Local Democracy Notepad

Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making.

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I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a non-trivial activity – but if the quality or the inclusiveness of that debate is an issue, there are a few important things that need adding:

• Beyond the parochial: Is there any data or information on how the issue in question is addressed elsewhere? Case studies? Experiences? Data that can be adapted to project possible outcomes if approaches that have been tried elsewhere were applied here? And how is this presented in a way that makes it accessible?
• Where is ‘everybody’? What about the people who aren’t active ‘community members’? And what about people who don’t join community groups? Some people don’t feel strongly about particular issues so they don’t join groups. Or maybe they work long hours or have competing responsibilities. Either way, they don’t turn up. But their views, experiences and opinions are equally valuable – or, as I would argue, more valuable than those of the people who do take an active interest. How effective are elected representatives at covering this question?
• Where is the intelligence? Once you become familiar with a complex question, it becomes clear that the debate about it is being conducted in what is almost a parallel universe. You may need to sit down before you read this and brace yourself for an unsettling revelation, but here it is: Newspapers don’t always employ intelligent reporters who dedicate their time to understanding the issues and representing them fairly. These people do, however, have the ability to dominate and shift the focus of that debate entirely.
• Where are the hidden hands? Where are the competing monopolies that are actually there, but not immediately visible? Think tanks publish reports and data all of the time. So do academics and civil servants in different forms. This work is usually paid for and commissioned by the ‘public officials’ in that diagram and in a diluted form, their work is paid into the process by those same public officials. In addition, political parties have a similar parallel influence.
• Opinion v Evidence: Opinion – as opposed to evidence – is involved here in a big way. How far is that opinion being regulated in order to ensure that diversity rather than weight is evident?
• Where is the manipulation? There are often pressure groups that have a vested interest in addressing these issues. They insert their data and messages into that process in a strategic way in order to distort it to their own ends. There is also the question of public representatives. How far are they helping to convene a discussion in the public interest, and how far are they there to promote either their own personal interests, the interests of an external organisation (a pressure group or a political sponsor perhaps?)
• What does e-democracy add to this? How far can we – the people with access to neutral public data, and the tools to interpret it – help or hinder this process? Can we introduce new information into the pot? Can we visualise and contextualise existing information so that those engaged in the debate can look at it in a new light?

Not a complete set of questions – and some a bit messy – but I think that it’s important that they’re asked.

Pic: Karlonsea - click for credit

Speed humps: love ‘em or hate ‘em, here in the UK they’ve become a symbol of the traffic calming zeitgeist.

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Speed humps also pose a major challenge for local democracy. That’s because local authorities are legally hampered from taking full account of the commonly held view that whilst speed reduction is good, speed humps are bad.

Here’s where I’ve got to in understanding why (stick with me please: it’s also about consultation, deliberative democracy and the Sustainable Communities Act).

A lot of people like the idea of slowing traffic to 20 mph in residential areas (in a 2005 survey cited in a study for Transport for London, 75% of the British public supported 20 mph speed restrictions in residential areas). Less noise, less antisocial car-driving behaviour, less road-rage, reduction of casualties from road traffic accidents, and encouragement (perhaps) for people to leave their cars take to public transport.

All this has helped 20 mph zones to sweep across the country. The London Borough of Southwark (where I live) aims to make 20mph the default speed limit across the entire borough. This sounds good to me.

But this is the problem. It would appear that 20 mph zones cannot, by law, effectively be implemented unless ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming measures are adopted at the same time. In other words, you can’t have a 20 mph zone unless you simultaneously accept measures like chicanes, speed cushions, speed humps, raised tables, pedestrian islands and the like.

As a (former) lawyer, and therefore something of a nerd about rules, I wanted to know why I kept coming across this argument. In fact, that I’m aware of it at all is down to the e-democracy practised on the East Dulwich Forum where local councillors interact with a very active local community. (Sadly that’s not the ward I live in or my rapidly developing views about 20 mph zones might not have ended up here!)…

Eventually I found the legal answer I was looking for. And it’s clear that it perplexes even experts working within local authorities. For the legal reason that you can’t have a 20mph zone without lumps in the road lies buried in regulations governing the use of traffic signs.

