Analogue councillors fail to connect in a digital age
IN the greater scheme of things, Birmingham’s biggest local government news this August must be the expiration of the Capita era.
The city council has finally ended its 13-year contract arrangement with outsourcing company Capita, with most of its IT and HR services brought back under council control, and some 300 staff returning or transferring to the council.
Note the ‘most’. This isn’t a total expiration – because Capita resembles the planarian worm, whose exceptional regenerative abilities enable it to regrow even its own severed head.
But it is the realisation of the crucial 2017 dissolution decision taken during the regime of Labour leader and long-term Capita scourge, John Clancy.
And, borrowing from the 2001 Labour Government’s playbook following the 9/11 New York World Trade Centre attack, if you wanted “a good day to bury bad news”, 1st August was a pretty good choice.
For, certainly in recent years, Capita’s humungous ‘Service Birmingham’ contract produced far more bad news headlines than good.
An apparently poorly negotiated, wildly over-secretive, and staggeringly costly arrangement – £345,000 a day at its peak – what even councillors, never mind us mere citizens, were able to glean owed much to the Post’s Graeme Brown, Neil Elkes and others, but particularly to my distinguished fellow columnist, Professor David Bailey.
Tributes duly paid, I’ll now edge towards something, unlike outsourcing contracts, I can at least half-understand.
The official 1st August line was that BCC-Capita relations are still hunky-dory and the changed working arrangements “timely and appropriate”, since “the council now has a well-developed digital strategy to transform the IT service provision to deliver customer-centric outcomes” – whatever they are in English.
It’s true, though. The council has since 2016 had a five-year Information, Communication Technology & Digital Strategy, which I remember trying seriously to read – all 50 incredibly densely written, jargon-dripping and bullet-pointed pages. I struggled, badly, but one
thing I did learn was that, while most councils have separate ICT and Digital Strategies, we lucky Brummies have, or will eventually have, a combined ICTD one – which is not just better, but “enormously exciting”, obviously.
You can hardly imagine the wondrous things it will enable, and, moreover, we’ve got a head start.
Birmingham is already one of the UK’s most digitally connected cities, but, as digital citizens, we’re going to become more digitally included, more digitally interactive and collaborative, with even a more digitally directed domestic waste collection service… though maybe that’s nearer the end of the five-year strategy.
So why on earth, you might ask – OK, I’m asking – are those at the heart of this digital wonderland, our elected councillors, prohibited from doing what some of us mere citizens have been doing through Skype, FaceTime and the like for seemingly decades – namely, attending and participating in meetings remotely?
Instead, as if nothing socially, economically, technologically or environmentally had changed in the half-century since the 1972 Local Government Act, all those participating in a council meeting must, like their Victorian ancestors, be physically present.
At which point, I will declare an interest. Exactly 12 years ago I spent what was a much hotter August writing a research paper for an independent Commission on the Role of Councillors.
I wasn’t at all involved in the Commission’s deliberations, so feel entitled to opine that its 61 recommendations still represent about the best prospectus around for the enhancement of councillors’ roles.
Anyway, Recommendation 40 was that the “Government should introduce legislation to enable councillors’ involvement in meetings – including, but never limited to, voting – without the need to attend in person.”
Its reasoning was phrased positively, suggesting it “could prove a particular advantage for councillors in rural areas, but also those with caring responsibilities or in full-time work.”
Fortunately perhaps, the then Communities and Local Government Minister was Hazel Blears, Labour MP for Salford, whose unusual pre-parliamentary experience included both ‘sides’ of local government, as a council solicitor and then elected councillor.
She supported the Commission’s recommendations generally, No. 40 particularly, and committed the Government to “introduce legislation enabling people to participate and vote in council meetings from their homes using new technologies.”
Blears herself had to resign from the Government before being able to introduce the necessary legislation – a misunderstanding about what constituted allowable expenses.
Since when, the new technologies have aged, but precious little else has happened.
Various possible reasons are discussed in a recent Briefing Paper by the Local Government Information Unit – public outrage at councillors “voting from the comfort of their armchairs”, potential abuse – but all more speculative than substantiated.
Moreover, it was all rather undermined by the Government recently conceding that “in certain circumstances” video conferencing facilities offered “a great opportunity” to hold meetings in a way that could “enhance the scrutiny of decision-making processes and open up local democracy to a wider audience”.
Unfortunately, the “certain circumstances” were meetings of joint committees or combined authorities, like the WMCA – not those of far more significant elected bodies like city, town and county councils.
We’re back, then, to that 2007 Councillors Commission, who I feared at the time might be putting their case too politely.
Yes, the video-link issue is about assisting existing councillors, but even more about attracting more younger, female and BAME councillors and those with caring responsibilities, who are being indirectly discriminated against and deterred by these ‘attendance in person’ restrictions.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of Birmingham
The video-link issue is about assisting existing councillors, but even more about attracting more