Local Democracy Notepad

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in viagra canada February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected. 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.

Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning.

Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest in local representation. (Shorter version: that councillors have to adopt a jurist role on the question of planning. If it can be demonstrated that they have a predisposition on a particular planning matter, this can disqualify them from deliberating on it).

It reprises a few old posts here asking about whether councils are advocates or jurors. I’m not going to comment on this one in any great detail apart from to observe that councillors now have a potential to convene and conduct conversations quickly and spontaneously in a way that they never used to be. This is what social media can do best: It can allow anyone to invite everyone to dump their evidence in one place.

This ability (when the bulk of councillors become accustomed to having it) hints at yet another role for the councillor to adopt. Not juror or advocate, but as the curator of evidence and opinion on local matters. In offline terms, think of the way that detectives setup an evidence board in the incident room that we’ve all become familliar with in police procedural TV programmes.

Either way, it points to a role where councillors are expected to be more inclusive and conversational and less adversarial.

To illustrate this, I’ve been racking my memory for examples of where someone has used lots of different social media and bookmarking tools to simply gather all of the information on a particular subject in a neutral and even-handed way so that visitors can get a good overview prior to making a decision. I know there are lots of examples, but I just can’t think of one now (help me out, willya?)

Note to councillors: It's called FACEbook. Not 'Bottombook'

Speaking to some Councillors in Kent today, I found myself answering a few questions about Facebook ‘dos-and-don’ts’ – I mentioned that there was bound to be something from the many social media practitioners that have written on the subject, and that a quick Google would turn up a handy etiquette guide.

Looking around, however, there doesn’t appear to be one, so here’s a quick bunch of suggestions from me:

1. Friends:The classic question that bothered many early-ish Facebook users was the question of ‘what happens when my suit / twinset friends meet my t-shirt friends?’ Do you want your boss to know that the reason that you’re a bit quiet on a Monday morning because you spent all day Sunday downing Tequilla Slammers? Similarly, councillors need to think about how much they want their daily trivia to be in the peripheral vision of the people that voted for them, their local journalists, or their political rivals.

The best way to demonstrate your political loyalties, for instance, probably doesn’t involve the colour of the underwear you chose for your ‘Hot Tory in Sexy Wench Pose!!” Read the rest of this entry »

In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending in their local areas.

An article in Le Monde has some eye-opening statistics. 80% of French parliamentarians are also councillors, compared with 20% in Britain, Germany and Italy. Of the 185 socialist deputies in the French National Assembly, 80 hold executive office on a local or regional council, and a similar proportion of socialist senators do the same. Of those who don’t hold executive office, most are backbench councillors in their local areas. The figures for the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) are pretty similar.

Who knows, if the socialists get their way, how many French parliamentarians will give up life in Paris and retreat to their communes. Perhaps not very many – but could you imagine any MP or peer in the UK preferring local office to national? It’s a symbol of the centralism of the UK, even set against the France of the préfet and the Code Napoléon, that being a footsoldier at national level is so clearly preferable to leading the ranks in your home town.

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 »

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 »

Chewing over Parliamentary reforms, here’s Jenni Russell from the Guardian last week:

“One experienced Commons civil servant is blisteringly critical of the way in which most MPs have accepted the culture in which they now operate. While some committees and chairs are excellent, many MPs can’t be bothered. “They’re just not interested in the core tasks of parliament, scrutinising legislation or working in committee. It’s too much hard work – they’d rather be social workers for constituents. …… They don’t spend three hours in the House of Commons library reading bills or papers themselves; they wait for Greenpeace or Liberty or a lobby group to tell them what to think. That whole culture of thinking, challenging, debating – that’s what’s been discouraged. Because, for them personally, what’s the point?”"

There are a number of conclusions one can draw from this, some of which could be justifiably homicidal. Other trades have a set of professional ethics that would, for instance, preclude them from relying upon lobbyists for information, or coming up with a transparent means by which they conduct their research. Read the rest of this entry »

At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office.

I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take web-communications more seriously.

Northern Ireland is a particularly testing place for this to be tried. The politics of Our Occupied Six Counties / OUR wee province* are somewhat sclerotic, highly compromised as they are to ensure a continued functioning democracy of any kind as part of the peace-process.

The quality of local government is plainly very poor because even this hamstrung polity has resolved to reform it (there were 26 councils which are being consolidated into 11 by 2011).

Despite this, within one year, Bill helped me get over 40% of the 582 councillors to take their first steps online. Admittedly, this commitment was often a nominal, rather than active one, but prior to the launch of the project, you could count the councillors that had ever unlocked the ‘write’ potential of the web on the fingers of one hand.

A good few real local government stars have emerged in the process, and Bill has taken the (steadfast) resistance of some influential sections of the bureaucracy on the chin and not taken no for an answer.

That’s good news for those of us who want Whitehall to work a bit more effectively. London’s gain will be Belfast’s loss.

*Delete according to binary sectarian outlook

Here’s a video clip about the ‘I’m a councillor – get me out of here’ project – and here’s a bit of background to the film.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQH0HNqDO8]

It’s a really brilliant project – where local authorities have any interest in being creative about the way councillors engage with young people (a learning experience – and not just a one-way one as well!), I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. 

I first became aware of it around 2003 (I think) and each year, dozens of councils have tried it, finding the obstacles and tweaking the offering.

Find out more here.