The way this works is that The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002 say that a 20mph zone sign “may only be placed on a road if no point on any road (not being a cul-de-sac less than 80 metres long), to which the speed limit indicated by the sign applies, is situated more than 50 metres from a traffic calming feature”. And then the Regulations go on to list the traffic calming features.

Innocent, isn’t it?

But the result is that the real choices offered to people consulted on 20 mph zones are about the kind of self-enforcing traffic calming measure proposed (e.g. whether it should be a hump or a cushion). In contrast, often what people (including me) want to support is the effective enforcement of a 20 mph speed restriction, not the humps and cushions.

Speed cameras and interactive speed signs aren’t an option in a 20 mph zone since they’re not self-enforcing. Consultation responses that request them instead of cushions, humps and the like are therefore likely to be treated as irrelevant.

This poses major problems for public consultation, since unless extraordinarily good practice is followed; deliberative democracy even; it’s unlikely that people will realise what they’re being consulted on.

If you like the idea of a 20mph zone but hate the idea of speed humps, cushions, chicanes and the like, you’re on a hiding to nothing. But it must be unusual for residents to be told that in advance, or to be involved in decisions on what the alternatives might be before consultation on a specific traffic calming proposal linked to 20mph zone starts.

The other problem is simply the conflicting evidence on the pros and cons of speed humps and cushions and the complex balancing acts. Hump-topped ones seem more effective; but they cause greater problems for emergency vehicles and buses. Flat-topped ones don’t work as well, but people on busy roads (which need the speed restriction more) might end up with them because such roads are more likely to be used regularly by buses and emergency vehicles. Etc. If you’re fascinated by this, please see this report from Transport for London, by way of just one of many examples of relections on the subject.

This is a classic situation where deliberation, based on the full range of facts, is more likely to generate consensus. And lack of deliberation dissent.

The Department for Transport notes that: “The value of adequate consultation being undertaken cannot be over-emphasised. Without such consultation, schemes are likely to be subject to considerable opposition, both during and after implementation”. Indeed. Barnet borough council has had a policy of reviewing and possibly removing previously installed speed humps for some years.

For the time being I shall be responding to my current local consultation to say that I’m in favour of the new 20 mph zone that’s been proposed where I live, but not to the use of speed humps and cushions and other so-called ‘vertical deflections’ to enforce it.

In my case this is partly a nimby (‘not in my back yard’) response to extra vibration and possibly extra noise caused by having one directly outside my house. Not just that though: if I thought they’d work it’d be great. I don’t drive and I dislike speeding. But I’m convinced, by credible evidence from Southwark Living streets in particular that humps and cushions generally don’t work very well in my bit of London.

One street where a close friend lives is down to get a sinusoidal hump (why local authorities go out to public consultation using words like ‘sinusoidal’ without further explanation is beyond me). It’s a very short street which ends with a right angle turn up a hill. It would be almost impossible to speed up or down it if you tried. But presumably this and other streets (such as one which already has a speed camera) have to receive ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming features because otherwise they can’t form part of the 20mph zone.

What I want to be asked is whether I support effective enforcement of a 20mph speed limit in my neighbourhood (I do). And then I want a proper deliberative process about the options so that I understand why it’s really necessary if I do end up with a speed cushion outside my house. But that’s not the question on the table.

What we’ve been asked is not ‘do you want a 20mph speed limit in the zone shown on the attached map’ but ‘do you want a 20mph zone’. Legally there’s a difference; and the difference determines how my view gets counted. It’s obvious isn’t it? Um, not.

Ah; legalistic hairsplitting that only a nerd would get excited about.

The majority of people whose views, like mine, can’t count are likely to feel frustrated and alienated by the Council. My own frustration is partly directed at the Council for not giving us residents the full facts when they consult. But it’s also got a legal outlet; a bigger target to blame. So that’s comforting.

