Author: inlogov

Creating our fate through our own behaviours

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Anthony Mason, Senior Associate INLOGOV

The American author Henry Miller is supposed to have said “we create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behaviour”.  Funnily enough, if you use a well-known search engine to try to find where and when he recorded this weary aphorism, you end up with pages of circular references to quotation lists.  But given his complex love life (five wives and many lovers) it sounds just like the sort of thing he should have said, whether or not he did.

Those local authorities currently in deep negotiations around devolution deals or on complex partnerships with health organisations should hear Miller’s (supposed) words ringing in their ears.  INLOGOV has recently completed research for the District Councils’ Network to look at a range of partnerships either led by or centred on districts.  The resulting report “Building Better Collaboration” is now available from INLOGOV’s website.  It was launched – perhaps appropriately – at a joint district/county summit on devolution in two tier areas.

One of our roles is to ensure that relevant research is given a practical application, so the study draws on a considerable body of academic material about partnership working to stress that individuals who will be good at collaborative working can too often be hidden away in vertical structures.  “Boundary spanners” and “collaborative champions” are needed in every partnership and need to be identified, developed and encouraged.

We identify five organisational behaviours/attributes that seem to be disproportionately important in determining the success or failure of collaborative ventures: leadership, selflessness, trust, momentum and risk.  Of these, the most significant for project outcomes seem to be: “audacious” early leadership; trust – grounded in an organisational culture of self-awareness; and momentum – where too many projects proceed at the speed of the slowest partner.

We noticed that in many of the partnerships we reviewed, there was at least one partner that seemed to put in much more than it could ever expect to get out in measureable benefits.  We termed that selfless behaviour and the term captures something of the particular contribution that the best districts can make to partnership working.  We explored why this was so – and in a way, the answer is a simple one: for districts, selflessness is actually role-appropriate behaviour.  Districts represent local communities and geographies; and so minding their local interest in collaborative projects must be “creating their fate…through their own behaviours”.

As you find so often, there is a flip-side to selflessness heard in the charge of parochialism levelled at a few districts, especially by some business voices.  Districts might reflect that being only champions of the local can have downsides – especially where a wide range of interests have to be reconciled for the common good, for example around a combined authority bid.

We suggest that the national local government bodies – the LGA, CCN and DCN can do much more to model good collaborative practice.  Where this goes wrong, they might reflect that “…most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behaviour.”

Anthony Mason

Anthony Mason is a senior associate at INLOGOV where he specialises in consultancy around partnership and collaboration.  He started his career in local government and then spent more than 20 years in PwC’s public sector consultancy practice.  His professional background is in housing and neighbourhood regeneration.

Catherine Staite reflects on the need for 21st century partnerships in Birmingham

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Catherine Staite, Director, INLOGOV

Working in partnership in the public sector has never been easy.  Diversity in size, ambition, buying power, influence and democratic legitimacy, create real challenges for partnerships. The imposition by central government of one size fits all models of partnership as a means of control didn’t help. Add the problems that arise from personality clashes and petty rivalries and its easy to see how partnerships came to be described as  ‘mutual loathing in search of funding’.

Of course it wasn’t all bad. Some LSPs developed a strong collective vision for their area and some LEPs can claim significant achievements. Many partnerships demonstrated that when you involve the right people, who behave in the right way, you can establish relationships of trust that will weather challenges. That is helpful as that experience is now providing the foundations for different sorts of partnership.

The role of councils within partnerships has always been contested.  Many councils espoused the view that their democratic mandate placed them in a pre-eminent position and they were leaders by right. It was the duty of partners to do their bidding. Many of their partners compounded this problem by  too passive, assuming that it was the responsibility of the council to provide everything from the vision to the lunch.

Partnerships in Birmingham have always been challenging. The monolithic nature of the council and the diversity of the city have created a long running battle for control of leadership space that has damaged relationships to the detriment of residents.  Many of the problems were highlighted in the Kerslake Report and resolving them is now one of the top priorities of the both the government appointed Birmingham Improvement Panel and the council itself.

