Counting the cost of talking to residents — a question for reorganisation

08/09/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Eren Bahadir Pehlivan

Between July and September 2026, I sent Freedom of Information requests to eighty-nine district, borough and city councils in England. Thirty-two went out in July; a further fifty-seven in August, adding questions about the annual electoral canvass. The full wording is in the appendix, and readers should judge it for themselves.

The questions were deliberately dull. How much did the council spend printing and posting correspondence to residents last year? How many items did it send? What did the canvass cost, and how did people respond to it?

As at 7 September 2026, seventy-three councils had replied. Thirty-six gave substantive answers. Twenty-one produced figures complete and consistent enough to compare with each other. Responses arriving after that date are not counted here. Excluding one council that restricts commercial re-use, the remaining twenty spent more than £4.4 million in a year on print and post alone. The median was £205,890.

Eighteen recorded both spend and volume. Divide one by the other and the cost of a single item runs from 74 pence to £15.01.

That spread is the first thing to be careful about, because it is not a finding about efficiency.

Councils count different things. Some totals include overheads, machine leases, paper and staff time; others are franking alone. Where a service is outsourced, the largest mailing may sit inside a contract price and never appear as postage at all. Shared services split costs between partners on conventions of their own. Year-on-year movements can reflect a restructure, a change of supplier, or a re-coded nominal ledger rather than anything operational. Geography, service mix and the degree of outsourcing all move the number. None of that is bad practice, and none of it can be read off a single figure.

What it does mean is that these figures are not comparable in the way a reader might assume, and that most councils cannot say which of those conventions their own number reflects.

Some answers, though, are not explained by accounting convention. A city council serving around 138,000 people replied that its total print and postage spend was “not held”, and that the number of items posted was “not held” as well. A district put its whole-council outgoing post at “£500k approx” and does not record how many items that buys. One council asked ten of its own departments and they disagreed with each other about whether the authority uses a digital notification platform.

A borough in the east of England explained that it had “recently wiped our 2025 canvassing data to commence canvassing for the current year”, rebuilt its answer from invoices and an Electoral Commission feedback sheet, and warned that it “may be incomplete.”

These councils answered courteously and within the deadline. The information was not there to give.

The canvass makes the point more precisely, because every authority is doing the same statutory job. Among four councils that answered in detail, one made no household visits at all; the others paid for 7,254, 8,839 and 12,306. Cost per property, where it could be isolated, clustered between 67 and 73 pence — a similarity that conceals four different operating models.

It also unsettles an assumption worth naming. In two of those councils about three-quarters of canvass responses arrived over the internet. In the third, which paid canvassers to call at the door, the internet share was 36 per cent and nearly half of all responses were collected in person. The digital share of responses appears to track the council’s chosen method rather than residents’ preferences. That is a caution for anyone reading channel-shift statistics as evidence of public appetite.

All of this now matters more than it did. Reorganisation will move these budgets into new and larger unitary authorities from April 2028. A successor authority inherits whatever its predecessors could measure. Where a district cannot state its own communication spend, the new organisation begins without a baseline for it; where a dozen districts each used a different convention, aggregating them produces a figure that is precise and meaningless.

Which raises a governance question rather than a spending one. Two councils told me, in different words, that nobody owns this. One wrote that it has “no officer responsible for customer contact strategy”. Another said all decisions on communications and digital engagement for the canvass are taken through the elections office. Correspondence with residents is not a service with a director. It is a cost distributed across every service, which is precisely why it falls between owners.

Three modest arrangements would help, and none requires new spending: a named officer accountable for the whole channel; a single nominal code that records volume alongside expenditure; and a canvass costed as one activity rather than split between an elections budget and a general print budget.

Reorganisation is an expensive way to find out what you were spending. It is also, for the next eighteen months, the cheapest moment to start counting.

Figure

“What one item costs, according to councils’ own figures.” Produced by the author from the FOI responses; councils anonymised. Copyright held by the author; free to reproduce with the article.

