“Councillors on the Frontline”

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke.

This is an excellent report—but I would say that, because I am a member of the Select Committee. As always, under the inspired chairmanship of the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), we ensured that we agreed things unanimously and did things based on consensus. That is the spirit in which we should approach this report and the role of a councillor in modern-day life.

Prior to coming to the Chamber, I was in the Tea Room discussing this debate with a colleague who said, “The problem is that I used to be a councillor and used to run weekly surgeries, and no one would turn up. Since I have become an MP, my weekly surgeries have been packed and almost all the people are coming to see me about local authority matters.” That brought out the dilemma that we all face.

I want to pose some challenges beyond the report, to an extent, and answer some important issues. First, what is the barrier to becoming a councillor? Why do people do this? I spent 24 years as a Brent councillor, including four years on the London assembly, and served on the fire authority, so I have reasonably wide experience. I served in a position in the London borough of Brent in which I lived through every possible form of administration, bar none.

I will not go into the wacky world of London borough of Brent politics, but suffice it to say that in the 1980s, when I was first elected, committee meetings were jam packed to the rafters, with standing room only in the council chamber. Now, they are lucky if they can get the local reporter to turn up, let alone any members of the public. We have disconnected the public from local authorities in many ways. That is a bad thing, which has happened over many years.

People become councillors for one of three reasons. First, it is often because they have a passion for one or more local issues, which are really about their local area, not even about the borough, and they want to see change and make things happen for their local people, which is laudable. Sadly, those people often become rapidly disillusioned. We found during discussions that a number of councillors serve a single term, and we lose their expertise that they have built up, because they have got frustrated and no longer wish to serve their local community. We have to deal with that in a big way.

Secondly, there are the political zealots—the people who have an axe to grind about the politics—who join. They are probably lobby fodder for whoever is running the council or is in opposition. They have a political axe to grind and will do anything in that respect. Sadly, many of those continue in councils year after year and often, in my experience, poison the atmosphere on all three sides in the main political groups.

Thirdly, there are the people who want to get on and do something else, either to become leaders in the council and take on executive roles or go on somewhere in politics, sometimes using local authorities that are known to be safe for Labour, the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats as a means to get into Parliament or some other representative body. Often, those people are very talented and progress rapidly through the ranks, but they are always—I have to say it: here is the pointer—out for what they can achieve and the kudos they can gain during the short period when they are serving, which is, I think, a great frustration.

There are clear barriers. One problem is the change from the old committee system, where every vote and argument was made in public and every councillor serving on that committee had to justify their vote to members of the public observing what they said, to the cabinet system or strong leader, or mayoral, model, where all the decisions—let us be clear about this—are taken in private and then rolled out in public to be rubber-stamped. That prevents political groups from reining back on political decisions that have been taken.

One of the opportunities of the committee system was that officers presented reports and political groups could take a view on those, and then a debate would follow, after which a decision could be made. Often now, with a cabinet system, such reports are endorsed by the political group and the individual member on the cabinet; it is then difficult for people to change their mind about a decision that has been taken, when they find out that the public do not like the decision. As a result of that, many people are now put off from becoming councillors, because they do not want to serve on a local authority.

There is a difference between executive councillors, who are either full-time councillors or significantly part-time members, and back-bench councillors—call them front-line councillors, or what you will—who are often struggling for a role. I concur with the Committee chairman: in Sunderland we saw that, clearly, a lot of work had gone on to ensure that all councillors saw that there was a benefit in their role.

The only drawback in allowing councillors power over spending money is pork barrel politics, with people saying, “I’ll spend some money in your area, provided that you get votes for me, come the election.” Local politics has been fraught with such difficulty over many years, with suspicion that particular organisations have received funding in return for votes. There is a big risk in such an approach. Although the sums are relatively small, they can have a significant effect. That is not a reason not to do it, but there have to be controls in place to ensure that this is truly beneficial for the local community, and truly acceptable measures have to be in place. The process has to be seen to be transparent, auditable and appropriate.

On training councillors, one problem is that many members do not have much experience of public life, really, when first elected. They come on to the council for a reason—we have talked about that—and local authorities, in the main, give them a quick briefing and say, “Good luck, you’re on your own.” That is the risk.

