“Councillors on the Frontline”

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Martin Vickers]

I accept that there is a failing by the political parties to broaden their appeal to women and minority groups, but we should support and encourage them to do that, rather than have yet more interference.

The report mentions the voluntary and community sector as a hunting ground for potential candidates. Speaking as someone who spent 15 years as a constituency agent, I can assure Members that that ground has been hunted almost to death. One part of that hunting ground is the parish councils.

I remember once approaching a lady on a parish council and asking her, “Wouldn’t you like to move up to the district council? We need a candidate for your village.” She replied, “Oh no. It’s political. I don’t believe you should have politics in local government.” A couple of years later, however, she was elected to the district council as a Lib Dem, and I said to her, “Why? You said you didn’t believe in politics in local government”, and she replied, “Oh no. That’s why I joined the Lib Dems.”

There are many important points in the report. There are constraints on the time that people can give, and it is important that local authorities bear in mind that most elected members do the work part time, alongside earning a living. The trend, much more noticeable in recent years, to have more daytime meetings is a deterrent to people becoming councillors. The Chairman of the Select Committee made the point about loss of earnings and allowances, and that is perhaps one way of compensating them, but if the self-employed want to get involved it is almost impossible for them to do so in normal working hours.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I strongly support my hon. Friend on that point. Throughout the 16 years that I was a councillor, I was also a self-employed barrister and the only way I was able to do that was because our local authority ensured that all its meetings were in the evening. My hon. Friend makes a hugely important point. The decision is in the power of council members.

[Martin Vickers]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention in support of the case. If we are serious, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, about getting a cross-section of the community involved, it is vital that we do not make it more difficult for the self-employed, among others, to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke, though it is perhaps a source of regret that, for the first time in as long as I can remember, we have a local government debate in which you are not participating. It is a pleasure none the less to see you presiding over us instead.

I congratulate the Chair and the members of the Select Committee on the production of the report. I noticed that there are some useful and interesting statistical appendices, one of which demonstrates that some 46% of Members of this House have, at one time or another, served as local councillors, and I am one of that number. If we include those hon. Members who were present at the beginning of the debate, we will find that in the case of this debate we are up to 90%, but I do not want my hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) to feel at all embarrassed about that, for he is, none the less, an excellent Parliamentary Private Secretary and is doing a fine job of supporting my hon. Friend the Minister.

It is instructive and worth recognising that a high percentage of people have moved from local government to Westminster. That is a healthy thing—I would say that, wouldn’t I? However, I think that we would all say that. I agree with the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) that there is real opportunity for a cross-fertilisation of knowledge between the two tiers. However, as will become apparent, there are other matters on which I do not agree with him. Nevertheless, he made a perfectly fair point, which we all recognise.

The report is useful. I had the pleasure of giving evidence to the Select Committee on behalf of my party, so I am in the odd position of being a participant both in the report and in the debate. There was an interesting exchange about how we make councillors more representative. I was elected to a London borough when I was just short of my 22nd birthday.

[Mr Betts]

A few years ago then.

[Robert Neill]

It was very recent, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says. Like me, he will remember that it was at a time when the Association of Municipal Corporations was still going. I had just qualified as a barrister, and I was doing criminal work in and around London and Essex, which comes back to the point that I made to my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) that a lot of us in those days were in full-time employment of one kind or another. As I was self-employed, I was not earning if I was not in court, so there was a particular pressure there. We dealt with it in our council—granted we were near London, so many of our councillors had to commute—by insisting that, save in very exceptional circumstances, the meetings were held in the evening. I accept that the situation varies from place to place, depending on geography and demography, but we have to adjust to that.

Throughout the time I was a councillor, I managed to hold significant positions of responsibility including the majority party’s chief whip—in a coalition at one point I might add—chairman of social services and environmental services and leader of the fire authority. As there was political will and agreement between all parts of the council, we all managed to carry out such functions without its becoming a full-time job, which is important.

I value the role of the councillors. That does not necessarily mean that I think that their actions should always be immune from criticism, but I value them and the role of local government. The point about the role of the councillor, and the whole added value that it brings, is precisely that it is not a full-time profession.

