Let’s improve our governance to help democracy work better says Barry Quirk

By Barry Quirk

Former Chief Executive of Kensington and Chelsea Borough and Lewisham Councils

There’s no better time to strengthen and revitalise governance among local authorities.  For there’s real excellence in the governance of most authorities.

There are three issues that Councils need to focus on to revitalise their governance.  First, there’s the perennial need to improve Councils’ internal governance arrangements.  Adding external and independent people to help keep governance focussed on what matters can make real sense.  Probably the most innovative arrangement, for increasing public trust and confidence in Council decision making, is for an independent ethics panel to be appointed to have oversight on Council decision making processes as well as the ethical challenges that confront Councils.  

Second, Council functions and activities are a significant fraction of all public spending in a locality.  But the larger fraction is the combined activities of education, health, police & criminal justice, welfare transfer payments, and the infrastructure investments of central government.  And so, Council governance ought to make sure that it brings the sunlight of accountability to the cost-effectiveness of all public spending in their locality.  Many Councils have been doing this extremely well - working alongside local public sector partners in achieving joint goals, but also enabling stronger public accountability of these other public sector functions and services.  Each Council needs to have this external focus to add to its crucial internal focus.

Third, Councils are nothing if they are not vehicles of effective community self governance.  The civic life of the Council should pulse alongside the life of civil local society and the changing demands and preferences of local citizens.  The most effective Councils don’t perform their functions to their public, they work with their public.  They work collaboratively with service users and citizens to generate new ideas for service change.  They co-design these service changes.  And they evaluate the impact of service delivery by working together. 

Over 20 years ago, the authority I worked for, the London Borough of Lewisham, in the middle of transitioning its governance to a directly elected mayoral model, conducted several citizen juries, many citizen panels, held citizen assemblies and had many community conferences on hot topics of local concern. The aim was to increase the volume of deliberative democracy on local public issues.  At that time, the Council thought that moving to a directly elected mayoral model was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition to revitalise the connection between the Council and its communities.  The whole Council needed to be engaged in a renewed effort to revitalise democracy at the local level.  In the 2020s, the prospects for emergent dialogue between Councils and their citizens is stronger because of the ubiquity of our social media age - but only if we ensure that all participating have equal chances of engaging in respectful, tolerant and creative dialogue.

These three issues each have the capacity to absorb attention and divert Councils away from a balanced and healthy approach to strengthening its governance.  We need to be mindful of the distractions of being drawn into internalised disputes, generally about those issues that Councils do control.  We also need to avoid the distraction of focussing a disproportionate amount of our efforts on those things over which we have influence, but not strong control. 

Make sure that your internal focus does not hinder progress

Councils are periodically beset by internal squabbles about the respective roles of those 10 or so councillors who compose the ‘political executive’, and those 40-80 other councillors who perform a range of scrutiny as well as other local public functions (such as planning, licensing and the like). 

Admittedly, several Councils have retained or reverted to decision making by committees.  But most Councils organise their decision making into two domains: the political executive and scrutiny.  These options are rooted in the Local Government Act of 2000.  Over 20 years later, the simplicity of the 2000 Act can easily get lost in the fog of local political disputes about who knows what when, who decides how to address unfolding events, and who controls the agenda of what’s to be decided in the future.  In the midst of this fog, constitutional realities and democratic accountability can easily become untethered. 

For example, Councils remain constitutionally unified - when something goes dreadfully wrong it’s the Council that is open to being sued; not the political executive, nor any individual councillor or officer who made the errant decision.  From these complications stem many internal concerns within Councils - generally about how power is sourced, shared and wielded.  These issues are part of the fabric of governance but they often become ‘un-discussable’. 

Addressing these internal arguments is vital to improving the health and effectiveness of local authority governance.  Prior to the 2000 Act, every Council made decisions in broadly the same way.  But now there is considerable variety in how decisions are made.  Is this of itself a good thing, or does it hint that some decision making arrangements may have been designed for the benefit of the majority in the majority?  A simple exercise to compare and contrast the differences between the ‘schemes of delegation’ of, say, ten randomly selected Councils might helpfully trigger a broader review of the reasons for and reasoning behind the present day divergence of practice. 

The locus of public decisions

Generally, public interest decisions should be made as close as possible to those most impacted by the decision.  However, that doesn’t mean that all the most important public decisions in a locality should be made locally.  Often it is possible to find a compromise between conflicting ‘local interests’ and ‘non-local interests’.  But sometimes it just isn’t.

In 1949 Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman relates the story of Willy Loman, a down-on-his-luck traveling salesman who nurtures dangerous beliefs regarding success and who struggles with personal memories linked to neglect, desertion and disorder.  Miller was asked whether his play was about the struggle of one man undergoing distress in his family, or was it a broader narrative about the nature of distress in society and the wider economy.  His answer was, “the fish is in the sea, and the sea is in the fish”. 

National problems have local expression; and local problems may inter-twine, get amplified and generate national problems.  The challenges faced by people and communities are not well served if different tiers of government appear to the public to be arguing about whose analysis of the problem is the most correct, and who has the best legitimacy to address the problem? 

As the 2007 Lyons inquiry into local government argued, improving the overall accountability of local government requires each tier of government having, “every reason to improve their own contribution to the well-being of citizens and communities, and to support others in doing so.”  This notion of self critical and mutually supporting tiers of government may seem overly idealistic, but the ideal does not mean that the movement in this direction isn’t possible.

The key democratic connection is with citizens

When considering the strength and vitality of their governance, Councils tend to neglect the most important people - their citizens and their local civil society.  It’s often just easier to get distracted by internal necessities and external disputes about ‘who should decide what should be done’?

All governments have many citizens but each citizen has several governments.  None of us are singularly governed by one person we elect as our representative.  And as citizens we expect all who are elected in our name to enter dialogue together and to work at finding compromises between their differing versions of the public good.  Of course we expect them to bring their political convictions to bear on public problems.  That’s why we tend to elect them on the basis of their party affiliation.  But we rarely want them to only address these problems through the lens of their political convictions.  Instead we want them to maintain a connection with citizens and civil society locally - so as to keep in touch with as many citizens as they reasonably can.  Democratic accountability doesn’t just occur in the ballot box.

By making public interest decisions close to the people affected, local government is so much more likely to actively listen to these people.  And it is so much more likely to encourage them to deliberate amongst themselves and respond to suggestions for improvement locally.

Commentators often portray democracy as a pathway for political elites to establish an electoral majority for the straightforwardly naked purposes of governing.  But democracy is so much more than that - it is an ideal, a process, and an idea in action.  The rhythms and pulse of democracy can be found in the everyday life of every community.  Democratic practice is not confined to the high arts of statecraft.  It infuses the common and everyday life between us all. 

Democracy involves people learning how to disagree with each other so that they can live together as equals without resorting to violence or competitive strategies of domination.   Where some win - but others seem always to lose.  In this fuller sense, democracy involves an open, emergent and deliberative style, as much as it requires formal and institutional foundations for governing. 

In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked to respond to a question about where universal human rights begin.  She answered:

“Where do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close, and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.  Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or offices where he works.  Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination.  Unless this rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.  Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s response presents the case with real clarity.  Improving governance is not simply about strengthening the ethical framing of Council purposes - though that is important.  Nor is it simply about reviewing the ‘parchment barriers’ that separate different layers of public authorities - again an important focus.  Perhaps more than both, improving and strengthening governance requires a rich seam of everyday connections between Councils and the citizens that elect them and the communities that they serve.

Download the EGF report on Decentralisation HERE