Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda:

“This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements.  Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

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.

Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion.I suppose it’s worth putting all of this into the rubric that most of the bloggers on this blog use to define what is good and what is bad though. Creative use of policy-related visualisations are definitely a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for more people to participate in deliberative processes is, again, a good thing – especially if it involves getting lots of people involved in the design of services. Datasets + visualisations should help there.

My one concern would be the ‘arms race’ one. At the moment, government – representing (in theory) the interests of the nation as a whole, has one strong suit in it’s ongoing battle with sectional interests. It has access to large amounts of information and it has a large apparatus of civil servants, think tanks, academics and local politicians that it can use to organise, express and apply that data.

Government enjoys monopoly privileges. From a democratic point of view, this looks quite bad. The flipside of the question is this: If you make data that government previously monopolised open to the public, will it be used by a wide well-meaning group of civic minded individuals? Or is a body of people with a mandate to promote the interests of the nation as a whole handing one of it’s most valuable weapons to a well-financed group of vested interests? The question of institutional capture.

It’s certainly the case in the US that commercial lobbies have been able to supersede governmental bodies as the representatives of the US abroad. As just one example, it was widely acknowledged that the US position at WIPO in the mid 1990s was represented by commercial lobbies within the motion picture and music industries – and not bodies that were being managed from within government.

Like I say, on balance, this is a good thing. But we should be aware of the dangers.

I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those  two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.

I work for the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development where I’m just starting work on a new project on ’the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘.

In the coming months, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next? And we’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.

This is a shorter version of a longer blog post that I’ve posted on my own blog. I wanted to highlight one or two elements because I think they are relevant to a local government audience – but please don’t let me stop you going and reading the whole thing if you want to.

Here, I highlight some of the ‘local democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen.

City mayors talk positive

City mayors from around the world met at an event organised by the City of Copenhagen during the official talks; the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors. According to an informal email from one participant: “This looked and felt like a team! They listened to each other’s plans, they openly encouraged plagiarism and replication, they fostered support for each other in a way that was uncontrived, open and positive. They discussed technical fixes, finance and resources, education and engaging citizens: they discussed mitigation and adaptation, economic opportunity and necessity: and they recognised they need to be leaders of substantial cultural change.”.

Divide between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ solutions

One point above others stands out: the huge political and psychological distance between the key issues and solutions debated during the official negotiations at the Bella Centre (where the formal talks took place), and the belief in bottom-up locally owned and self-managed solutions that characterised many of the ‘unofficial’ side meetings for civil society at the Klimaforum space and in a variety of other meetings spaces around the city.

Indeed, with the slow pace of progress in intergovernmental talks, it has become apparent that much more emphasis will now likely be placed on local level innovation to deliver climate solutions.

Already in the UK, commentators are paying renewed attention to the groundswell of community-based activism that has sprung up over the last couple of years away from the formalities of ballot-box decision-making or the stifling bureaucratic decision-making of some town halls.

This renewed call to ‘community-based local solutions’ is both valuable in practice and laudable as prescription; the more so when it builds community ties and hence the ability to remain resilient in the face of climate change.

And yet, a note of caution must here be sounded on two grounds. First, because it was noticeable in Copenhagen that the vision of ‘bottom-up’ decision-making that was articulated in many side events was not accompanied by a seamless vision of the role of national government; or of the much-vaunted national level ‘leadership’ that became a war-cry of campaigners during Copenhagen (e.g. in statements of the ‘politicians go to fancy dinners; leaders act’ sort).

Related to this is the real-world fact that any failure of global democracy resulting from negotiating inequality between nations is necessarily also a failure of national government.

In the run-up to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments encouraged so-called ‘Type 2′ agreements to be tabled and to become a formal part of the Summit’s outcomes. These were essentially voluntary agreements or partnerships between different stakeholders to tackle different dimensions of sustainable development. But there was a backlash from some potential ‘Type 2 agreement’ signatories, who accused governments of passing the buck to non-governmental actors instead of getting on with reaching a deal themselves.