Now a council could in principle impose a 20 mph speed limit without ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming measures (at least I think it can; I’m not sure how it works in London); but that hasn’t been proposed in my neighbourhood; it’s very unlikely that it will emerge as an option out of consultation because people haven’t been told it might be an alternative; and anyway 20mph speed limits without additional ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming are recommended by the Department of Transport only for use on roads where average speeds are already below 24mph (definitely not the case on my street save for when it’s too congested for cars to move).

Essentially ordinary 20 mph speed limits rely, like most others, on police enforcement. And the police may have better things to do than deal with calls about speeding cars in an area with a 20 mph speed limit, runs the argument.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with my specific views on speed cushions. The wider issues here are about deliberation and consultation.

Still, if you do happen to agree with me that speed cushions and humps really aren’t the best thing since sliced bread…. could this be an area where people should ask for their local authority to get new powers under the Sustainable Communities Act?

Then local authorities could adopt 20mph zones (not just limits), complete with signs, and experiment with alternative approaches to enforcement that don’t rely on speed humps, cushions and the like. Many residents would thank them; at least if there were good ideas on workable alternatives that didn’t involve citizens’ vigilante speeding patrols.

Might it be worth a coordinated effort if there’s another round of proposals under the Act to ensure that at least one such proposal gets through to the Act’s ‘selector’?

Long live localism and the ‘duty to involve’.

Much of the comment about the new Pew Internet and Civic Engagement Survey has been around its finding that wealthy and well-networked people are the most likely to participate in civic activities online. The already-engaged, in other words, are the beneficiaries of much engagement work.

I don’t think we should worry too much about that. That isn’t because I think poor people don’t matter, or that the politically disengaged deserve to stay disengaged. I think that the demographics of online engagement will solve themselves if we get democratisation right.

After all, the same middle-class bias is seen in voter turnout in the offline world. Voters are older, richer and more middle-class than the non-voters and since online civic engagement is designed by and for the politically-active, it is hardly surprising that those engaged online are old, rich and middle-class too.

The rewards of political engagement online also accrue mostly to those who already have strong views. The man ranting about privatisation on Comment is Free and the libertarian on Free Republic share the misperception that the great mass of the people are behind them. In fact, the great mass of the people don’t know what to think and aren’t particularly bothered about it. What use do they have for a discussion forum, however elegantly designed?

Fixing the class bias in politics without expanding the political class is impossible – and expansion of the political class has to come as a consequence of wider and deeper political engagement both online and off.

To do that, governments need to nurture political spaces with their attention, so civic participation has results beyond a warm fuzzy feeling. The civic engineers need to create spaces in such a way that people aren’t just reciting political cliches, but are really discussing and developing ideas in possession of the facts.

Most importantly, though, the people themselves need to be brought to realise, through advertising or through campaigning, that political engagement is more than a hobby for old rich people, it’s a vital part of the duty we have to our world. This last point sounds like moralising – and it is. Democratic transformation in politics can only come through citizens, and an engaged and dutiful citizen can’t be created by a well-designed website.

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here). Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Lawrence Pratchett

I went to an interesting seminar last week at the CLG (yes – unusual!) where Prof. Lawrence Pratchett and Dr Catherine Durose from De Montfort University talked about a recent systematic review they have carried out of a number of different empowerment tools. You can find the full report on the CLG site and its excellent to see someone looking at stuff that has already happened rather than running around trying to start something new the whole time. 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 »

Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest.

According to a piece on the When Saturday Comes blog, the experiment is not doing so well. Apart from a decline in membership, which is having an effect on the club’s already shaky budget, many of the democracy elements of the operation have been junked. The website members no longer pick the team, and now have ceded some power over transfers to the management, which is appointed by the MyFC website owners.

When Saturday Comes opines:

you have to wonder what the future holds for MyFC if the power afforded to members keeps being eroded. With Daish regaining some control of transfer policy, and the headline grabbing – but ridiculous – concept of fans picking the team having long been consigned to the dustbin, there is little incentive to persuade new investors to part with £35 per year, especially as the club look set for another season at the wrong end of the table.

