Bristol’s great opportunity for enhancing its democracy

BRISTOL’S popular vote to reject the mayoral/ cabinet system offers a huge opportunity to move away from power organized as a personal fiefdom, supplemented by single party oligarchical control, to a system which promotes greater political diversity of views in deliberations of council decisions and scope for enhanced participation of local neighbourhoods.

The referendum wording citing a local authority committee system cannot be backward looking if it is to be successful. It needs to address how council decision making can be effective in addressing complex problems within funding constraints; be made more accountable to its electorate and promote more neighbourhood involvement in decisions affecting them.

In the two years leading up to the new system’s introduction, all these questions need to be explored and discussed by a city wide commission, involving all city stakeholders, as recommended by the Bristol Civic Leadership Project. The current city mayor, Marvin Rees, needs to both support and facilitate this. With sufficient preparation, the new system can achieve for Bristol a democracy fit for purpose in the 21st century.

The democratic potential in rejecting the city mayor system now needs to broaden its focus onto the West of England Combined Authority and its metromayor. WECA has no democratic foundations, being a creation of central government and a small cabal of unitary authority leaders. It came into being without a popular referendum. Its tiny list of founders can be seen in the WECA devolution agreement of 2017.

Combined Authority metromayors, despite the ‘democratic’ veneer of popular election, are a creation of the Treasury to give the Chancellor of the Exchequer increased control over city region financial settlements. While metromayors may boast of winning government funding on their own account, the reality is that the Treasury determines the funding settlement to be offered through policy determined by a sponsoring central government department. To obtain this funding,the Combined Authority submits a business case meeting these centrally laid down criteria. The Department of Transport’s communication with the WECA metro-mayor over its City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement amply shows this.

The government is keen to show the metro-mayor system, as a Conservative creation, as a success and thus, in the context of only seven city region metro-mayors, it has been generous with financial settlements. The lack of democracy underpinning the metro-mayor office is demonstrated by the powerlessness of citizens to reject it (as Bristol has rejected the city mayor model).

The only way to abolish the metro-mayor model is for a twothirds majority vote of unitary authority leaders in the Combined Authority Committee (or Cabinet) to dissolve the Combined Authority as a whole.

Chris Lamb Bristol