The idea of co-production – harnessing the capacity of people to come together to achieve positive change – has been around for many years. Birmingham has many inspiring and energetic people who don’t buy into a cynical and defeatist narrative about Birmingham being too big to manage.  They are willing to give their time and energy to work together, with but not for the council, to create a positive narrative about Birmingham, its people and its future.  Birmingham Partners has a small informal steering group which is working hard to create a self-sustaining network of diverse functional partnerships and communities of interest  – thereby making  itself redundant.  The role of the steering group is to facilitate, not control, discussions about an agenda for change.  Practical support for meetings, public events and social media is provided by the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University and Aston University.

It’s not easy for the council to let go of control. Real change is slow and messy and they are under pressure to deliver demonstrable improvements quickly.  There are lots of views about what needs to happen next.  The council will therefore always have a pivotal role, holding the ring and ultimately making the very difficult choices forced on them by austerity.  Widening engagement and participation in those debates will both strengthen the legitimacy of those choices and mitigate their negative impact. Things can only get better – and they will.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Only a Georgian Devolution Revolution, but maybe Catherine wasn’t completely wrong

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Chris Game

If, like Catherine Staite, you’re Director of an organisation and you risk entitling even an ironic blog: “Oh dear, … I’m wrong again!”, you must at least secretly hope that your underlings will be tripping over themselves to assure you that of course you’re not, either before or now.

If so, two months must seem a disconcertingly long wait, but my personal excuse is that I was waiting for a suitable peg on which to hang my grovel. Let us give thanks, then, for last week’s Conservative Party conference. Even before Chancellor George Osborne’s rabbit-out-of-hat business rates announcement, it had amply validated Catherine’s concern about the party political primacy of the Government’s whole devolution policy. And its timing also offered a useful opportunity for an update on devolution developments since my own last blog on the topic some of which, I wondered, might have prompted her to modify her earlier pessimism.

Recapping briefly: Catherine’s blog was about how neither of the two key opportunities for local government that she hoped for from the Government’s Devolution/Combined Authority agenda – the development of a sufficiently sizable scale of operation to enable the delivery of ‘big ticket change’ (her business jargon, I’m afraid), and “to improve collaboration by drawing in reluctant partners” – looked, at least in late July, like being significantly realised.  Her vision of “a range of CAs operating at different scales and across varied geographies, receiving different devolution deals”, she felt, was proving to be self-delusion.

Her reasons included: George Osborne’s fixation with his Northern Powerhouse and metro mayors, and relative unconcern with counties and sub-regions; central government’s lack of either commitment or capacity to deliver effective devolution deals on any scale; and the sheer difficulty facing diverse and traditionally self-sufficient local authorities trying to develop convincing collaborative devolution bids within a ludicrously short time-frame.

The Treasury’s early September deadline was tough. Moreover, dictated by November’s Spending Review, it seemed to reinforce Labour sceptics’ suspicions of the Government’s whole strategy being more about the devolution of cuts than of powers, or, in the neat Newcastle version, passing the buck without the bucks. It was noticeable, however, that even some of those issuing such warnings, like Oldham Council leader Jim McMahon, were equally insistent that councils should still take “every bit of power from the Tories that we can. We have a responsibility to. It is our duty.”

For their part, ministers, or their civil servants, spent pre-conference week frantically negotiating, in order to maximize the political capital involved in such devolution giveaways by announcing at least one big one at the ideally located Manchester event. Cornwall’s (non-mayoral) settlement, rightly headline-making back in July, was politically now history, and it seemed the North East were being groomed as conference darlings. But then Sheffield City Region came up fast on the inside and breasted the tape on the Friday, before conference delegates had even convened.

Last year, the four South Yorkshire met boroughs comprising the CA were openly opposed to an elected mayor – and openly disappointed with the consequential paucity of their December ‘devo-lite’ deal.  Since then, though, the addition of five Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire districts as non-constituent members, the General Election outcome, and the Cities & Local Government Devolution Bill had changed minds. Having accepted an elected mayor as the non-negotiable price of a worthwhile devolution deal, the region is for the moment head of the Manchester-chasing pack.

If the Bill weren’t sufficient confirmation that an elected mayor is indeed the price, regardless of anything electors themselves might have to say, this new agreement is peppered with references to the functions for which “the directly elected Mayor of the Sheffield City Region Combined Authority” will be responsible, and of course accountable. These include strategic planning and the region’s transport budget – with the delivery of a ‘smart ticketing’ service – while at CA level council leaders will get access to funding of £30 million a year for 30 years to boost local growth and invest in local manufacturing and innovation. From what I could tell, the Sheffield leaders got at least close to their bid document ‘offer’, which brings me to the second part of this blog.