Eren Bahadir Pehlivan is the founder of ADORASEC Ltd, working on notification between institutions and the people they serve. The dataset here is his own. Email: [email protected]

Appendix — the Freedom of Information request

Reproduced in full, as sent. This is the wording used for the second round (fifty-seven councils, August 2026). The first round (thirty-two councils, July 2026) used the same Part A and Part C questions but did not include Part B, and asked for “the most recently completed financial year” rather than naming the period. That relative wording proved ambiguous: several councils answered without stating which year the figures covered, and their responses are excluded from the comparisons above. It was replaced with absolute dates for the second round. The change is noted here because it bears directly on how far the two rounds can be read together.

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I have tried to keep it as light as possible to answer, and I have set out below what would make it lighter still.

Please provide the following for the 2025/26 financial year only — that is, 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.

If your figures for that period are not available, or if the council’s records are held to a different reporting period, please answer for whichever full year is most readily available and simply state in your response which period the figures cover. Knowing the period matters more to me than which year it is.

Four things before the questions, each intended to reduce the work involved.

First, we do not require a departmental breakdown. A single whole-organisation total is sufficient for every figure below. These figures are typically held against nominal codes in the finance ledger, and a total taken from there is exactly what we are asking for.

Second, if a figure is not separately recorded, please simply say so. That is a useful answer to us and we would much prefer it to an estimate. A number of authorities have already told us that certain figures are not held, and we have recorded that as a finding rather than a failure.

Third, the questions are grouped so that each group can be answered by one team: questions 1 to 3 by finance, questions 4 to 6 by the elections team, and questions 7 and 8 by whoever holds the staffing information.

I should be explicit about how those first two groups relate, because it has caused confusion elsewhere. Part A is not about elections. It concerns the organisation as a whole — every department, and all correspondence sent to residents whatever the service area, including council tax, benefits, waste, housing and planning. Part B is the election-related part and concerns only the annual canvass. The two do not overlap, and a figure covering electoral registration alone would not answer Part A.

Fourth, if any single question would take the request over the appropriate cost limit under section 12, please tell me which one and I will withdraw it, rather than the request being refused as a whole. I would be glad to agree a narrower wording by email before any work is done on it, in the spirit of the duty to advise and assist under section 16.

PART A — CORRESPONDENCE WITH RESIDENTS (ALL DEPARTMENTS — NOT ELECTIONS)

1. The total amount spent by the council on printing and posting correspondence to residents during the period, across the organisation as a whole. This is not limited to electoral or canvass mail. A single whole-organisation total is sufficient.

2. The number of items posted to residents during the same period, if this is recorded.

3. The total amount spent on SMS or text messaging to residents during the same period, and the number of messages sent, if these are recorded.

PART B — THE ANNUAL CANVASS

4. The total cost to the council of the 2025 annual canvass — that is, the most recently completed canvass, whose revised register was published on 1 December 2025 — including printing, postage, staffing and any personal canvasser visits. If the canvass cost is not recorded separately from the council’s general print and postage budget, please say so.

5. For that same canvass: the number of residential properties to which a canvass communication was sent; the number that did not respond to the first communication; the number of reminder communications sent; and the number of household visits carried out.

6. For that same canvass, the number of responses received by each route — paper, online, telephone and SMS — if this breakdown is recorded.

PART C — WHO HOLDS THIS WORK

7. The job title and, if the council is willing to share it, the direct contact details of the officer responsible for resident communications, customer contact strategy or digital transformation.

8. The job title and, if the council is willing to share it, the direct contact details of the Electoral Registration Officer and of the officer who manages the annual canvass day to day.

I am content to receive the response electronically, and I understand the statutory period is twenty working days.

One last thing, which is an offer rather than a request. The same questions have gone to a number of district councils in England. Any council that responds is welcome to a copy of the comparative results, showing where it sits against the others, with the case reference against every figure so that anything in it can be checked at source. It is provided at no cost and on no conditions. You do not need to do anything to receive it beyond answering this request, and you are under no obligation to take it.

Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2026: why the future of public services is about systems, not services

02/09/202631/08/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Claire Dhami

I was fortunate enough to attend the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin this June, bringing together public servants, leaders and practitioners from across the world who are grappling with the same fundamental challenge: how do we make public services work better for people in increasingly complex and uncertain times.

The festival itself has an interesting origin. It was founded by Charles Landry and others as a provocation. The term ‘creative bureaucracy’ deliberately challenges the stereotype of bureaucracy as rigid, slow and rule bound. Instead, it puts forward a different idea that public institutions, at their best, can be imaginative, humane and capable of solving complex problems.

What began as a provocation has now become a global movement. The festival has grown into a space where thousands of public servants come together each year to share what is actually working in practice, often in spite of system constraints, and to learn from each other.

What struck me most, both from the festival and from our work in the West Midlands, is that the issues we face are remarkably consistent across countries. There is a growing recognition that many of the challenges in public services are not about marginal service gaps. They are about how the system itself is designed.

We have built systems that are logically organised around institutions, but in practice expect people to navigate multiple disconnected pathways. Responsibility is too often passed between organisations, rather than shared. The result is fragmented, transactional experiences, particularly for those with the most complex needs.

This is not a capability problem. It is a design problem.

One of the most powerful shifts discussed at the festival is moving from improving individual services to improving life outcomes. That may sound like a subtle change, but it fundamentally alters how we think about reform.

Instead of asking how to optimise what already exists, we start by asking what people actually need to thrive and then work backwards to shape the system around that. In our own work, this means focusing less on creating new interventions and more on redesigning the pathways between education, health, employment and community support, particularly at the points where people are most at risk of falling through the gaps.

This is where relational public services become essential. When support is organised around trusted relationships and continuity, rather than organisational boundaries and eligibility criteria, the experience for residents changes completely. It becomes earlier, more consistent and more human.

But perhaps the most important insight for me was how we think about innovation.

There is a tendency in the public sector to equate innovation with new programmes or pilots. The festival challenged that directly. A more effective model is to see innovation as a small but deliberate part of the system, around 10 percent of activity, designed to influence the other 90 percent.

The pilots themselves are not the outcome. They may succeed or fail. The real value lies in the learning they generate and whether that learning changes how the system behaves. That means influencing mainstream commissioning, policy decisions and how resources are actually deployed.

This requires discipline. Without a clear link between experimentation and system change, innovation remains interesting but peripheral. With it, innovation becomes a lever for reform.

It also clarifies the role of organisations like the Combined Authority. Our role is not to direct delivery or create new services. It is to influence how the system behaves. That means convening partners, aligning incentives, building shared ownership of outcomes and creating the conditions for change.

At the same time, the festival highlighted a fundamental contradiction that we see locally. We talk about partnership, prevention and place-based working, but continue to fund services in ways that reinforce fragmentation. If we are serious about system outcomes, we have to fund them differently, aligning resources around shared cohorts and goals rather than organisational silos.

The message I took away from Berlin is that the future of public services will not be defined by new initiatives. It will be defined by our ability to redesign systems so that good people are able to do the right thing, consistently.

When we get that right, innovation is no longer something separate. It becomes part of how the system learns, adapts and improves over time. And that is where meaningful, lasting change happens.

Claire Dhami is Head of systems change and inclusion at West Midlands Combined Authority.

When mayors hold the pencil: gerrymandering inside a territorial reform

28/08/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues (University of Minho), with Oliver Meza (CIDE) and Carmen Navarro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Gerrymandering is usually filed away as an American problem — a decennial ritual of oddly shaped congressional districts and litigation. But the practice does not require an American ballot. It requires only two things: a boundary that has to be redrawn, and a politician with an interest in where the line falls. Territorial reform supplies both, and it does so in countries that would never describe themselves as having a redistricting problem.

