Sadly, it’s not a surprising headline, but the 2008 National Census of Local Authority Councillors is just out: it shows that councillors in England are still predominantly white and male. There’s a bulge around retirement age. (I’m talking statistics here, not middle-age spread!)
Some of the main findings are summarised below:
• Most councillors (68.4%) were male, 30.8% were female (0.8% did not respond).• The proportion of female councillors has increased from 27.8% in 1997.
• The average age of councillors has increased from 55.4 years in 1997 to 58.8 years in 2008.
• 96.6% of councillors were white and 3.4% came from an ethnic minority background.
• 56.4% of councillors held a position of leading responsibility within the council and 53.2% of all councillors received a special responsibility allowance in addition to their basic allowance.
• 88.0% considered themselves to be effective or very effective in their role as councillors which was a slightly smaller proportion than was the case in 2006 when 92.1% considered that they
were effective.• 88.4% of councillors cited a desire to serve the community as their reason for wanting to become a councillor.
• Councillors spent, on average, 22 hours per week on council/political business.
• Most councillors (62.5%) indicated that they thought it was very important that there was a greater role for councils in the accountability of key local services like health and police. 40.4%
felt that it was very important that councils had a devolved, discretionary budget for individual councillors to spend on local amenities or initiatives.• 54.5% of councillors intend to stand for re-election at the end of their term in office and 81.8% would recommend taking on the role to others.
You can read the Final Report here and the Preliminary report (October 2008) on councillors’ gender and ethnicity here.
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4 Comments
I wonder how many of those BME councillors were women?
“Most councillors (62.5%) indicated that they thought it was very important that there was a greater role for councils in the accountability of key local services like health and police.”
Sadly it is Lib Dem policy to create alternative democratic bodies to fill with people to scrutinise health and police services.
I think one of the most interesting things I experienced as a councillor, was the amount of casework from wards that I didn’t represent, coming to me directly, first because of my surname (i.e. the association of being muslim and being able to understand sensitivities), which in turn I had to be professional about and pass on to the relevant ward councillor for that geographical area (which the resident wouldn’t always be so happy with as they’d tried to avoid them.) I did this in order to ensure the best service was given from the right experts.
There is such a bigger picture to representation than mere statistics – and the difference I feel, is in the level of engagement relative to how people relate to who is representing them. Trust plays an important part in this.
It all kind of firms up my belief that, in order to make a radical difference to local government, what we actually need is fewer councillors, but on a full-time basis. Up here in Scotland, the introduction of a £15K part-time salary and STV made very little difference – despite almost 50% of the sitting councillors standing down in Fife, for example, the average age only dropped from 60 to 55.
For councillors to properly fulfil their roles they really need to be full-time.