Dusting off the town hall

Do we live in a healthy democracy? Do we live in a democracy at all? Do we know what we mean by democracy? And do we really care so much for democracy that we want to do something about it?

The issues are not as stark as they may have appeared seventy years ago when idealists and ideologues turned up to fight, as they supposed, for democracy in Spain. But the European political animal is far from healthy.

In the UK we find a public sector still dominant – at 40% of GDP [check] and yet subject to the minimum public scrutiny. Parliament passes most parts of finance bills on the nod, blaming the supposed pressure of parliamentary time. This time is, however, not being used to challenge legislation or seriously to hold departmental ministers to account. The public is fed mainly the weekly pointlessness of Prime Minister’s Question Time rather than the real business of legislation or accountability.

Most of our services are delivered by national government, regional institutions or by quangos. Apart from an opportunity once every four years to vote for a member of the lower chamber of Parliament (using a dodgy nineteenth century election system which is anyway turned by custom and by the simplifying pressures from the media into a prime ministerial ballot), the public get little opportunity to vote for those who can make a difference to their lives.

When they do, they often find it difficult to understand who does what. The two-tier system operating in much of England defeats them – district council wards can be won or lost on the record of the county council, even when under different political control. But everywhere electors are told – often truthfully – that it is not the fault of Councillor X, but the machinations of the Regional Assembly, Regional Development Agency, Government, Environment Agency, Learning and Skills Council, Health Authority/PCT, fire authority, or whatever it may be, which has caused the legitimate desires of local people about their local services to be overturned.

As a consequence, most people do not vote in local elections – in fact there is a class of those who have never voted in any elections, comprising particularly younger people and those from lower socio-economic groups. Meanwhile there is a cynicism about politicians which far outweighs the reality. ‘Politicians are all the same’ and ‘Voting never does any good’. After all, how do you get rid of the person or group which really is responsible for the overspend, the white elephant, the fiasco? You don’t know who they are. And when you do the chances are that it is some complex partnership between public, private and quango which managed to drop the crockery.

Principles

There are some clear Liberal Democrat principles here. Most of us would agree without hesitation that power should be wielded by people who are subject to elections unless there is an especially good reason why something different should pertain (most of us would hesitate about the election of judges, for instance).
We would further say that what can be done locally should be done locally.

Losing sight of where we come from

In practice, however, Liberals tend to diverge from these uncontestable principles – and not just because of budget pressures. In Parliament and in council chambers there are surprisingly few advocates of local solutions to local problems. The ‘party of local government’ is remarkably coy when it comes to nurturing local government. Symbolically we will put up an MP on a BBC Local Elections Special in the early hours of a Friday in May. Well, MPs are better at these things, aren’t they?

We are also keen to embrace the quango state (the authors of this article have both sat on quangos, incidentally): some quangos are necessary we say; the list of those we would abolish tends to be short, if such a list exists at all. Meanwhile, there is enormous enthusiasm to get rid of the county council or the ‘unelected’ regional assembly, even though the former is elected and the latter may comprise mainly councillors anyway. There is far less clamour to get rid of the entirely nominated regional development agencies, the Environment Agency or Ofsted.

Meanwhile Conference resolutions are peppered with royal commissions, new boards, more regulation, more proposed busy-bodying by the great and the good. We also applaud some of the worst examples of unaccountability: school governors are universally accepted as a good thing, despite the fact that they are typically unelected and take their decisions anonymously and in private. Parish councils are extolled as the truest form of local government despite the notorious lack of challenge, scrutiny or – for that matter – electoral contest. And who hasn’t recently deplored ‘post code lotteries’ – a natural consequence of local determination?

But the worst deviation of all is the fact that we have largely stopped talking about fair elections. So much of the contortions over town hall governance from the other two parties has stemmed from the fact that we don’t have a democratic election system. England is almost entirely devoid of democracy in any recognisable sense. First past the post entrenches the strong and denies diversity and challenge. If there had been any chance that Labour in Newham or the Tories in Broxbourne could be dislodged by the voters – as would happen if voters’ preferences had a chance of being really reflected in the outcome – then we would perhaps never have had the rush to strip councils of their functions or the development of the ridiculous Cabinet and Scrutiny system now bewildering the public.

The fall out

We have stopped in some parts of the country looking or sounding radical. At our worst we confuse saying something silly with actually being radical: we want porn available for sixteen year olds and votes for prisoners, but aren’t too fussed about who runs our local hospital.