Portugal is a case in point. In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we look at the 2013 reform that amalgamated Portuguese sub-municipal units — the freguesias, roughly comparable to parishes — and ask a question that the amalgamation literature has largely left aside: not whether mergers deliver economies of scale or damage local democracy, but who decides which units merge with which, and what they get out of it.

A reform designed to be captured

The reform came out of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding with the troika. Cutting the number of local entities was one of the commitments made, and central government initially tried to impose specific merger criteria from above. Local government rejected that outright. So the government softened its approach: it kept the targets — urban units to be reduced by 50–55 per cent, rural ones by 25–35 per cent — and handed the map itself to the mayors. Across 278 municipalities, the number of sub-municipal units fell from 4,269 to 3,092.

The design has an unusual feature. The units that had to merge were not the units that decided. Mayors drew the proposals; municipal assemblies approved them. And Portuguese municipal assemblies are hybrid bodies: alongside directly elected members, every sub-municipal president in the jurisdiction sits with a full vote. Sub-municipal presidents are also, in practice, part of a mayor’s electoral machinery — the people who campaign, mobilise and deliver a vote in their own patch.

That makes an amalgamation reform something more than an administrative exercise. Reducing the number of sub-municipal units aligned with the mayor’s party reduces the mayor’s support in the assembly that approves the budget and the investment plan, and thins out the voices in the field who will be needed at the next election. Conversely, a well-drawn map can pack opponents into a single unit or dilute them inside a larger friendly one. The pencil was handed to precisely the actors with most to gain from how it moved.

Vulnerability and feasibility

We modelled the mayor’s decision on two dimensions. The first is vulnerability: does the mayor have a majority of politically aligned sub-municipal units, or not? The second is feasibility: does the mayor command a majority of the elected seats in the municipal assembly, and so the ability to get a map approved without concessions?

Crossing them yields four situations. Where mayors are not vulnerable, redrawing is either irrelevant or indifferent — there is nothing to gain. Where they are vulnerable but lack an assembly majority, redrawing is crucial to survival but has to be negotiated, which means sharing the spoils. Where they are vulnerable and hold the assembly, redrawing is appealing: the incentive and the means coincide.

Using the 2009 sub-municipal election results projected onto the new 2013 map — the only information mayors actually had when drawing it — we then estimated multinomial logit models on all 278 affected municipalities.

The pattern is clear. Across the country, 51 per cent of municipalities ended up with more aligned sub-municipal units after a reform whose entire purpose was to reduce their number. In the appealing quadrant, the odds of an increase in aligned units rise more than nine-fold; in the crucial quadrant, where the map has to survive a coalition, they rise just over four-fold. The gap between the two is itself the finding: opposition parties will not sign off on a map that benefits the incumbent alone, so the gains get shared and diluted. Results hold when we substitute a vote-efficiency measure of the kind used in the US gerrymandering literature.

Why this should interest anyone outside Portugal

Two implications travel. The first is procedural. Structural reform is often delegated downwards on the sensible-sounding grounds that local actors know their own territory. They do — and they also know their own electoral arithmetic. Where the reform reshapes the boundaries that determine who sits in the body that scrutinises the reformer, delegation is not neutral. Anyone currently watching local government reorganisation in England, where boundaries, wards and the composition of new authorities are all in play, may find the logic familiar.

The second is about what happens next. Since 2013 there has been sustained pressure in Portugal to demerge some units, and the initiative for those petitions again rests with mayors. If the same rationality holds, demergers will be permitted where they are politically harmless and blocked where they are not — meaning the same territories get gerrymandered twice.

None of this requires bad faith or illegality. Every map was lawful and approved through proper procedure. That is rather the point: an effective opposition, not a rule about compactness, was the only thing that reliably constrained the outcome.

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Political Science, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, and a researcher at CICP.

