Mayoral Referendums

Debate between Bob Ainsworth and John Leech

Wednesday 25th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). I agree with an awful lot of what he said. However, I most certainly disagree with the most high-profile thing that he said about the Prime Minister’s advocacy. I do not want the Prime Minister to come to Coventry to advocate for an elected mayor. That would not go down nearly as well as it might in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency.

I cannot boast 26 years in local government as the hon. Gentleman can, but I did eight years as a member of Coventry city council before being elected to this place. It has long been my view—after about a year of settling in and getting to understand how the system worked, I became pretty disillusioned with it—that I do not believe that it works. I do not believe that it can be made to work.

In 2001, Labour proposed elected mayors. We set up a system that all hon. Members in this Chamber will know allowed for a petition to be raised, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, to get a referendum. Not many petitions have been raised. If I believed that the reason for those petitions not being raised over that intervening period was a high level of satisfaction with the current system and that nobody really wanted change, I assure the House that my support for the mayoral model would have waned considerably. However, the petitions have not been raised because we face, as the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) said earlier, almost total apathy in respect of local government. We do not have—we do not enjoy—local democracy in England at all; it does not exist.

On 3 May, a third of the people of Coventry will vote, and they will do so almost overwhelmingly on national issues, not local issues. Political parties and councillors know and understand that. Indeed, I have not studied the Conservative leaflets in Coventry—if they have been put out at all—but my own party’s leaflets cover police and NHS cuts, overwhelmingly. Why? We know that that is how to appeal to the electorate, and we want to win. This is not about council services, development of the manifesto locally or about what the council is or is not going to do. The product of that is a massive increase in apathy about local democracy, the potential for local leadership and the important services that councils provide.

There is also an impact on councillors. In what other walk of life would we consider it good and acceptable—something that we ought to continue with—to have a system where people know that their policies, credible or incredible, make no difference to their success. However, local government elections can be affected organisationally; we have all done it and participated in it.

Councillors and councils fall or stand on the national trend. Councillors know that. In 2004, the Labour party lost control of Coventry city council, not because we as a party lost control of it or because it was a bad council, but because in that year the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was somewhat unpopular in the country. It was as simple as that. We wound up with a Conservative council for six years, which fell in 2010, in large part because the local election was on the same day as the general election and, in an overwhelmingly Labour city, the turnout was well up and the Conservative council was swept away as a result. I do not think that that was a particularly good council—it was worthy of considerable criticism—but it knew, and we knew, that it would lose an election called on 6 May 2010.

[Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that support for local government and more interest in local politics would be helped by never having local elections on the same day as a general election?

[Mr Ainsworth]

I have not thought about that and I am not dead sure about the degree to which it would, but having a mayoral system in our cities—like the hon. Gentleman, I would be interested in the proposition going further than just in cities—would provide some mitigation against the domination of national politics in local affairs. Of course, the national trend would still have an effect; to suggest that it would disappear entirely would be naive.

On the suggestion about replacing local politics with independents, I am sure that we all know people from our parties who share our beliefs but choose to cover their colours in particular parts of the country, because they know that if they wear their rosette and show their colours they will not get elected. Therefore, they stand as independents. That is, to a degree, dishonest.

A mayoral system, such as we are seeing in London and will see elsewhere, would force people to think well beyond the allegiances of their own political party and about the city as a whole: Coventry, for example. That would give people at least a degree of ability to buck the national trend. People would be, to a greater extent than exists at the moment, genuinely accountable to their local populations, surviving on their own abilities, popularity and the policies that they pursued and, therefore, their ability, to some degree only, to get themselves re-elected off the back of their own policies.

The mayoral system would bring those benefits and the potential for leadership. In saying that, I do not denigrate councillors. Many people dedicate themselves to local government over the years, toiling away, trying to make their cities and communities better places for little remuneration, but they are largely—it is not their own fault—unknown within the communities that they represent. Walking the streets of Coventry, the majority of people do not know who the leader of the council is. That is not the fault of the leader of the council. The Conservative leader of the council for six years, up to 2010, was largely unknown as well. The system prevents them from being able to give the leadership that is so necessary in the modern world.

Those of us who have been lucky enough over the years to travel and to mix and converse with leaders of cities in other countries, know that in many countries—those with which we have to compete—there is a far higher degree of self-reliance. People in cities in Germany do not look in much degree to Berlin, or even to Stuttgart or Munich, for leadership. There is a lot of leadership and a lot more powers in the city itself and, as a result, those cities are more successful.

None of the democratic deficit that I have been talking about, however, matters much to our constituents if it does not make a difference.