Local government reorganisation is happening. That’s the reality.
As a current district councillor, I could debate the pros and (many) cons of this all day – but one topic I’ve heard worryingly little about is how these reforms could destroy what little representation young people have in local government.
Currently, young people in local government are a rarity. According to 2022 data from the Local Government Association, just 16% of councillors are under the age of 45 – despite the same group accounting for over 40% of the population.
The same dataset found that just 1.2% of councillors were aged under 25 – around 200 in total across England.
There’s currently half as many under-25s who are councillors than players in the Premier League.
This isn’t a surprise. The role on paper just doesn’t work for young people. Whilst being a councillor is intended to sit on top of a full time role, the reality is very different, with meetings easily spilling over into the daytimes, ever-growing casework piles, huge time pressures, and residents’ needs to meet. On top of this, councillors with special responsibilities face even greater challenges.
This blind spot is a huge problem. Our councils need to reflect our whole communities, not just a subset of them. Councils need councillors with a range of experience and backgrounds to make good decisions – and councils that lack young voices (and voices from other underrepresented backgrounds) lack views from the whole community. Whilst a good councillor is capable and able to represent the views of their whole community, it’s still absolutely vital to have young people around the table.
Unitarisation makes these problems worse. It raises the barrier to entry significantly, and higher barriers to entry can often lead to worse representation of underrepresented groups – placing the already dire representation of young people further at risk.
As Lib Dems, we know it can be challenging to get elected. Ahead of the General Election, many of our prospective MPs had to give up their jobs to become full time campaigners to win. The joy of local government is that this isn’t currently the case – but getting elected locally is getting harder and harder. Unitary councils mean a smaller number of councillors and candidates having to appeal to a larger number of voters. These growing campaigns are placing a larger and larger barrier to young people being able to get themselves elected compared to others – both financially and organisationally.
Reorganisation also puts a huge number of local boundary reviews on the horizon, and seeing as Local Government Boundary Commission reviews almost always cut the number of councillors, that barrier gets even higher.
Making a smaller pool of people accountable to a larger pool of people and centralising power doesn’t improve governance – and it often benefits those who have been around the longest (and therefore those who are usually the oldest) the most.
This ‘incumbent’s advantage’ can also play out in our own party’s procedures. Having a smaller group of increasingly professionalised councillors massively reduces natural churn, and therefore massively reduces the chances of a young person being selected for a target seat.
Two of the main reasons I am where I am today are the fact I had an incredibly supportive mentor and being asked to step up into a seat where we needed a candidate. If we were in a post-reorganisation world, I don’t think that opportunity would’ve existed for me. Even then, with a higher barrier to entry, I don’t think I’d have said yes.
I’m so glad that opportunity did exist though. It’s given me some absolutely life-changing opportunities and shaped me as a person massively. Beyond this, there’s been a real positive impact on my local area that I can trace back to the work I’ve been able to do. But I’m now worried that the opportunity I had won’t be available to other young people – and that what little representation we have in council chambers could fade away.
As a party, and as a country, we need to give serious thought to what we do to prevent these issues from coming to fruition.
If we want to encourage more young people into public service we need to lower the barrier to entry and support people into giving back to their communities.
Labour’s reorganisation plans do the opposite.
* Nathan Hunt has been a District Councillor in Huntingdonshire since 2022. He is also an Honorary Vice President of Young Liberals.
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11 Comments
According to 2022 data from the Local Government Association, just 16% of councillors are under the age of 45 – despite the same group accounting for over 40% of the population.
But every single one of the 84% of councillors who are over the age of 45 was, at some point in their lives, under 45 — and presumably can remember what it was like.
Therefore councillors over the age of 45 are perfectly capable of representing those under the age of 45, as they themselves were once.
The reverse is not true: a councillor under the age of 45 has never themselves been over the age of 45 and therefore cannot (if we accept the premise that people can only be represented by those who share their experiences) represent someone over the age of 45.
Surely, therefore, if it is important that different perspectives be represented by those who have personally experienced them, older councillors should be prioritised over younger councillors as older councillors have personal experience of being younger, whereas younger councillors do not have personal experience of being older?
“Making a smaller pool of people accountable to a larger pool of people and centralising power doesn’t improve governance – and it often benefits those who have been around the longest (and therefore those who are usually the oldest) the most.”
I agree. We should keep District Councils for example, but their role can be re-assessed in current circumstances. In our area, there is a need for a much better locally appropriate Strategic Authority for the whole of North Staffordshire, but for the reason stated above, district councils should still be there.
It is often said this two-tier system costs more, but the benefits democratically are very large and much of the cost should come from cutting staff in Whitehall or similar government organisations around the country. That also means less national tax and more local tax, thus giving us proper devolution. Sam Freedman’s book ‘Failed State’ published last year shows how grossly overcentralised our system is and it is failing.
I disagree with the writer.
Local government should be organised in the way that makes most sense, and in my view that means eliminating duplication and having unitary authorities.