Given the tight deadline and the known difficulty some aspiring CAs faced even agreeing their full memberships, the total of 38 “landmark devolution bids” seemed to impress others as well as, very obviously, the Government itself.  The 38 included three from Scotland, one from Wales, and some constituting ‘expressions of interest’, rather than definite bids or, as DCLG Permanent Secretary Melanie Dawes put it, “offers that cannot be refused”. Several were manifestly eleventh-hour concoctions and/or overlapping, including no fewer than five from Yorkshire.  So, while the modesty was disarming, it was hardly news when Grant Thornton’s timely survey found “around 1 in 5” of their interviewed local government leaders conceding that their devolution proposals were “fairly” or “very weak” (p.41). Even so, in this age of adjectival inflation, it seems all 38 must be referred to, irrespective of rationale or content, as ‘landmark’ proposals (LPs), just as Manchester’s deals are always ‘ground-breaking’, and all working class electors patronised as ‘hard-working families’.

These LPs were not public documents, and it was up to CAs themselves to release whatever details they wished. Any comprehensive comparison, therefore, has been impossible. Nevertheless, some attempted to do the best they could, perhaps most notably the Local Government Chronicle, whose analysis of 26 of the relatively more detailed English bids is summarized here in slightly amended and more easily comparable form.

CA devolution bids (2) (1)

Bid proposals were coded into 18 policy areas, including ‘Fiscal powers’, plus the expressed readiness to consider an elected mayor. This latter was obviously unnecessary for Greater London and Greater Manchester, vital for the other metropolitan/city regional CAs – the more so after Osborne’s announcement that they alone will be able to raise business rates and levy a dedicated infrastructure tax – but interesting too in the bids involving counties.

Catherine referred somewhat sceptically to what Treasury officials reportedly envisaged as an at least three-county ‘East Midlands Powerhouse’. In the end, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire agreed to submit a joint 19-authority D2N2 bid based on their two-county LEP, and there is talk, though not in the bid document itself, of an elected CA mayor.  However, Leicestershire stuck with its single-county, but also LEP-based, bid,  and, perhaps predictably, Leicester City mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, has advised against another for the CA.

Whether these and the other county- and county/unitary-based bids will be judged to have, in Catherine’s phrase, “ticked all the boxes”, or at least a sufficient number of them, remains to be seen. Both East Midlands documents, and particularly the former, seem to me to constitute substantial and substantiated ‘offers’, the more persuasive in their having clearly emanated from directly relevant LEP and SEP (Strategic Economic Plan, not Someone Else’s Problem) experience and the partnership working involved, and the same could reasonably be expected of other such bids.

Moreover, even if boxes do remain unticked – and here I think Catherine may have been wrong – the signs are that it’s NOT “too late now”, particularly for these acknowledgedly more difficult multi- and cross-county arrangements.

Anyway, it’s the number, composition and comprehensiveness of some of these county- and county/unitary-based bids that I thought might possibly have prompted Catherine to wonder if she hadn’t slightly rushed to judgement and written off her hopes over-hastily. So I tried categorizing the 28 English non-city region bids (all those on the DCLG list, including Cornwall, not just those in the LGC list). It was obviously based in some cases on minimal knowledge and arbitrary judgements – particularly where whole-county LEPs are involved – but it provided a very rough statistical confirmation of what Catherine feared and what in the circumstances was only to be expected: that the bulk and probably a majority of these non-metropolitan bids – 15 of the 28, by my reckoning – would come from single counties.

The explanations will vary, but many will centre on the sheer shortage of time. Some took seriously ministers’ message about 5 September being the deadline for councils wanting to develop plans based on an existing or fairly solidly agreed Combined Authority with an elected mayor. Most counties, even more than most urban authorities, don’t want mayors, so why rush? But then over the summer the ministerial line changed to one of trying to drum up as many bids, or even expressions of interest, as possible – too late, though, for most counties, even if they’d wished, to respond other than individually.

Given a more generous time frame, and taking account of reported earlier discussions, it seems likely that at least some of, say, Norfolk and Suffolk, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, Wiltshire (and Swindon), might have followed the D2N2 route and produced the joint, rather than individual authority, bids that the Treasury apparently favours. Which suggests that some may yet do so, and personally I’m particularly hoping the Oxon/Bucks/Northants combo progresses beyond its ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ transport alliance, thereby enabling me to note their questionable grasp of anatomy, with Bucks certainly appearing considerably closer to Gall-bladder-land.

Other existing multi-county bids, in addition to D2N2, include Surrey, West and East Sussex and Heart of the South West (aka Devon and Somerset), plus four that I categorized as primarily LEP-based: Cheshire and Warrington, the North East, Tees Valley, and West of England.

This left me with a motley group of 6, comprising Swindon, which may at some point resolve its ‘misunderstanding’ with LEP partners Wiltshire, Telford & Wrekin, which has since applied to become a non-constituent member of the West Midlands CA, and the shambles of Yorkshire, which would take a substantial blog on its own.

This blog, already over-long, I’ll bring to a close with two very brief conclusions. One, to date, both the Chancellor’s business rate plans and his devolution deals balance too calculatedly their freedoms and checks to constitute, outside the heady excitement of a party conference, a ‘Devolution Revolution’. Two, given what we know of local government’s initial positive response to the Government’s devo agenda and that the door seems definitely still open, I’d suggest Catherine’s early optimism has certainly not yet proved entirely misplaced.

Chris Game - pic

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Who do we think we are? A personal reflection on the immigration debate.

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Catherine Staite, Director, INLOGOV

This week Teresa May has argued that immigrants bring no benefits to our country – just problems. Its not unusual for politicians to assert things which fly in the face of the evidence but it is unusual to hear something presented as fact which is so demonstrably untrue. Birmingham has provided a home for many different waves of immigrants over the last century and they have helped to create a diverse and vibrant city. Migration is an issue, like many others today, where prejudice trumps evidence.

The latest mass movement of refugees from Syria, Iraq and parts of Africa – fleeing unspeakable violence and oppression – has brought the issue of migration into sharp focus. The sight of so many traumatised people and so many drowned children as well as the terrible stories of cruelty, as a result of which enormously dangerous journeys became the only possible course of action, has made it hard for xenophobes to maintain a fictional narrative in which migrants are opportunists, pootling about the world in search of generous welfare benefits.

Each episode of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ highlights both the rich diversity of our heritage and the, sometimes astonishing, parallels between previous episodes from history and the current mass movements of people. The programme illustrates the impact of the major upheavals of history through the small stories, the unsung heroism and heartbreaking tragedies of its subjects’ ancestors. It humanizes history.

Until recently, we might have thought that systematic brutality and persecution in the developed world were things of the past. We might have flattered ourselves that, with all the benefits of instant communication and our ability to mobilise resources to respond to emergencies, we would never see such suffering in Europe again – but we are. As was often the case in the past, many of our politicians have turned a cold and indifferent face to that suffering or used it to drive fear. They have been more interested in maintaining their own political careers than in ensuring the safety and well being of their fellow human beings. They have also been wilfully blind to the evidence of the opportunities and benefits that migrants bring, focusing instead on the costs and the risks.

Will a successor programme, in a hundred years time, tell some British national treasure the story of her ancestors, illustrated by a film of defenseless women and children being attacked by pepper spray, through a metal fence, in Europe in 2015? Will that person weep, as so many subjects of the programme do now, when they contemplate so much suffering? What will they think of us, that we allowed it to happen?

Evidence of the benefits of migration include Boris Johnson, who is descended from George III, a German and also has Turkish ancestry. He seems to be making a contribution to public life. Michael Portillo’s family fled oppression in Spain. Say what you like about his politics, he presents a great railway travelogue. Derek Jacobi’s family were Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France in the 17th century and bringing their skills as weavers to the English economy. Now we enjoy his skills as an actor. Jane Seymour’s Polish Jewish family suffered in the Warsaw ghetto in the same way that people are suffering now in Homs and Aleppo. We have all those people in our national life today because, at some point, Britain gave their ancestors a home.

However, some might argue that politicians are right to worry about the consequences of migration when you think of the heritage of one recent subject of the programme, Frank Gardiner – so quintessentially English – who discovered that his ancestor had arrived without the proper documents, subverted the local culture by making everyone speak his language and had taken a job previously held by a local. Perhaps he’s the exception that proves the rule. He was William the Conqueror.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Is a 120-member council really too big?

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Chris Game

This blog’s main purpose is to place somewhere in the public domain some basic electoral data on council size. Basic, but not normally presented in a form that I’ve sometimes wanted for illustrative purposes. I’m hoping, therefore, there may be others who’ll find the data of at least passing interest, so here goes.

Cllrs table

Hmmm. I can sense you’re containing your excitement, so I’d better explain why I’m bothering you with this stuff when you’ve already got the Greek debt, bombing Syria, Osborne’s budget, child poverty and Wimbledon to worry about. It’s the very top line, showing how Birmingham’s 120 councillors represent by far the largest electorates of any single-tier English authority – and arguably three times that 6,131 number in practice, as all metropolitan boroughs currently comprise entirely three-member wards.

And that’s it? No, but it’s interesting, surely, to have statistical confirmation of the demands we make on councillors by the exceptional scale of our so-called local government. In Birmingham this means having to get yourself known by, and every four years seek the votes of, up to 20,000 voters, who wonder (or ask you aggressively) why they see their ‘local’ councillor only at election times.

It’s interesting too, I think, to have again confirmation of how the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) – whose figures these are concerns itself exclusively with ward/division variance within, as opposed to across, authorities. Just one ward or division exceeding 30% variance from an authority’s electors-per-councillor average qualifies that authority for electoral review. Yet, for instance, the 93% variance between the overall average for Birmingham (incidentally, the 9th most deprived English district) and that for neighbouring Solihull (179th) is brushed aside as, in the words of the Polish expression, “not our circus, not our monkeys”.

But even that’s not it – or not entirely. The timing of the blog is prompted by the possibility/probability that the Commission is preparing to act in a way that would increase that Birmingham-Solihull variance from 93% to around 130%. More specifically, it is understood to have rejected a cross-party submission by Birmingham’s political leaders to retain the 120-member city council at its present size, on the grounds that it “runs counter to recommendations in the Kerslake Review which suggested 100 councillors as a maximum number”.

At which point, I should first mention that ‘council size’ will mainly be used henceforth in the relatively rare but Boundary Commission sense of “the number of councillors elected to serve a council”. Secondly, and more importantly, I should explain this blog’s secondary purpose: to update you on one stream of the action that’s followed last year’s Pickles-initiated review into the governance of Birmingham City Council, led by Sir Bob Kerslake in the months before his retirement as DCLG Permanent Secretary.

Collectively, the Kerslake review’s findings and conclusions were dire. Birmingham was judged a dysfunctional council, with a damaging corporate culture, a micro-managing leadership, poor member-officer relations, an arrogant attitude towards partnerships, with multiple plans and strategies not followed through, and no clearly articulated vision for the city.

The Review produced 10 main recommendations, several with multiple parts. The first and probably most important was the imposition of an independent Improvement Panel to “provide support and challenge” to the Council and oversee the implementation of an improvement plan.

The fourth recommendation, and inevitably one of the most contentious, was that the LGBCE should conduct an Electoral Review to enable the Council to move to what Kerslake felt would be a more effective model for representative governance – namely, replacing (by 2017/18) the current system of election by thirds from three-member wards to all-out elections every four years from single-member wards.

For what it’s worth, it’s a recommendation with which I completely agree. But here’s the thing – size and numbers, views and recommendations. Most of the Kerslake review’s many references to the size of Birmingham City Council seem – though it’s always clear – to be to the Council as an organisation, to its staff, or even to its residential population.

There’s no doubt that the reviewers also weren’t keen on the size of the council in the Boundary Commission sense (p.10). They felt it made the council (apparently in the organisational sense) difficult to run and had encouraged “individual councillors to micro-manage services”. But their major concerns were the size of the three-member wards – which meant “some councillors are struggling to connect their communities with the council – and the pattern of election by thirds, which “has not helped the council’s ability to take strategic decisions.” These were the changes called for in the Electoral Review recommendation, which contained no mention of councillor numbers per se.

Council size was treated differently in the Kerslake review from election by thirds. It easily could have been a whole or part-recommendation, but it remained merely a “view” of the report’s authors that “there needs to be a significant reduction in the current number of councillors” (p.26). I don’t feel this is academic nit-picking. Words have meanings, and, were council members to argue that a view shouldn’t carry the same weight with the Commission as a recommendation, they would seem to have a point.

The 100-councillor figure, moreover, wasn’t even a view, or, for that matter, a maximum; more a conveniently round-numbered illustration (p.26): “For example, by creating 100 mainly single-member wards, the average population of a ward could be reduced to just 10,730 from 13,413. This would result in a direct saving of around £1.6 million over five years.” Note that casual “just 10,730”, which would be nearly half as many again as the highest average ward population of any other single-tier authority, EVEN IF that authority too (Leeds) were forced to switch to single-member wards.

As already emphasized, however, the LGBCE, regards such comparisons as irrelevancies. So, if Birmingham is going to be deemed not to merit a council of more than 100 members, what case will the Commission make to justify driving it even further out of line with other major metropolitan councils?

The Commission’s own 50-page Technical Guidance suggests it sees itself as independent of government, consultative where necessary, and open-minded, with no predetermined views of council size or councillor numbers. It believes each local authority should be considered individually, and dislikes comparisons of council populations and electorates, any mathematical criteria or formulae, and also arguments based either on population projections or future cost-savings. It is evidence-driven, provided the evidence is substantiated and relates specifically to the characteristics and needs of the review authority and its residents – the governance arrangements of the council, its scrutiny functions, and the representational role of its councillors in the local community.

All of which sounds fine. If 120 councillors with already statistically the heaviest workloads in the country with by far the highest population:councillor ratios in Europe can’t effectively justify their own continued existence, then perhaps they don’t deserve one. But then, if the Commission really did start with no predetermined views, why the rumours of it following the apparently cost-driven notions of the ministerially appointed Kerslake review not merely to the letter, but beyond? Odd.

As in so much of our local government practice, other countries have other ways of doing these things. Most democratic countries pay at least lip service to every vote being of equal weight, and therefore start off with a table rather like mine, listing numbers of either registered electors or all residents in each municipality, precisely so that comparisons CAN be made across councils of the same type.

Sweden is, well, Swedish, and details the whole council size procedure in Chapter 5 of its Local Government Act – and then translates the whole thing into English!. For a start – and a very good one, for any voting assembly – all total councillor numbers must be odd.

Second, an electorate-based formula sets MINIMUM numbers, which municipalities themselves may, and regularly do, increase: up to 12,000 electors – 31 councillors; 12,001 to 24,000 – 41; 24,001 to 36,000 – 51, and so on. Stockholm’s 660,000 electors, should any mathematicians be wondering, get just the 101 councillors, not 561.

Of course, not all countries are as Scandinavian in their determination of council sizes – though Purdam et al’s 2008 CCPR Working Paper is still one of the few academic examinations of these matters. But few, unaware of our now constitutional requirement that Manchester be advantageously treated in all things, would see the disparity between that city’s 96 councillors representing an average of 3,868 electors, Leeds’ 99 representing 5,426, and Birmingham’s current 120 representing 6,131 as some bizarre kind of democratic virtue. As for Kerslake’s suggested 10,730, they’d surely dismiss it as some sub-category of ‘ze Ingleesh sense of humeur’.

The table’s final column shows potential council sizes under a rough-and-ready Swedish-type formula, adjusted for the greater size of our metropolitan authorities: up to 200,000 electors – 60 councillors; 200,001 to 300,000 – 70; 300,001 to 400,000 – 80, and so on. Different bandings would obviously produce different results, but this one has Coventry, St Helens and Kirklees as the biggest gainers, Manchester, Bradford and Liverpool as the biggest losers, and Birmingham – well, there’s a coincidence – retaining its current 120 members.

In principle, one possible partial explanation of Manchester’s more generous councillor allocation could be that on current figures it’s the 4th most multiply deprived of England’s 326 district authorities – were it not that, as was noted above, and also in the Kerslake Supporting Analysis noted (p.13), Birmingham is only just behind it at 9th.

Kerslake doesn’t link deprivation to any consideration of council size, but the Scottish Boundary Commission does. In fact, it uses BOTH population size and level of deprivation as two of its three principal criteria for determining council numbers.

North of the border, therefore, Birmingham’s current population size, its dramatic projected growth – an additional 150,000 by 2031 – and its multiple deprivation would all militate against any cut in its councillor numbers. If the English Commission sees things markedly differently, it will be interesting to hear why.

Do ‘sticky’ institutions always survive? The demise of the Audit Commission

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Katherine Tonkiss

The Audit Commission played a central role in the audit, inspection, performance improvement and regulation of local authorities (and other public service providers) in England for over thirty years. Operating at arm’s length from government, it thrived under the efficiency and performance improvement agendas of successive Conservative and Labour governments, growing into a large and powerful public body. Yet those familiar with the history of the Audit Commission may note that antipathy towards the institution among local authorities and other stakeholders grew at the same time its powers were being expanded, and when the Coalition Government came to power in 2010 the Commission had lost considerable popular support. Yet few – and least of all the Audit Commission itself – anticipated the announcement of its abolition in August 2010.

The academic literature on the reform of arm’s length bodies doesn’t account for the relative ease with which the decision to abolish the Audit Commission was accepted and progressed. This literature tends to highlight how abolitions of large and powerful bodies which are deeply embedded in the public institutional architecture of the state (as the Audit Commission was) are very contested and difficult to implement. The literature refers to the ‘institutional stickiness’ often displayed by such bodies, denoting their capacity to survive even where there is considerable will to abolish. The Audit Commission appears to buck this trend – why?

This is the question we sought to tackle in our recent article on the abolition of the Audit Commission, published in Local Government Studies. In our article we apply a form of ‘argumentative discourse analysis’ to a large qualitative dataset which we collated on the abolition. This approach enabled us to focus on the ways in which narratives and storylines expressed by different actors framed the Audit Commission and the decision to abolish. As a result, we are able to demonstrate how discourse is an important medium through which administrative reform is negotiated.

In our analysis we identified that there was a strong pro-abolition discourse which focused on the idea that the Audit Commission had become bureaucratic, inefficient and burdensome; that it was not delivering a regulatory function in the public interest; and that change was needed to rectify these problems to deliver full accountability for public audit. This discourse was underpinned by a range of storylines which focused on areas such as accountability, localism, inefficiency and the desirability of open market competition for audit contracts. These storylines were uttered by a wide range of considerably powerful actors such as the government, conservative MPs, the right-wing press and the Local Government Association, and in a range of public settings including parliamentary debates, evidence to select committees, press briefings and ministerial statements.

By contrast the anti-abolition discourse was far weaker. It focused on the Audit Commission as providing a high quality independent audit function and sought to challenge narratives about it being inefficient and wasteful. The key storylines were uttered by the left-leaning press, the Audit Commission itself, some third sector organisations, some Labour MPs and a trade union, making use of select committees, responses to the government consultation on the decision to abolish, and open letters. Yet this discourse was not overtly anti-reform. It focused more on preserving the key functions of the Audit Commission, such as the independence of public audit, more than it did on the preservation of the Commission itself.

What our analysis shows, therefore, is that a strong ‘discourse coalition’ formed around the pro-abolition position which provided a solid basis for the newly elected government – aided by a popular mandate, legislative capacity and executive authority – to move forward with abolition. The influential actors involved were able to access various institutional settings which ensured that these storylines would be reported in the media. Timing and time were also important factors – the proposal was developed in secret, and the Audit Commission was only notified a few hours ahead of the abolition statement in the House of Commons. Such timing prevented the Audit Commission from formulating and seeking to build a strong discourse coalition around its own anti-abolition storyline.

The Audit Commission’s ability to survive was also hindered by deep institutional norms which prevented it from seeking its own preservation. This can help to explain why it refrained from launching a full defence, focusing only on the preservation of its functions rather than of the organisation. The discursive resources open to the Audit Commission were constrained by the deep norms which come with accepting appointed office, including not criticising its own abolition or political decisions concerning administrative reform. Without this defence, and without substantial stakeholder opposition to the proposals, the abolition was relatively straightforward.

Our analysis, therefore, helps to explain why, contrary to the literature on institutional stickiness and to other parallel cases of public body abolition at the time, the Audit Commission’s abolition was relatively simple and unopposed. Isolated and bound by institutional norms not to criticise its own abolition, the Audit Commission and its few supporters were placed in a weak position by a powerful pro-abolition discourse coalition.

This post is based on the following article: Tonkiss, K. and Skelcher, C. (2015) Abolishing the Audit Commission: framing, discourse coalitions and administrative reform. Local Government Studies. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2015.1050093.

Katherine Tonkiss is a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy at the School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University. Prior to this she was a Research Fellow at INLOGOV working on Shrinking the State, a project examining the abolition of public bodies under Coalition Government.

Katie Tonkiss