There must be a risk that the same will happen now on climate change: that governments will seek to bring citizen and business-led voluntary action into a bigger intergovernmental tent at the expense of much-needed national level leadership.

That is not in itself a bad thing, but must not become a substitute for effective action at the national and international government levels.

Second is the reality that politics is nowhere more personalised; nowhere more exposing, than at the local level. Any move formally to institutionalise a prioritisation of local level decision-making needs also be accompanied by efforts to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion in local level decision-making; to ensure that minority views are given due weight.

Localism must not become a banner under which marginalisation or ‘business as usual’ decision-making by vocal elites become entrenched in public policy.

The apparent distance between local and global level solutions – a canyon or a rift at best – was made all the deeper by the Copenhagen organisers’ unforgivable failure, over at the official Conference of the Parties at the Bella Centre on the outskirts of the city, adequately to make provision for non-governmental observers of the Conference (including this one, who lacked the stamina of some to stand in a freezing queue for 6-9 hours on the last day that non-governmental organisations without ‘secondary’ badges were allowed to exchange their pre-registration for entry badges to the venue).

Civil society and climate change

Beyond Copenhagen, there is renewed pressure on civil society around the world to make its voice heard above the non-voting views of economic interests and politicians limited by short-term political priorities or (in some countries) crude opinion poll data. This is precisely the message that is emerging from the larger non-governmental organisations: “we don’t have a real deal, and we’re not done yet”, is the essential message.

Or to put it another way, ‘we’re all eco-warriors now’. Action based on this insight will undoubtedly shape both the course of democracy, and the course of climate change, in the coming months and years. But there is also a significant tension between the Green political tendency towards political decentralisation, community activism and bottom-up change and my observations here. For sometimes only strong local, regional and national representative governments have the capacity to take on un-elected interests such as commercial pressure groups; and sometimes representative democracy is the best back-stop for fair decision-making on climate change at local level.

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.With raw material from the Taxpayers Alliance, a cornucopia of sites have blossomed attacking the symptoms of ‘big government’ while rarely actually making the case for the kind of minarchy that is implied by their position.

The end result has been – it is no exageration to say – the near-total demoralisaton of the political class with MPs openly saying that they hate their job and that their families are begging them to take a job stacking shelves in the local supermarket rather than having to put up with the hyper-scrutiny that they appear to be under at the moment.

On the other side of the fence, though, we’re seeing the institutions that compete with a more left-libertarian notion of democracy being taken to peices by rationalist bloggers. Great oak trees from little acorns grow, and it you don’t like the sight of an organisation being taken apart because of it’s attempts to surpress debate, then don’t go and look at this article now.

Those of us that are rather keen on representative democracy may have a happy couple of years to look forward to, watching all of the organisations that rival elected politicians getting their comeuppance.

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?

One of Brooker’s points is the assymetrical way that pressure is brought to bear on objects that have lost the public’s trust. Here his is writing about the Daily Express’ utterly disgusting treatment of Dunblaine survivors:

As I’m sure you recall, there was an immediate outcry, which was covered at length in all the papers. You remember their outraged front pages, right? All their cries of SICK and FOUL and VILE in huge black text? Remember that? No? Of course you don’t. Because the papers largely kept mum about the whole thing. Instead, the outrage blew up online. Bloggers kicked up a stink; 11,000 people signed a petition and delivered it to the PCC. The paper printed a mealy-mouthed apology that apologised for the general tenor of the article, while whining that they hadn’t printed anything that wasn’t publicly accessible online. All it had done was gather it up and disseminate it in the most humiliating and revolting way possible. Last Monday’s PCC ruling got next to zero coverage.

The only slightly bright light here is that 11,000 people signed a petition that was promoted by bloggers. Perhaps even newspaper proprietors are becoming accountable in some way?

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….