I had slight worries about the suggestion that we should remunerate councillors on the basis that they are, in effect, pursuing a full-time career, and I had even more worries about the gloss that some hon. Members and other commentators put on it, hence all the conversation around pensions and so on. The reality is that, whatever the level of commitment, that is not what it should be and not, I think, what the public wants it to be. That is not to say that we should not be professional and that people should not be recompensed for the moneys that they often sacrifice when they carry out such public service.

At a time when the public is sceptical of career politicians at any level, including those in this House, it would be wrong to send out a message that once someone goes on to a council, they do that full time, regardless of the size of the authority. Moreover, such a move would not reflect the reality on the ground that the size of local authorities and the commitment that members put in varies greatly. There is a world of difference between serving as a back-bench councillor on a small district council and serving as an executive mayor or the leader or a cabinet member of a unitary authority. We must accept that there is a range of differences, and that a national template cannot be imposed on them. An error that the earlier Councillors Commission made—I am glad to say that the report has not made it—was to try to impose national minimums for remuneration and so on. The Government are right to say that allowing councils to outsource their remuneration policies to an independent body—although it is useful to have such a body to advise—runs the risk that it does not then calibrate effectively to that change in local circumstances. We must always be honest and up front about that.

I accept that being a councillor was not always a selling point. When I was a barrister, my clerks did not generally put on what was the equivalent to the chambers website that I was a councillor, apart from those couple of occasions when I was instructed either to prosecute or defend members or officers of local authorities for breaches of the criminal law. I accept, therefore, that there is a bit of an issue, but people deal with that in a common-sense way.

It struck me throughout my time on Havering council, which was an authority that changed hands from time to time, that there was a certain refreshment or turning over of the membership without its being imposed in any hugely structured way. That is why our discussion about what the political parties can do to get a better representation of the community in councils was helpful, but it is right to come to the fairly nuanced conclusion that we cannot impose such a move from above. I passionately want to see more women and more members of our black and ethnic minority communities involved in public life. Although I know that I, as vice-chairman of my party, have a bit of work to do to help my colleagues achieve that, I do not believe that an imposed model works, not least because the way in which individual political parties operate varies. Some are more decentralised than others, and that is true of both the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties.

Imposing such a practice through quotas does not work. Furthermore, it is almost counter-productive, because it is important that someone should be able to say that they came to this House or to the council on their merit. They should be able to say, “People voted for me because they thought that I was the best candidate.” We do not want to undermine that at any level. That is why I am wary of too rigid an approach to remuneration and pensions. I do not want to get to a situation where a professional and often time-consuming piece of voluntary public service is treated as a career, but that would be the message that went out if we followed the route that is hinted at in some parts of this report.

Most members of the public would be surprised to find that councillors are members of the local government pension scheme—arguments relating to such membership can be made either way. Sometimes analogies are drawn with Members of this House, and we must take them on board when we discuss the matter. I am a member of the local government pension scheme, as most members of the London Assembly were, but I am now a retired member as my pension was frozen as soon as I left—I simply say that for the record. That was because the previous Government decided that the devolved bodies, of which the London Assembly was one, should have full-time salaried posts, so there is a distinction there.

[Mr Betts]

Generally, I find that I agree with the hon. Gentleman, apart from on pensions. If a councillor is not full-time but has to spend a day a week away from work—that is not unusual for many councillors—and therefore has to give up their pay from work and their pensionable element of that pay, they are effectively getting only 80% of their pension value for working for that week. Is it unreasonable to have a system that allows them to replace that element of lost pension provision by paying in to another scheme that simply reflects that situation and gives them that element, so that they do not lose out on pension for the time they have served on a local authority? Is that unreasonable?

[Robert Neill]

There are two things that we can think about that; I understand—superficially—where the view comes from, but there are things that we should look at. First, there is the question of entitlement to paid time off to enable people to do their work, which we ought to think about. Secondly, and this is something I had to think about as somebody who was self-employed, if I was not earning a fee, whatever percentage of that fee I might have put towards my pension arrangements, I would have to make up elsewhere.