A site commenter makes the best point of all – that an operation like MyFootballClub, started on the Internet without a particular club in mind, was never going to create a common bond strong enough to keep people participating through the bad times:

If it had been a supporters’ trust that bought the club, then perhaps this could have all been avoided. By going from internet-concept first, and THEN casting about for a team after members had been brought onboard, the erosion of support has been swift but not unforeseeable–how is a “member” in California or Australia supposed to feel any sort of bond with this side? After clicking yes/no a few times, how likely would they be to stay engaged? In their world of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, surely the same denizens couldn’t be expected to focus on a mere non-league football team in little old England for too long.

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 »

Matthew Taylor, former No 10 policy wonk, has an interesting article on his blog about public service reform. He rightly says that finances over the next few years are both a huge challenge to public services, but also an opportunity to make real change happen. That won’t come about, he says, without a change in the national political culture, starting from the top:

There are far too many ministers, all of whom think it is their job to generate initiatives; ideas are allowed to be developed and launched without any reference to those at the front line; change management and the time it takes is not treated seriously; there is complete lack of realism about how far the centre’s intended messages actually reach; civil servants fail to see or warn (or be allowed to warn) their masters that every new target or piece of guidance had an adverse impact on all these existing targets and instructions (not to mention local morale).

No disrespect to Matthew, but this is a very technocratic argument. The idea that there should be fewer ministers is perhaps not a bad one – though it needs to happen alongside a more powerful and independent Commons and a reformed Lords. No matter how many Ministers there are, however, they will still be put on a spot on the Today programme and asked to make a commitment that “[bad thing] will never be allowed to happen again.”

There are certainly real opportunities for reform in the fiscal squeeze that’s ahead. The barrier to transformation, though, is not hyperactive Ministers who don’t let technocrats manage, it’s an immature political dialogue in which the media and the public create and feed off outrage and disgust, while politicians sit on top of the bureaucracy and try to placate the beast.

This is a local government problem as much as a national government one. Anyone who has seen parents protesting about school places or attended a controversial meeting of the planning committee will understand that.

If the spending cuts to come are not to create more disaffection and anger, they can’t be done behind closed doors. They need to be discussed openly, in public, and real choices have to be set out clearly, not decided and then ‘consulted upon’.

People should have the chance to see the books, and have intermediaries more trusted than journalists to explain to them what the choices are. They then need to be able to express an opinion more nuanced than ‘I want everything for free’.

Creating the circumstances in which this can happen is part of a widening and deepening of active citizenship that is essential if the political world is to catch up with what today’s citizens expect.

I’m not so naive as to think that this level of openness will appear in the twelve months before a general election, although it would be nice to think that it could. Afterwards, though, if Labour or the Conservatives are really serious about localism and democratic reform, a big conversation, not a Big Conversation, needs to be created.

Reading this post – as good a round-up of the progress and the opportunities I’ve seen made me think about the OfCOM research, published earlier this week that indicated that 43% of ‘unwired adults’ are happy to stay that way.

There’s a parallel, I believe, with the push to create new participatory spaces. Like broadband, the assumption that we all want it, will all invest in working out how to use it, to game it, to let it become another one of the weapons in the armoury that we use to take on the world – is an unexamined assumption.

And then think where that leaves those people? Many of the ‘wired adults’ are using online tools without ever taking an interest in politics, democracy, or the participative options that exist to tackle the issues around them.

Shopping, chatting, watching missed TV programmes, gambling and other activities all trump ‘engagement’. Others (such as Kevin, for instance) can quantify just how little most people want to be oppressed by demands to engage, to participate, and to have your say, but the one conclusion that can safely be reached is this: Those who lionise the notion of active citizenship, and promote a more participatory politics massively over-estimate the appetite for it.

Have those ‘unwired’ adults ever told you that they’re happy to let the wired-up interfering busy-body do-gooders have a disproportionatly strong voice in the big decisions that effect their lives? I ask because I’ve never seen any evidence that such consent has been given.

And if it hasn’t, why is so much energy being put into encouraging people to participate in decision-making processes that effect us all?