Keeping duplicative district councils to give younger people experience sounds like “make work” to me, and British taxpayers cannot afford such extra costs.
We have a two tier system courtesy of the reforms of the 1970s. If we accept that “strategic authorities” headed by “Mayors” are going to be foisted on us, either devolve the functions of the County Councils down to the districts (making the districts unitary) or give them to the strategic authority, depending on what is appropriate for the function in question.
The proposal to force several districts together into a single unwieldy unitary will cost money to no useful purpose and will be “devolution” going in the wrong direction.
@Mohmmed Amin
I also share you sentiment as well. I do think we have regions and cases where their is unnecessary duplication with too many tiers within tiers. I think that a lot of this is a legacy of our organic but admittedly messy history of how councils were formed.
Now I do believe we need more local empowerment and decentralisation. We should definitely reshape our authorities they get more powers and responsibility so they can be answerable to local needs – although I am more in favour of strong cabinet, rather than strong executive. Heck, I might even welcome a constitutional arrangement of regional assemblies.
But I think we sometimes confuse getting rid of bureaucracy and duplications with getting with local democracy and accountability. So in rare agreement with Labour (who I still have suspicions when it comes to moving power away from top-heavy state to more devolved forms when it comes to local governance) I think we need it should be reorganised as you said Mohammed that makes more sense. What LibDems should debate helping devolve more power to regions/local areas and properly redraft or frame our Constitutional power that is both permanent, empowering and settled.
Back in the late 60s, the then Liberal Party proposed a system of devolving power to Scotland and Wales and the regions of England, with powers taken away from Westminster and given to powerful regional/state bodies. There was further to be a single tier of local government (plus towns/parishes as now). Power was to be exercised as near to the people as possible. It made sense then and it makes sense now.
What we are going to get from Labour is not devolution, but centralisation and in the least democratic way possible, where power will rest with one individual (a Mayor) and councils will become mere ciphers.
So let’s not pretend we like it. Yes, we have to deal with whatever we get, but we should do a fair bit of shouting and complaining about the direction of travel and centralisation. Labour (and the Tories too) don’t want local control, especially if it inconveniently gets in the way of what they want to do with housing, planning or anything else.
We Lib Dems genuinely want to take power out of Westminster and give it back to the people. Let’s campaign for what we believe. That might actually make us distinctive and, who knows, might prove to be popular.
Important write up Nathan, and as a young (admittedly over 25!) district councillor, it’s given me vital experience. Having people from different generations is vital in politics, and it is sad to put this at risk.
Mick Taylor is correct, indeed I remember it to have been a very strong thrust in Liberal Party policy.
Nowadays, I would add a plea for education to be returned to a properly financed local government. The privately run academy system has very little democratic accountability if any at all ….. there was a chronic case reported on BBC North TV tonight of a failure to provide S.E.N. places by the academy system.
I’m concerned by some of the comments which seem to imply that wanting our democratic structures to work for more people, not fewer is a bad thing.
The challenges that young people face today are not the same challenges faced 10 years ago, let alone 20/30 etc. and regardless of this, the idea that young people are any less qualified as a group to be elected than older people is frankly concerning.
Nathan is right to highlight the issue of age inequality in local government, and I think it’s entirely correct for him to argue that reorganisation will only exacerbate these problems.
Already, councils as they are suit the needs of a subset of the population who are not reflective of the whole. This applies for young people as much as it does for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Wanting our systems of government (local and national) to enable full participation from as many people as possible is not saying “make work” for young people. It’s saying that we have as much of a right to take part in these institutions as anyone else.
These aren’t just things we have to press the government and councils to fix, it’s something that we as a party need to work on too.
After all, that so few young people are councillors means an even smaller number were selected as liberal democrat candidates in winnable seats and given the resources they need to succeed.
“There’s currently half as many under-25s who are councillors than players in the Premier League.”
Why restrict the comparison to the Premier league? If we include other leagues too, of both men and women, there would only be a tiny fraction.
Isn’t this as it should be? Young people should play football, and engage in other sports, while they are physically able to do so. If there is a choice between turning out for a football or cricket match and attending a council meeting, I know what I would choose at that age.
There’s plenty of time for other less physically demanding activities later on.
You don’t find many under-25’s being councillors for much the same reason that you don’t find many under-25’s working as directors of large companies or as senior consultants and so on: Because you need experience (life and to some extent political experience in the case of councillors, business-specific experience in the case of other jobs). And there’s no way to gain lots of experience that doesn’t involve getting older. It works the other way too: How many of the premier league players the article cites are over 45? I’m gonna guess, almost none.
There is a valid point about the need to listen to and formulate policies that serve all parts of the community including young people, but the answer to that is probably more to do with finding ways to make sure representatives are in contact with and listen to people from all groups, rather than trying to recruit loads of people who may not yet be ready to become (or even interested in becoming ) councillors.