather be on scrutiny than in the administration? Not many, I bet, in answer to both questions. So why load scrutiny down with new powers and responsibilities, until it’s shown that it’s ready for them?

Another area where the green paper makes some new suggestions is around the entitlements (p.29) set out in an earlier, more wide-ranging document called Building Britain’s Future. The idea here is that the Government will legislate, as it has on climate change, to fix policy priorities in legislation, and then allow councils greater discretion in the ways they choose to provide the entitlements.

There’s a separate post to be written on how democratic it is to attempt to entrench your governing philosophy while staring a general election defeat in the face (“not very” is the two-word summary).

From a practical perspective, though, it doesn’t feel like this a great step forward for democracy at local level. As set out in the condoc, the Government decrees the entitlement, the citizen receives it, and the local council is forced to cash Whitehall’s blank cheque. I foresee enormous legal and political rows about the exact meaning of particular entitlements, and innumerable “postcode lottery” campaigns started by interest groups looking enviously across local government boundaries. A prostitute famously has power without responsibility – now councils get to have responsibility without power (as usual, some might say).

Chapter three of the condoc pitches a few ideas on how councils might respond to climate change. Some might want to do lots of different things, some might want to do one or two big things. Hey man, that’s cool, no pressure, says the condoc. Let us know how it goes, we might delegate you some powers. (p.37)

There’s a fair bit in the document (p.39 onwards), and in John Denham’s launch event speech, about sub-regional working through city regions and multi-area agreements. These have the potential – particularly if RDAs are abolished – to become important hubs for economic and social development, as well as conduits of Government funding. It’s important that they are set up right and governed sensibly. The condoc rightly proposes some ways of democratising the governance arrangements through greater openness and scrutiny.

Amazingly, in a throwaway remark half way down page 44, the condoc also suggests “creating new sub-regional local authorities with a much wider range of powers” and possibly direct elections. You would have thought that a proposal for a third tier of directly-elected local government might merit a bit more prominence than that.

The final chapter (p.46) proposes putting the relationship between central and local government on a more formal footing. What could be more formal than a long series of Local Government Acts, you might ask? Well, the idea is that the Government would create a set of achingly bland and obvious principles (examples in the condoc) that it could then say it was adhering to, and set up a joint Parliamentary Committee to check up on them. Pretty much pointless, I’d say.

Overall, then, the consultation is, unfortunately, a damp squib. Andy Sawford at LGIU has a rather more positive take on it, though I regret the abandonment of empowerment rhetoric which he celebrates. Elsewhere, Town Hall Matters considers the scrutiny issue in more detail.

Brian Barder’s excellent – and comprehensive – opposition to ‘participatory democracy’ has been up and commented-up for long enough to be worth a second visit if you’ve seen it already.

My only problem with it is that posts such as this probably have an obligation to advocate consultation – in it’s most creative and energetic form – to ensure that the monopsony enjoyed by civil servants, think tanks, pressure groups and political parties can be disrupted. Discussing this with a council leader the other night, I heard a very interesting corrollary to the ‘hard-to-reach’ demographic that his council is concerned about when it consults.

We have a bigger problem with the ‘hard to avoid’ group. Our old friends, the active citizens…

Benchmarking: Missing the point

Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point:

Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement.  So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects.

Instead of insisting in a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.

When I worked for politicians some years ago, I recall the dread that some of them had when they had to go and tour educational projects designed to get young people involved in the music industry. I’ll never forget the rictus grin of one well-known ex-minister being filmed listening to some banging choons at a FE College. Read the rest of this entry »

Readers of this blog could be forgiven for believing that I’m on some sort of commission scheme for Debategraph and MixedInk.

Like the best ideas in this field, these two projects have focused their energy on getting the idea right and the initial project out of the door. That’s a long way of saying that they don’t have an affiliate-scheme and I’m not getting a penny from either of them.

Well, it seems that I’m not alone in rating MixedInk’s approach. The Whitehouse is giving it a try – using it to draft it’s open government standards.

If that isn’t an endorsement, I’ve no idea what is. In giving people a slightly competitive platform to collaboratively shape ideas, MixedInk ticks almost every box in terms of providing a positive way of including people in policy processes. Instead of a spEak You’re bRanes – type ‘race to the bottom’, it urges it’s participants to get stuck into the issues and add value to them in a realistic way.

Further to the earlier post about active citizenship, during a conversation with my mate Nick Buckley of Gfk NOP, he reminded me of Jakob Neilsen’s ’90-9-1′ pyramid. I’ve not looked at this for a while now but it makes the point, doesn’t it?

There are only a few people that really warrant the title ‘web guru’ but Neilsen is plainly one of them and the article is well worth reading.