The full article — ‘Gerrymandering to survive: an explanation of the political conditions that shaped mayors’ decisions over an amalgamation process in Portugal’, by Miguel Rodrigues, Oliver Meza and Carmen Navarro — is published in Local Government Studies, 51(5), 993–1015. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2404104

Local Authorities engaging in housing delivery

24/08/202624/08/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Janice Morphet

The Secretary of State for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government frequently speaks to the media about the ways in which local authorities are providing more homes. She typically discusses two ways that she expects them to deliver – through the reform of the planning system and providing more social rent homes using Government Funding[1]. All councils use the planning system to negotiate affordable housing secured through planning agreements[2] and about half of local authorities retain and develop social rent homes using government subsidy. However, over five waves of research since 2017, we have found that, in 2026[3], 95% of local authorities are engaged in housing delivery, although much of this is not recognised by government.

How are local authorities increasing the number of homes they need in their areas? We look at this in detail in our research. Each round in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2026 has used the same methods to find out what councils are doing. The first stage is to examine each council’s documents, reports, websites and records to provide detailed information about their levels of activity. These findings are published in a free report which is available now for 2026. Where the council has its own company to develop homes alongside other methods, like WV Living in Wolverhampton or Goram Homes in Bristol this is noted and weblinks provided. Some councils also have active Arm’s Length Management Companies (ALMOs), where the council retains ownership of its stock but some or all aspects of its housing management and delivery are undertaken independently. These ALMOs are also registered as housing associations and have separate assured access to government funding. While the number of ALMOs has been reducing, some that remain are very active including Cornwall, Derby City and the LB of Sutton.

Other councils enter into partnerships with private developers or housing associations. Some local authorities may enter into multiple arrangements of this type such as Oxford City Council, where the agreement will vary on each site. Others like Gateshead and Cambridge have developer agreements for several housing sites over a period. In some locations, such as LB Ealing, local authority estate regeneration is undertaken with both housing developers and housing associations. These relationships bring funding, expertise for councils and less risk for developers who will usually also be providing some market homes as part of the arrangements. However, when completed, despite local authorities often providing land, finance, advocacy and guarantees to third party funders, the homes are attributed to the developer and/or the housing association and not to the council.

Since 2022, housing construction costs have increased while government subsidies and restrictions on the use of receipts for properties sold under right to buy have limited local authority investment in housing delivery. Yet 82% of councils increased affordable housing in their areas. At the same time, homelessness has increased placing strain on wider council budgets. Local authorities have been looking for other solutions to provide more homes. In the 2026 survey we found 57% councils are acquiring homes to add to their stock. While these homes are not net additions, they can be used for different tenures and to relieve homelessness, overcrowding and multiple occupation. The funding for acquisitions has come from an Government easing of the use of RTB receipts such as Bassetlaw and through a Council’s General Fund rather than through the specific housing funding route. Some councils are managing acquisitions through setting a budget, numbers cap or location, others by seeking certain types of homes eg former RTB homes to enable future estate regeneration eg Ipswich or suitable for older people such as Bury. Where councils have been working with developers, they have been able to agree purchases of unsold new homes at different points in their construction – from design stage to completion including Birmingham City Council. Many councils are supporting the development of garden villages and urban extensions to provide additional homes including Sandwell, South Derbyshire and Cheshire East.

Some councils are engaged in a wide variety of activities to deliver homes including Stockport, Sheffield and most London Boroughs where the Mayor of London has the power to provide all with funding for 5-10 year social housing programmes. If the new Prime Minister wants local authorities to deliver more homes, then the expertise and skills built up in London Boroughs to deliver the Mayor’s programme and then applied to wider housing delivery should be available to every other local authority in the country.

Local authorities are providing more homes than popularly acknowledged. They should receive more recognition of what they are achieving and the model of funding for each local authority as available in London demonstrates that this approach has a significant role in expanding housing delivery across all tenures in England.

