I broadly welcome Hazel Blears’ new white paper on empowerment. However, I hope that the ‘double devolution’ proposed (that is, local people running local services), will have governance arrangements for community-run services that avoid some of the pitfalls experienced with foundation hospitals.
These have contradicted Hazel’s aspiration to revitalise party politics at a local level. In the case of some foundation hospitals, board elections have seen people who have lost council elections or been barred for good reasons by political parties from being candidates creep back into public office through the back door. A catch-22 means that members of parties have to state their affiliation on foundation hospital board ballot papers but there is no provision for the parties to actually select and run official candidates.
The absence of any party filtering panel and selection processes removes any quality control and can allow the ‘mad, bad and corrupt’ to run, reduces clarity of voter choice, and carries with it an implication that the involvement of political parties in public life is somehow improper. The foundation hospital model has also been a restricted form of democracy because voting has been confined to ‘hospital members’ who self-select by joining and are not necessarily representative of patients as a whole or the community served by the hospital. Voting for important public bodies like this should be open to the whole electorate.
If ‘double devolution’ is to work then we also need safeguards to ensure that community assets are not hijacked by small groups of self-selecting activists. The people with the most time to get involved in community life are not necessarily representative of the diversity of their fellow citizens, particularly not the most socially excluded. There is no point switching control of community facilities from one small group of people (councillors) to another equally small group that hasn’t even been elected – there need to be mechanisms for consulting and engaging all users and potential users of a facility.
There also need to be clear controls and accountability and oversight by the local authority to ensure no return to the bad old days of the 1980s when some councils doled out cash and buildings to voluntary groups with no subsequent checks on the proper use of public assets. Whilst the vast majority of people in the voluntary sector are involved for the right reasons, the threat to the public interest from corruption and misuse of assets is out there and needs to be taken seriously.
It’s a shame that just as CLG is embracing greater public participation in decision-making my own council in Hackney has been forced to scrap the excellent model of tenant involvement we had. Every council estate used to have an estate committee. This was a properly convened full council committee where ward councillors and tenants sat together to hold estate managers to account and decide how to improve the estate, with a budget and professional clerking. The Audit Commission made us drop this system as they thought it was the wrong model of tenant participation, but the net result has been to reduce tenant involvement.
I don’t think the white paper goes far enough on elected mayors. We now have proof they work and can improve previously failing councils – I’m a member of one where this has been the case. It is absurd that so few councils have adopted this model of governance.
Rather than just making it easier for people to get a directly elected mayor, CLG needs powers to force failing councils to move to an elected mayor model and to compel major cities to hold a referendum on the issue. It is crazy that some of the largest cities in Britain are almost alone in the world in not having an executive mayor to provide long-term strategic vision, leadership and accountability.
I’m disappointed that there hasn’t been recognition that one of the major drivers of public disengagement and disempowerment from local councils is that we have an unfair electoral system which makes many councils one-party states with no incentive for voters to turn out or for councillors to be responsive to their electors. We need a more proportional voting system to elect councillors.
Much of what the white paper seeks to achieve could actually be done by political parties strengthening themselves and looking outwards, and by them receiving a degree of public resource for their role in building civic society. We need political parties strong enough to identify, recruit, train and capacity-build the next generation of school governors, tenants’ leaders and trade unionists from across the community, and then turn them into the councillors and MPs of the future.
Luke Akehurst is a councillor and Labour chief whip in the London Borough of Hackney. He writes here in a personal capacity