What we can do, and this would be permissible under the Government’s proposal, is say that there is no reason why a councillor cannot put a portion of their allowances, which are set locally, towards a private pension. Then, of course, they could claim the tax relief, which is part of that process. So people are not prevented from making some provision.

I accept that this is a difficult issue, but I think that there is a general feeling among the public that—if anything—we will have to be rather more cautious in our approach to pensions right across the public sector. That applies to Members of this House—our pension scheme is being revised, including for Ministers; the ministerial pension scheme is being revised—and it is happening to civil service pensions and to local government officers’ pensions. We cannot escape the fact that doing otherwise would send a message that is rather at variance with the general thrust of the approach towards pensions in the public sector. The Government’s actions are consistent with saying that, for a raft of reasons, we must recognise that we can perhaps no longer adopt the same approach towards pensions as we did before.

As I say, I accept that this is a difficult and controversial issue, and I have tried to use pretty moderate and non-partisan terms. I understand the arguments either way, but we have to be realistic about things.

As I have said, the great value of councillors is that they are not officers. I would not want—even by accident and inadvertence, if you like—to get to a stage where we do something else that reinforces the idea that councillors are part of the payroll. We would not make councillors more effective at being councillors by making them more like officers. The whole idea is that they are different and separate, and the fact that very often they have employment and experience in the private sector is part of the added value that they bring in as a different dimension to the council.

[Mark Pawsey]

On occasion, the role of the councillor is to call officers to account and there is sometimes a danger that councillors become too closely identified with the body on which they are a councillor.

[Robert Neill]

That is a perfectly fair point, and it applies right across government. I do not go as far as one council leader, with whom I served at one time, who said that his committee chairmen—we call them cabinet members now—were not doing their job if their officers and directors were not scared of them. I would not recommend such an approach, but there has to be a proper degree of distance; I think all of us would recognise that, because sometimes we have to make it clear that there is a dividing line of responsibility, and about where decisions are ultimately taken.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful that we are benefiting from the hon. Gentleman’s vast experience of many levels and of several roles in local government. However, does he recognise my experience from a number of peer reviews of other authorities that I had the privilege to participate in? One of the reasons that some councils become unresponsive to the needs of their citizens is that they are too officer-led, and if the elected members are not around enough to ensure that the officers are responding to residents, they are not able to carry out their job. Some of the points that he is making would encourage elected members to be around less rather than more, and therefore they would be unable to make the difference that residents want.

[Robert Neill]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s proposition, but maybe not with his final conclusion, for several reasons. First, I am firmly of the view that the best councils are member-led and that good officers respond more effectively to strong member leadership, so having such strong leadership is in everybody’s interests. Secondly, however, that does not mean that we must have a massive professionalisation. I have already made the point that often there are differences in roles, for example, in London boroughs such as the ones with which he and I are best acquainted. There is the world of difference between the commitment of the leader and the cabinet, and that of a back-bench—let us say “frontline”—ward member. We have to recognise those distinctions and that is why a sensible, locally set form of allowances is a better means of going down that route, rather than moving towards some kind of quasi-salary, because those allowances can reflect particular circumstances.

I was a little surprised to read what is again a fascinating little tit-bit in one of the appendices of the report, about the growth of special responsibility allowances. Sometimes, they are not unreasonable to reflect things. Sometimes, however, I have had a suspicion that there has been a degree of what we might term “grade inflation” in the number of special responsibility allowances that are awarded. I notice that, according to the report, something like 53% of councillors have some kind of special responsibility allowances. I wonder what that would translate into here—300-plus Front Benchers of one kind or another in this House. I do not know, though; occasionally I suppose I could see attractions to that. Again, however, I think we understand that it is a question of getting a sensible balance and not abusing what is an important system.