We need proper training programmes throughout a councillor’s career that are appropriate to their individual needs, and we neglect that far too often. As several hon. Members have said, having member-led, member-controlled councils with members who are experts in their field, who can take decisions and who can get officers to do what the community wants, is beneficial to the officers, the community and the wider public. Far too often, such training is neglected.

One of the problems that we always had when managing budgets was that it was very easy to cut a training budget—whether training for officers or for members, it did not really matter. People would always say, “Let’s cut the training budget, because we do not need it.” Actually, training and education should always be invested in, because that is the way to get better officers, better councillors, better decisions and better value for money. I would caution against the cutting of training budgets.

On the structure of councils, I will share the current experience in Harrow to show the problems of the current cabinet structure. Harrow has 63 councillors. There are five individual councillors—a rag-bag of various types—25 Conservative councillors, 25 Labour councillors and eight independent Labour councillors. That makes it difficult to have a strong leader model.

People might be surprised to learn that, of the eight independent Labour members, the leader of the council is independent Labour, six independent Labour councillors are members of the cabinet and the mayor is an independent Labour councillor. So all of them have executive positions, yet they form a small minority of the council. That is the problem of the current structure of local government, in which minorities can take huge control because they are the balance between the major parties. That is an extreme example, but it can happen and I think it is one of the drawbacks of the current system. That is one of the reasons why we need to redress the structure back to a more committee-based system, rather than the cabinet system. That is my personal preference.

Another issue is remuneration and whether councillors should be full time, part time or volunteers. My view is that there is a difference between people who lead a council, or who hold an executive position, and those who are critiquing or being a front-line councillor. The fact is that leading a council is a full-time job.

When I was the leader of a council back in the early 1990s, I had a full-time job. I would go into the council first thing in the morning to ensure that everything was hunky dory, and then I would go off to work. I came back at 6 o’clock and never left the council before 11 o’clock, which without question affected my career. People said, “Oh, you are not really committed to the job you are doing.” During that time the most I ever got in a single year for that service was the princely sum of some £1,300. I knew what the position was when I took it on, but we should recognise that people are doing that sort of job, which is a strain, and they should be properly remunerated for doing it.

Given the electoral cycle, and given that someone can be in the role at one moment and voted out the next, we must have a position on whether they are protected with a pension and, potentially, redundancy payments. We have gone from a position in which people volunteered for the council and, to a certain extent, were recompensed for a small amount for their time—their expenses, telephone bills and, if they had them, care costs were probably paid for—to a position in which they have an allowance as a councillor and special responsibility allowances on top of that.

However, there has never been a job description, a contract of employment or a position on redundancy and what happens at the end of a term. Pensions were never mentioned. It was always ad hoc. We have gone from people being complete volunteers to being full-time employees, but they are not really full-time employees. That is something that successive Governments and regimes have failed to address. We have to bite the bullet and do something about that.

The make-up of councils is a real problem. The numbers of both women and ethnic minority people are not representative of the community. As the Chairman of the Select Committee said, the average councillor is white, male and aged 60, which cannot be right because it is not fully representative of our community. It is incumbent on political parties to make that change. I am pleased to say that, come the local elections next year, of the 27 proposed candidates in my constituency 11 are women and 18 come from minority ethnic communities, and that number could be stretched further if people from certain other minority communities are included. That shows that we are trying to make a change at local level ourselves.

My concern is that after the 2006 local elections—I cannot speak for the 2010 local elections—the London boroughs of Brent and Harrow represented 40% of ethnic minority councillors in the whole of London. In London, which is probably the most ethnically diverse city in the world, it has to be bad news that councillors across our boroughs are not representative of the communities they face. I commend the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), the ex-leader of Lambeth council, on the steps taken there in 2010. That is good news, but we are woefully short of both women and ethnic minority councillors.

Most people, if challenged to do so on the doorstep, are unable to name their councillors. That is a problem faced by councillors across the board. Talking to communities in community languages is all-important, and representing those communities is difficult for people who do not understand such community languages. Often, the people who need help have difficulty speaking English—they always have English as an additional language—and therefore having councillors who can speak those community languages is terribly helpful for representing them in the council, for understanding their problems and for dealing with the ward work that follows. That issue needs to be addressed with appropriate action from the political parties, rather than from the Government.

