Local Democracy Notepad

Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4′s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it.

Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, it allows a large number of people to take existing technologies, adapt them slightly, pour the newly-available information into them and then present them to anyone who is interested. It creates fantastic new research possibilities, and allows developers to visualise the data in a way that may tell us something that we didn’t know already.

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Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Ben Goldacre

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.

The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted against politicians and the very idea that government should tax (“steal from”) people and spend (“burn”) their money. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, David Cameron offered a fairly populist ‘bonfire of the quangos’ proposal, with the implication that politicians would take back many of the toxic decisions that they had farmed out to overpaid bureaucrats.

In the FT the other day, Philip Stephens questions the emphasis:

“…broadcasting policy accounts for only about 5 per cent of Ofcom’s workload. Moving it to Whitehall would scarcely mean “that Ofcom, as we know it, will cease to exist”. Some 90 per cent of Ofcom’s remit comprises unglamorous work such as telecommunications regulation, upholding broadcasting standards, allocating spectrum, and, crucially, policing competition. All this can properly be done only at arms length from civil servants and ministers.”

I’d agree with Stephens’ highly critical conclusions about the seriousness of the Conservatives here. All of that said, if MPs had to pick up that 5% that he mentions, it would be a minor triumph for common sense, the taxpayer and a for democracy as well.

Here are a few observations about OfCOM’s activities in the past year or so:

• Not content with having one place to farm out awkward questions, Lord Carter’s ‘Digital Britain‘ was launched in competition to OfCOM’s Public Service Broadcasting review
• In reply, OfCOM have strategically launched their local media review
• While this happened, DCMS have a new minister in the driving seat – one who shows no grasp of the policy questions or any disposition to ruin the end of his ministerial career with futile study
• … and anyway, whatever the DCMS decides, it will be overruled by the bafflingly named BERR
• Carter resigned before his report was published, undermining the whole shooting match

And where, exactly, does parliament fit in to any of this anyway?

These exercises were a complete waste of time. They have taken place in the context of impending General Election and the fin de siècle atmosphere in which all complex policy matters are discussed. Few of these conclusions are likely to result in legislation before the chess-table is turned on it’s head by an incoming government.

It’s a farce – and one that exists because Parliament doesn’t have the resources or the self-confidence to take these issues on in the first place.

We can assess the commitment to promoting ‘scrutiny’ at a local level from the main parties by looking at their attitude to these ‘political detoxifying chambers’ that QUANGOs partly provide. David Cameron could announce that he will ignore the outcome of both the Digital Britain review and any forays OfCOM is making outside of the more complex regulation of things like Radio Microphones – an issue that it would probably be unwise to hand back to Westminster.

Update: I’ve just seen this post over on Jim Godfrey’s blog:

The real solution in my view is not necessarily to weaken Ofcom by taking away PR functions and slashing salaries, but to strengthen the DCMS. Too much of their policy ‘thinking’ takes place elsewhere and they need a strengthened capacity – in concert with the Department for Business.

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.

Further to this (very good) post by ‘Living with rats‘ (name explained here)

“Never trust public servants, the community leader said. ‘They always dump you. They never keep their promises. They’ll always let you down.”

…. here’s rent-a-rant Charlie Brooker on good form:

But if the media’s rotten and the government’s rotten and the police are rotten and the city’s rotten and the church is rotten – if life as we know it really is fundamentally rotten – what the hell is there left to believe in? Alton Towers? Greggs the bakers? The WI? Read the rest of this entry »

Time for a look at Chapter three of the Conservative local government green paper, Shift Control.

This chapter is the section of the green paper that focuses on democracy, so there’s a lot to talk about. The chapter says that a Conservative Government would:

• provide citizens in all our large cities with the opportunity to choose whether to have an elected mayor;

• give people the power to instigate referendums on local issues;
• make the police accountable to the people they serve through directly elected commissioners, crime maps and
  quarterly beat meetings;

• put the power to judge the behaviour of councillors back in the hands of their citizens by abolishing the Standards
  Board, and repeal the rules that prevent councillors representing their constituents’ views on local issues;

• permit local authorities to devolve unlimited funding to ward councillors; and
• let local people choose the organisational structures of their local councils.

Directly elected police commissioners deserves a fuller treatment elsewhere, so I won’t discuss it here. I’d only say that the obvious problem is one of competing mandates. Standards Board issues are democratic, in the sense that elected politicians should not be subject to disbarment by unelected civil servants – leaving such issues to the judicial system is by far the better approach.

Devolution of some money to ward level – as a power not a duty – isn’t a bad idea in itself, but the green paper suggests that money will be parcelled out to councillors directly. Participatory budgeting may be relatively untried, but an opportunity to extend it has been missed here. Participatory budgeting also provides a check on process: if individual councillors have sole responsibility for spending, the possibility of ward-level slush funds can’t be ruled out.

Allowing referendums on council governance structures might be a good idea if people knew or cared what their council governance structure was. More likely to be used is the alternative proposal to allow changes based on manifesto commitments. One problem in the proposals is that any referendum would take place at the same time as local government elections. This hasn’t been thought through. If Blanktown Council holds a referendum on whether to create an elected mayor, it has to be before the election cycle or there could be a four-year wait until the proposal is implemented. Far better to have the referendum held on election day in the year before the change comes in.

It’s also not clear what would happen to those places where directly elected mayors already exist. Would a council elected on a manifesto of getting rid of them be able to do so? This is important because elected mayors are sometimes independents, and sometimes from a different party than that controlling the council. It would be unfortunate for democracy, to say the least, if an respected independent mayor could be chucked out by collusion between a local government old guard on the council.

Quite contrary to the anything-goes spirit of the above, another proposal is to force big cities to have referendums on elected mayors whether they want to or not. This is probably the weakest idea in the chapter. Caught – as the government are – between a desire for elected mayors and a reluctance to impose them, the Conservatives have come down in favour of a double fudge. Rather than letting councils be, or imposing mayors, they are going to force councils to hold a referendum (in which most if not all councillors will campaign for a no vote). Then, beyond that, they are proposing to do this on the basis of current authority boundaries. In the case of Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, at least, the boundaries are historic irrelevancies. Far better to follow the London model and have directly elected subregional leaders (call them mayors if you like) that cover strategic issues across a range of unitary authorities.

The idea of local referendums triggered by 5% of electors sounds great until the first local referendums for expelling immigrants, leaving the EU, or reintroducing hanging start coming in. There need to be several safeguards on this proposal – first, referendums should be restricted to local government issues (not just issues that affect the locality); second, there should be a participation threshold, of say 20%, for a result to be considered valid; third, the option to hold the referendum outside the normal electoral cycle should be removed: this means that referendum votes would get higher and more representative turnout.

If ever there is an organisation that is perceived to have lost touch with almost all of it’s stakeholders (apart from the management consultants who decided how central government should assess their performance), it’s the Arts Council of England. Here, Ivan Pope outlines what they should be doing to re-connect.

That post includes a spot of profanity – but not too much. I’m only pointing to this in lieu of a post that I’ve been meaning to write about non-elected organisations have a good deal less legitimacy than elected ones, yet we demand more transparency and accountability from people who have been voted for.

I’d argue that this is the wrong way around. That the Arts Council can behave the way it has in recent years would suggest that I’m in a minority on this one….