For me, the real problem that the heavy users can present is that they have the potential to act as veto groups. Not necessarily influential in that they are taken seriously and respected by policymakers. But that they can target their personal obsessions.

Here’s Will Davies on how what used to pass for blue skies thinking is now just down and dirty:

“When David Cameron declared the need for a new constitutional settlement recently, quite a bit of this was based on the capabilities of new technologies such as youtube and text messaging. Leaving aside the overall quality of his vision, I was struck by how credible and necessary this exploitation of digital technology suddenly appeared. Prior to this constitutional crisis, the e-democracy movement had preached e-this, e-that, cyber-parliament, the Big Conversation, a civic commons – none of which ever acquired any political plausibility. It operated in a rhetorical realm in which ‘participation’ and ‘interactivity’ could be celebrated to the heavens, without ever imperilling a decrepit parliamentary system.”

Here’s an illustration. less than a fortnight ago, my kids came home with a letter in their bags saying that the school was considering ending the school day 15 minutes earlier than the current time, and that this change would take place in September. A short consultation period would follow the letter and the governing body would be making a decision … about now.

I ran into half-a-dozen parents that evening at a school play. They were fuming. The consultation period was over the half-term, and it all looked like a done-deal.

Now, as it transpired, I”m prepared to believe that the school was acting in perfectly good faith. The plan had come up quite late in the school year, there was a lot of enthusiasm for it among the staff for good professional reasons. There were a number of reasons why they really needed to get it in place by September. The consultation time-frame was unavoidable.

The parents I met were going to organise over the half term. A few of them are fairly tech-savvy (there’s already a TXT tree), but I’m the one with the reputation on that score and after a few phone-calls, a site was established using a Ning group.

Someone from the PTA has a list of mobile numbers for parents and a text message went around within a day or so. Soon after, the number of registrants to the site had climbed past 50 to it’s current number (74 as I write – not bad for a primary school).

The ensuing discussion was heated. More than 20 people contributed lengthy responses to the consultation – lots of evidence, research, even a spreadsheet of comparisons with other schools and an attempt to cross-reference school hours against performance was loaded up to the site.

A few parents questioned the motives of the teaching staff. Others even questioned their competence. By the time the open meeting started to discuss the event, the senior teachers were struggling to hide their outrage. Some of it was justifiable – feelings were hurt, reputations had been called into question.

They were also slightly baffled. Other schools had done the same thing with their timetables over recent years without a peep from the parents. Now, thanks to the ease of networking, and the convening power that we all can wield using free applications, they were having to offer detailed powerpoint presentations to a well-prepared (and often hostile) bunch of parents.

I’d guess that more than 50 attended the meeting, and I’m waiting to hear what the governing body has decided in the end.

The school now has a growing online community of parents who can ask any questions they like. I’m not convinced that it will make the school any better managed. It may make it worse. It may reward the time-rich Victors. The teachers may feel battered by this experience and think twice before making potentially controversial decisions. They often work 10-12 hour days and weekends to-boot, and they have a right to have grievances against them handled in an orderly, confidential way (web-forums are bad at this).

But of one thing I’m sure: Someone would have set up that site if I hadn’t done. I hope that I did it according to Mick’s advice (it’s now got a set of ‘play the ball not the man’ rules and a moderation policy).

This is the kind of participation that a lot of e-democracy projects would have spend £tens of thousands on a few short years ago. Now, they’re so simple, it’s easier to do them than not do them. Local public servants are starting to get a sense of what MPs and the BBC have felt in recent months.

Here’s the RSA’s Matthew Taylor making the case for a pro-social framework for local government. 

This bit may seem like a triumph of hope over expectations, but it’s interesting to ask ourselves why that would be:

“Engage local councillors in a redefinition of politics and social change, moving from a government-centric to a citizen-centric model. Support and incentivise councillors to be capacity builders (if this sounds crazy, there are places it is happening).”

Prior to this, he argues that….

To create the future most of us aspire to we need citizens who are… more actively engaged in collective decision making at every level.

Matthew is to be congratulated for this term ‘pro-social’ I’ve started to hear it being dropped into conversations all over the place, but I’m fairly certain that Matthew first mentioned it on his blog about a year ago. (I await correction on this if I’m wrong). So, I’d like to get an idea going in my own puny way. I’m sure that it won’t go a fraction as far as his but here goes:

Don’t aspire to involve people in collective decision making. You will be lying if you tell them that you are going to do it, and no-one will like the outcome. Instead, involve people in describing the problem and drafting proposed solutions.

I’ve outlined the thinking behind this on my own blog over here. What do you think?