Janice Morphet is a Visiting Professor at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning

The full report is here:

2026 desk survey report for publication Download

[1] Eg BBCR4 Today Programme 19^th August 2026

[2] Often known as s106 agreements from role of s106 of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act in providing the legal means to secure this housing

[3] Local Authority Direct Provision of Housing in England: Round Five Research Report 1 – Local Authority Activity to Directly Support Housing Provision: Desk Survey Report. Janice Morphet and Ben Clifford UCL Bartlett School of Planning

Is inclusion the wrong goal for local politics?: why how women are included matters as much as whether they are included.

14/08/202629/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Tanya Jakimow

There are several self-evident truths when it comes to achieving gender equity in local government. Increasing women’s political participation is the first step and an unproblematic good. The focus must hence be on removing barriers to ensure elected bodies are representative of the broader population. When gender parity is achieved, political institutions will change, to become more gender sensitive, more deliberative, less conflictual.

More than thirty years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action towards gender equality, these axioms are looking shaky. Why have substantial increases in women’s participation as party members, candidates and local representatives not significantly challenged men’s political dominance? Inclusion is not enough, and sometimes, it may even be the problem.

Research from parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, shows that women are not absent or excluded from democratic life, they are active participants. Put differently, women make important contributions to local politics but in ways that are rendered invisible, unrewarded, taken for granted, and exploited. They are included, but on disadvantageous terms.

Challenging the political dominance of ‘majority’ men hence requires going beyond addressing women’s exclusion to examine the terms of their incorporation: the contributions women make to democratic life and electoral politics; what they receive in terms of political opportunity or power; against the costs and burdens of their participation.

Take for example Gayatri*, who has been a loyal party worker in Dehradun: a city in North India. For two decades she has invested time, energy and money to her party, organising ‘supporters’ to attend rallies, connecting residents to government entitlements and campaigning during elections.

These activities generate significant positive political sentiment towards her party, but are often invisible, under-recognised, rendered ‘outside of politics’, and hence unrewarded. When she requested the party ticket to contest municipal elections in a seat reserved for women, the party instead selected the wife of a new party member. Gayatri declared: “This is exploitation! I will never work for the party again”.

Or Ibu Dewi*, who was approached to be a candidate in Medan’s 2024 local elections in Indonesia. The party needed her to fulfil gender candidate electoral quotas that require every third position on the ballot to be a woman. For over three months, Dewi spoke to small groups of women, organised campaign events and went door-to-door, promoting the party, then the presidential campaign, and only then her own campaign.

Dewi expended her physical and emotional resources, and depleted her household savings. For her efforts, she received less than 300 votes in a ward of 20,000 voters. She was heartbroken, and furious: ‘All this effort for what? Only the parties benefited from my campaign.’

Even as elected representatives, women often do more for less recognition. Sarah* was elected as a councillor in Sydney, Australia, on the basis of her community advocacy. After her election, she got to work reopening a swimming pool: applying for the government grant, chairing the committee, and liaising with community to redesign the facilities.

When it came to cutting the ribbon however, it was the Mayor who took centre stage, inviting his political allies alongside him. His party claimed this achievement in their re-election campaign material. Across councils in my home state of New South Wales, community members, council staff and councillors reported women as being diligent, putting in the work but not receiving the credit. This under-recognition has electoral consequences; Sara was not re-elected.

My comparative ethnography of local politics in India, Indonesia and Australia shows that the terms of women’s incorporation at each stage of the ‘ladder of political recruitment’ is often inequitable, and at times exploitative: women do more, bear more burdens, for fewer returns, compared to men. This is the case not only for women, and not all women equally. Structural relations of power such as white supremacy, religious majoritarianism, caste, ableism also shape the terms of incorporation into local politics.

I am not suggesting that we should not strive to achieve gender parity, or better put, to ensure that people of all genders are present and have influence within political systems. Inclusion remains an important goal, as are removing the barriers to exclusion. But reforming electoral democracy only through inclusion is insufficient. There is an equal need to transform its underlying value-system towards genuine democratic practice in which everyone participates on equal terms.