There is also the issue of councillors as the leaders of their communities. One of the thrusts under the previous Government was to get to a point at which councillors spent more time in their community talking to residents’ groups, charities, community groups and so on. In my experience, the problem has been that there is then a disconnect between councillors understanding what the council does—inputting into and critiquing the work of the council—and connecting with community groups. My personal opinion is that that has not worked wonderfully well, and a lot more work needs to be done by individual councillors, assisted by the councils, to understand that things have to change and that councils have to be representative of the area.

I am concerned that in London we have all-out elections every four years. In the London borough of Harrow, regardless of the results of the election, we are expecting a huge turnover of councillors. More than 50% of councillors will be new, which creates a political vacuum and an opportunity to train people in the right sort of way that encourages them to be councillors in the right sort of vein.

It is incumbent on local authorities to have a proper training programme for those councillors now so that it is ready to go when people are elected. From my experience across London authorities, I am not convinced that a proper induction programme is prepared for such councillors. That needs to change. Without doubt, without such a change discontent will continue to build up, with people saying, “It isn’t worth being a councillor, so I am going to give up.”

[Mr Joe Benton in the Chair]

I have one last challenge, which is not in our report. Given the changes that have been made to the roles of executive councillors, who make decisions, and councillors on the front line, who represent their wards, we should perhaps reduce the number of councillors overall, rather than having large numbers of councillors and large councils right across unitary and all sorts of other authorities. We should pay councillors better, reward them appropriately and give them the support they need, but we should reduce their numbers, because if we make them more professional, more involved and more effective, we will need fewer of them. That might be controversial, and some people may not agree, but local authorities all over the country are starting to reduce marginally the number of their councillors. However, a marginal, creeping approach is perhaps not sufficient, and we may need radical action to introduce such a change.

Mrs Brooke—sorry, Mr Benton; the Chairman has changed during my speech.

[Robert Neill]

That is the effect you have.

[Bob Blackman]

Yes, I know. Mrs Brooke is gone—she could not stand it any longer.

In summary, Mr Benton, this is an excellent report. The Select Committee has put in an awful lot of work and collected an awful lot of evidence, so the report is worthy of lots of action. There is further work to be done: we have to transform local government so that it is, in the right way, at the forefront of decision making. The report is a welcome step, but it is not the end of that transformation; it is more like the end of the beginning.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Blackman]

Is it not one of the dilemmas of the whole system of overview and scrutiny and cabinet that council officers frequently see it as an obstruction to their getting on with the day-to-day job? Therefore, the resources applied to assist members who sit on scrutiny or overview are very limited, and those resources are often the first subject of reductions in expenditure when the council considers its budget. Does that not pose a problem to the whole basis of challenging the executive and council officers who find such overview and scrutiny an unfortunate irritation to their normal work?

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. He reminds me of my time as a councillor, when I would—Members touched on this issue earlier—sit in meetings with council officers. Occasionally, they would, I do not doubt, be blaming somebody unfairly, but they would certainly use the opportunity to say to members that if we did not take a certain action it would upset the Audit Commission, that it would not help us with our comprehensive area assessment—or something else that the normal public do not care about or understand, and nor should they, because it is usually wasting their money—and that the Government will pull part of our grant from somewhere else.

That is why taking away ring-fencing was so important. I appreciate that the hon. Member for Croydon North and other Opposition Members have commented on how important that was. It is also why it was important that we got rid of some of the burdens—not only such things as the standards committees, but the Audit Commission itself and the way it worked. The hon. Member for Warrington North commented that we have the Local Audit and Accountability Bill, which is the final nail in getting rid of the Audit Commission, coming to us very soon. She commented on the Secretary of State’s powers, and I hope to be able to convince her, through the process of the Bill, that it is the right thing to do. It is already part of the code anyway, but she should look carefully at some of the authorities out there that are wasting taxpayers’ money on wholly inappropriate literature. We will talk about that, no doubt, in the months ahead.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East is right in talking about how council officers will use funding. I have spent part of today talking about this very issue. Opposition Members have made the point about council funding and how it has changed. The challenge I put to the local government sector is that it is difficult for the general public to give that real credibility, until we can see every council involved. There are great councils doing great, innovative work to make sure that they are being efficient, but there are still lots of councils out there that have not looked at everything they can do, in terms of front-line services, innovation and shared management, and cracking down on the £2 billion of uncollected council tax and the £2 billion worth of fraud and error. Councils have increased their reserves by another £3 billion in the last year alone to a record high of £19 billion. That money should be going to ensure that we have great front-line services and innovation.