Comment Our councillors are being disappeared... by stealth
perform. True, superficially the LGBCE doesn’t look that mysterious, for it publishes all its proposals, plus a certain amount of its reasoning.
Its aims too are more modest than God’s, being limited to achieving its singular interpretation of electoral equality: namely, equalising the number of electors represented by
Now, 37 of the 101 councillors will represent singlemember wards, with 64 in two-member wards.
each councillor in any particular local authority. And about that intra-council or internal form of electoral equality it is passionate, and it’s what prompts most – but importantly not all – of its reviews.
However, about inter-council electoral equality – across even similar types of council – and also about other aspects of intra-council equality, it is passionately indifferent.
Birmingham’s LGBCE referral was exceptional – one outcome of the now Lord Kerslake’s ministerially- initiated review in 2014 of the council’s governance and organisation – but not really its processing.
Kerslake, seriously unimpressed, identified councillor numbers as an important council weakness. Cutting them from 120 to an arbitrary but tidy 100, and presumably increasing their workload, would be part of the solution – a recommendation the LGBCE endorsed and implemented almost precisely. Ward names and even boundaries were negotiable, but council size was off-limits.
In the only measure it cares about, the commission regarded the current 120 councillors as representing an average of just over 6,000 electors – although, since all represented three-member wards and had to be elected by all ward residents, more meaningful figures would be 18,000 electors and 30,000 persons, considerably higher than any other single-tier council.
Now, 37 of the 101 councillors will represent single-member wards, with 64 in two-member wards. Presumably, therefore, candidates in the former group will have been almost relishing campaigning for the first time for the votes of ‘only’ 7,000 or so electors – especially as their colleagues canvass similarly new electorates, but twice the size. In our system, the latter may reflect, electoral equality is for generally unaware electors, not acutely aware aspiring councillors.
Part of this column’s purpose was to highlight how this most underappreciated tier of our political class is being gradually but steadily whittled away in a policy vacuum. For nothing in the LGBCE’s terms of reference requires it almost always to equalise downwards.
Certainly, there are several instances – Bexley was one this year – where reviews were initiated not by the commission, but by the council itself wishing, for financial or other reasons, to reduce its own elected membership.
In both circumstances, though, the commissioners’ phraseology is that they are satisfied that “decreasing the number of members by XX will make sure the council can carry out its roles and responsibilities effectively”.
Most council officers will have mused occasionally that “if it weren’t for those pesky members … ”.
But it’s a bit concerning, especially at election time, to realise an unelected, unaccountable body is already doing something about it. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham