The Councillors Commission, chaired by the former Labour leader of Camden Council (Jane Roberts), is due to report to the Government on Monday and leaks to the media suggest some highly controversial proposals will be included.
The media coverage has led on proposals to significantly increase the money paid to councillors.
But in the leaks are two other hot potatoes: the suggestion that council by-elections should be axed (and instead any vacancies filled from a list of names) and the suggestion that term-limits should be introduced for local government elections.
The Commission was set up following the Government’s local government White Paper, which said there would be:
An independent review of the incentives and barriers to serving on councils. Councillors should be supported in their contributions and service to their communities, not face disincentives to taking on the role. The review will look at a range of issues, including the extent to which finding it difficult to get time off work discourages people from becoming councillors or serving in cabinets, the time commitments expected of councillors and cabinet members and allowances.
You can see the list of its members on the Councillors Commission website; they included three Labour politicians, one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat (Cathy Bakewell) alongside some independent members.
UPDATE: The Observer’s coverage includes other proposals from the report: encouraging people to vote by giving voters free entry into a lottery, lowering the voting age to 16 and “Encouraging participation with ‘political speed-dating'”.
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13 Comments
As far as I can see, nobody on the commission has any experience of being on a ‘small’ council – it’s all big urban areas and counties.
I really ought to wait to see what the report actually says before commenting further. But I think to get better councillors – at least on smaller councils- we need to be given more power, not more money.
And having been elected and re-elected ever since 1984 I’m not keen on the idea of being disqualified simply because I’ve done more than 5 terms…
If I remember correctly from last conference where there was a fringe on this, most of the independent members were ex-Labour people.
So it could be a bit of a stick-up.
Personally I think term limits (say 20 years) would be welcomed to encorage parties to find new candidates rather than just going for the same old faces each time. They should apply to principal councils but not parish/community councils.
Term limits are also being concidered for Lords reform.
As Josiah Bartlet said: “We have term limits – they’re called elections.” 😉
And filling Council vacancies from “a list of names”? What do they think we are, a bloody school governors board?
What Joe said—term limits are fundamentally undemocratic and I don’t think I’ll ever be persuaded to support them.
Parties reselect candidates (we do it democratically if someone else wants a go) and then the voters get a choice. If the voters are happy with their previous choice, then so be it. Yes, new blood is to be encouraged, but better to acheive that through a decent electoral system that improves voter involvement as they’ve started to do in Scotland than by false limits on terms.
It’s not mentioned on her biog but I’m pretty certain Cathy Bakewell has fairly lengthy experience on district Councils in Somerset as well.
I’ll be ultra-generous and give them the benefit of the doubt until I’ve seen all the proposals though some of the headline grabbing ones above are clearly a bit barking 🙂
I have a copy of a very late draft and I have to say that a large number of proposals in this report are garbage.
As for appointments from a list, they have already introduced the idea of some appointed councillors for Parish Councils (in the recent Local Government Act) so it’s just an extension of that really. The new New Labour establishment really do not believe in local democracy, full stop.
I hope we will be going very strongly on the attack against the whole report which is at least 50% dangerous, wrong, rubbish.
The problem is, surely, that in a lot of places we DON’T have elections. Not meaningful ones anyway. There are far too many places around the country where elections are a mere formality.
But surely the solution to that is to have a fairer electoral system rather than simply kick out individuals for being too successful?
With the number of places where it’s difficult to find candidates anyway, I think term limits are daft in practice as well as wrong in principle.
I’d be tempted to say yes to them for unopposed candidates, if it didn’t open up the possibility of opposing parties deliberately not standing against a candidate they otherwise couldn’t defeat…
“I’d be tempted to say yes to them for unopposed candidates”
Another advantage of STV: very unlikely to have any unopposed candidates.
Yes, we must oppose tinkering with the system; the fundamental lack of power is a big turn-off. But also most people understand that you cannot win without being a party member, and that puts off many people. So actually it is in the interest of councils (not to mention Parliament) for political parties to be large and diverse organisations.
But there are two other, broad areas that I feel need addressing:
a) Issues about working people being either actively discouraged from standing or at least feeling (knowing!) their career will suffer. Employers need to appreciate that their staff could benefit from being a councillor, in the same way as they can from a secondment.
B) We should not dismiss the real turn-off to most people from opening oneself up to close personal scrutiny. Your address and phone number usually in the public domain; people knocking on your door at all times of day and night. Even for parish councillors.
With the huge rise in the ‘quangocracy’, it’s not surprising that many people who genuinely want to undertake public service do so by appointment to a (well-remunerated) NHS trust or similar, rather than go to the trouble of fighting an election.
The idea that vacancies be filled by a member of the same party is common place here. In the Assembly there is an official list of substitutes, but in local government, vacancies care often filled by the Party who held the seat proposing someone for co-potion, and if that person is not opposed then they take the vacancy. Makes sense in an STV system, and its not too often that co-options are opposed, as each party knows they could be the ones to need the co- option next time.
Pam
Belfast
Pam – is that partly a specifically Northern Ireland solution to deal with the problems of minority views being represented in an AV by-election for an STV seat.
Scotland has gone to STV with by-elections.
Over at the GLA, when an assembly member elected from the top-up list resigns, the vacancy is filled by the next person on the list. It happened to the LibDems when Louise Bloom resigned. Is that so very wrong?
I assume that a resignation of a constituncy elected member would trigger a by-election.
I should mention here that the final report does actually endorse the idea of local authorities piloting the introduction of STV (recommendation 21).