We have lost the plot when it comes to core Liberal values: so many campaigns for CCTV on little evidence; so many sub-Stalinist crime initiatives. How many Liberal Democrat councils have installed or are thinking of installing numberplate recognition systems on public roads? How many have banned skate boarding? How many talk about nuisance youths without wondering or remembering what it’s like to be bored and too young to get into a pub?

We manage simultaneously to fail to empower the people we are representing or serving (‘write to the Focus editor and we’ll do it for you’ is the politics of the manor house) and yet give much more power to the middleclass busybody in Local Strategic Partnerships, residents’ groups, or urban redevelopment. The same faces, always, everywhere.

And we have all found ourselves explaining the council or – worse – the quango to the people, rather than listening to the people and forming a bridge between the two. Things have come to a pretty pass when the Department for Communities and Local Government is telling us – us! – that we need to spend more time sticking up for residents.

Liberals have got to wake up and speak for democracy and liberalism. Our current failure to do so has meant the protest vote going elsewhere: to the Greens or worse the BNP, using against us techniques we pioneered years ago.

The road to salvation

We need to renew our commitment to local solutions. This may mean a change of mindset. Too often we somehow accept that parliamentarians are ‘better’ than councillors, that Westminster is a better place to fetch up. Clearly on big ticket issues like defence, it is absurd to claim anything other than a marginal role for councils. But the key difference between tiers is different functions: an average MP is probably, by the rules of natural selection, a better performer than the average councillor. But there are above average councillors and rather ordinary MPs.

We tend to forget that in the nineteenth century some of the best political minds could find themselves in local government. Joseph Chamberlain emerged from it, shaped by it. Lord Rosebery, the great might have been, devoted some of his political life after being Prime Minister [check dates] to leading the work of the newly formed London County Council.

If we have politically bankable councillors – which we do – then we should deploy them in the media and in the public realm, as clear statements that we believe that local issues matter and that local decisions can and should be taken by local people.

But there will be no more Cllr Lord Roseberys unless the job is made attractive. The removal of attendance allowances and the creation of meaningful responsibility allowances has gone some way towards at least mitigating the cost of a political career in local government.

The key attraction of politics is, however, being able to do something. That is more for most of us than successfully lobbying for a pedestrian refuge or the refusal of a planning application. Power matters more. And we should not be afraid of wanting power. Without it we are just a civilised force of concerned residents, not a political force.

The clue is to start from ‘Local First’. We must abandon assumptions about how services can be delivered. The National Health Service was a socialist creation: nationalising a local set of affairs rather than making existing local hospitals and general practitioners affordable. The ‘National’ bit was never necessary. So what is it that PCTs do – or strategic health authorities for that matter – which could not be undertaken by councils?

Why is the police run by police authorities on which (typically) sit three magistrates and five ‘independent’ people answerable to no-one at all? Why should these bodies not be as much part of councils as fire authorities – and maybe more so? Why are schools now so detached from communities and democratic accountability that they are treated as separate entities? They hold public assets that the public pay for and for which they need to be accountable. Their admissions rules are invariably a matter of legitimate public concern. It is possible liberally and democratically to argue that local management of schools has gone much too far.

Councils, moreover, need renewed powers – including fund-raising powers – in relation to economic development, regeneration and transport. The last is the true scandal of modern politics. The Conservatives experimented with bus privatisation and found that it did not work. They then rolled it out across the rest of the country and found that it still did not work. Labour came to office and did nothing to make it work. That is because a privatised public bus provision is a nonsense. Liberals should be saying that public transport is by the people for the people. Councils can do this better. The private sector had their chance and drove down bus ridership. It increases only in London.

A quid pro quo?

We are asking a lot. There should be devolution and it should be to councils and councillors, not partnerships, local quangos or regions. Are councillors up to it?

Reverse the polarity: have parliamentarians – or Whitehall – proved that they are better at it? Is there a single service that we can confidently say has worked better after being taken off councils?

In some local areas, the answer may be yes. In some areas it still doesn’t work and the fact that the public has not yet turfed out the perpetrators can be laid in part at the door of our electoral and political system.

Even so, the world has moved on from Labour Liverpool and its taxis, from Westminster and its homes for votes. The CPA regime has led to objective challenge. The local government family really is like a family and the IDeA is a powerful force for change and improvement. Councillors who talk to councillors in other councils, share their experiences, help with their campaigns and learn from them can become, dare we say it, professionals, knowledgeable and able enough to challenge advice and take decisions - and take risks - with confidence.

The gifted amateur, dabbling a little in local public life, hoping for a bit of civic recognition, a bit of ribbon or a chain, may be a casualty of this. But the prize is a new deal for the people.