I will just say one other thing that shows that I do not entirely follow Opposition Members. This Government should be judged not necessarily on words but on deeds, and the real thing that makes people decide to be a councillor and to stay a councillor is a belief that the job makes a difference. The issues that we talk about and how we recruit people are terribly important. My party is putting in work. I particularly want to mention the work done by the Be a Councillor campaign, which is a cross-party Local Government Association initiative; the work that we have done in the Conservative party through Women2Win and other groups; and the work of my friend, Councillor Clare Whelan, who is a former colleague of the hon. Member for Croydon North and who was recently appointed an Officer of the British Empire for her work on improving diversity in local government. All those things are important, but the key point is that people become councillors because they think that giving up their time to go and be there is worth while, because they think that their decision can make a difference to their community and the place where they live.

That is the key point and I believe that the Government firmly pass the test, because what we have done—in actions—is give, where there was not one before, a legal power of general competence: to remove what I think we would all agree now were overly prescriptive targets; to remove the comprehensive area assessment; to phase out ring-fencing; to change the approach to planning, neighbourhood planning and so on; to remove predetermination, which I think we all agree was a fetter on democratic accountability by councillors; and to remove what had become an over-intrusive standards board, although I have said in Westminster Hall before that we need to watch to ensure that that is not recreated through the back door. All those are positive, devolutionist and decentralist actions by the Government.

In defence of Ministers—both past and present—it is perfectly consistent to say that, although we believe in localism and we hand power back, that does not mean that Ministers—or Opposition Front Benchers for that matter, as national politicians too—are obliged to take a Trappist vow of silence. It would be objectionable if a Minister said, “I am not going to allow you to take that decision”, but that is not the case; that is not what we are saying. We are allowing local government to take more decisions, but if a local authority of any political persuasion makes a flawed decision, it must run the risk of criticism by Ministers or Opposition Front Benchers, just like anyone else in public life. I do not think it is at all fair to criticise Ministers on that account; it is the deeds, not the words, by which they should be judged.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for being so generous with his time. I commend the Government for what they did on abolishing much of the ring-fencing. That was one of the very best things that this Government have done, and it has made it easier in very difficult circumstances—circumstances that are partly the fault of this Government—to manage the reduction in resources. However, is the hon. Gentleman advocating—as I do—that the Government should now move on from that and adopt a much more thoroughgoing, total place model that looks at all the public resources being spent in a particular locality and at how those can be de-ring-fenced and made accountable to the local authority, also allowing local communities to have a bigger say over what those resources are spent on?

[Robert Neill]

I have always advocated a move towards greater pooling and collaboration on budgets, and of course the Secretary of State—both now and throughout his time in government—has done a great deal of work in pushing forward community budgets, which is part of the means of piloting exactly that approach. I think we can do more and believe that, regardless of political persuasion, we should all recognise that this is an ongoing process.

By its nature, government in this country, historically, has tended to be quite centrist and we have to move away from that, gradually. The Government have already done a lot in that direction. Successor community budget pilots will open up real opportunities to demonstrate, across Government, that this can work. However, I say, as somebody who served as a member of a strategic health authority, that we have to take on board that not all the partner agencies, to use the current fashionable term, with which local government has to work in matters such as health—I digress slightly to mention the return of public health powers to local government, which is another significant devolutionary measure that this Government have put through—have the same culture of democratic accountability and transparency as local government. It will be a real fight for those of us who identify with local government, as a sector, to ensure that our standards are applied in these new arrangements, not those of—let us say—rather more bureaucratically obscure approaches to the world. All of us in local government need to take on that fight, but there are real opportunities if we win it.

This is a positive debate. I welcome the Select Committee Chairman’s giving us the opportunity to discuss this subject. Even if we do not agree about some matters, the commitment to local government across the House is clear, and that is important.

I was impressed by the methodology set out in the report. The idea of speed dating fascinated me. A councillor attended a constituency surgery in Chislehurst with me and we went to the local pub afterwards, just to compare notes and check that we had everything in order. We were congratulating ourselves on what we thought was our good name and face recognition, until I noticed that we were sitting at a table above which was a sign that read “Over-40s speed dating tonight”. I hope that the methodology has not caused too many difficulties for the Select Committee. It is a worthwhile report. If someone does not have a sense of humour, they should not go into local government.

[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.