*All names are pseudonyms

Tanya Jakimow is a professor of anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Tanya’s current research concerns the enduring problem of political over-/under-representation in local government in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tanya-jakimow/

‘Fix the Environment, not women’: achieving gender equity in local politics

07/08/202629/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Tanya Jakimow

Women’s under-representation in local politics is a global problem, and no less the case in Australia. In my home state of New South Wales (NSW), women make up 39% of councillors in rural and regional councils, with more than a quarter of local government areas (LGAs) having fewer than 30% women. To achieve ‘gender parity’, the government funds programs to encourage and train women to contest elections and become a councillor. While having a demonstrable positive impact, the focus on ‘fixing women’ arguably detracts from the more pressing need to ‘fix the environment’.

On either side of the 2024 NSW local government elections, I conducted research to see what we could learn from rural and regional LGAs that either experienced a sharp increase in the number of women contesting and winning local elections in 2021 (from less than 25% to at least 50%), or that have had persistent men-dominated councils (more than 75% men) over at least 4 terms. The ten in-depth case studies entailing interviews with councillors, former councillors, candidates, community leaders and participant observation, yielded several lessons about what makes an environment more, or less, conducive to women’s local representation.

First, more women contested and won elections in LGAs where a ‘collective sentiment for change’ was cultivated. The 2021 election was a watershed; the Covid-19 pandemic and revelations of sexual violence in parliament sparked national conversations about the kinds of political leaders needed. In some LGAs, this national conversation became localised.

Residents looked at the record of men-dominated councils and initiated discussion about what the next council should look like. Councillors wrote newspaper editorials, organised events for women candidates, and tapped women on the shoulder to consider standing. All contributed to a shared sentiment that it was time for a more gender balanced council and a collective motivation by women to be part of that change.

Second, name-recognition was a key determinant of voter preferences in councils with persistent men-dominated councils; women performed well as candidates when they had opportunities to promote themselves as candidates. In councils where candidates communicated directly with voters through newspaper editorials, in door-to-door campaigning and especially candidate forums, women often impressed, and were elected in higher numbers

In contrast, a low-key electoral culture with limited campaigning can advantage men. Men are more likely to bear the name of established families in the area, to hold leadership positions in prominent organisations, and to be official heads of farms and large businesses. They also enjoy the premium of a masculine name in a low information context. In a system of compulsory voting, disinterested voters often vote “just because they know the bloke” (community member).

Third, a discourse that council should stick to the masculine-coded activities of ‘roads, rates and rubbish’, makes men the ‘natural leaders’. Australia has not been hit by austerity to the same extent as the United Kingdom, yet its local governments are cash strapped due to a poor revenue base and cost-shifting from state and federal governments. Hence the potency of a political message to ratepayers that we need to get ‘back to basics’, presenting feminine-coded services of childcare, libraries, community centres as a threat to fiscal responsibility, and hence women’s contributions to civic life as incommensurate with local government.

In contrast, in LGAs where councils have a strong relationship with community groups and sectors such as the arts and care, women see a natural progression from community leadership into council. Community events provide opportunities for women leaders to build relationships with councillors, which leads to informal mentorship and succession planning. Women majority or gender-equal councils thereby can persist over time.

These are just three of the ways that local conditions matter for the number of women contesting and winning elections. The research suggests alternative approaches to increasing women’s representation in local government beyond training women: initiating public debate about the qualities needed of councillors, enriching the information context, and ensuring strong relationship between councils and community groups.

The environment of course must be conducive for a diversity of women, including racialized minorities, First Nations, women with disability, and across age and income. The point is that the environment matters, not that there is a single set of conditions. Many of the first-time women candidates I spoke to had benefited from the training programs rolled out in the lead up to the election. While none said it was pivotal to their decision to contest, they felt more confident, and in some cases, the advice strengthened their campaigns. The question is not whether such programs are useful, but rather are they enough, and the best use of limited resources. Fixing the environment in which women become councillors, rather than treating the women as the ones who need to change, is an alternative approach worth considering.

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham