Who is in control of the sandbags?

04/02/201429/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Philip Whiteman and Ian Briggs

The recent news that the Minister for the Environment, Owen Patterson, has visited flood torn Somerset and the Environment Agency, has had a bit of a tough time in the media. It has started to open up a few interesting questions and issues around who is actually accountable and who is responsible for flood response. Undoubtedly facing persistent flooding problems is deeply distressing for those affected and it is far from unreasonable to expect the response from the State to be swift, appropriate and well managed.

But who should respond and who has a say over what the local priorities are is perhaps a more complex question to answer. On further investigation it would appear that our system of local public administration has a few dark corners that are somewhat enlightening to explore.

One slightly dark corner that the media seems to have paid little attention to is the Local ‘Internal Drainage Board’ (IDB). What may come as a surprise to many, especially if you do not operate in a particularly high risk area, is that these IDBs are actually part of the complex firmament of democratically elected local bodies.

Internal Drainage Boards as local public organisations are specifically charged by legislation to supervise matters of water level management. Whilst current powers are determined by the Land Drainage Acts of 1991 and its precursor of 1930, the antecedents of these curious bodies can be traced back to Henry II in 1297. Not surprisingly, their boundaries are not coterminous with principal local authorities, but instead with water courses.

The 121 IDBs are distributed across the low lying areas of England and Wales, such as the Somerset Levels, Fens or Romney Marshes. Board members are elected by the IDB ratepayers and may sit alongside appointees. Herein lies another oddity: each elector, usually an agricultural land holder, is awarded a number of votes related to the size of land holding or occupation – something rather reminiscent of voting rights pre- the 1832 Great Reform Act! Whilst local authority members may sit as appointees, it is not remarkable to comment that control of IDBs holds little interest to political parties.

The very existence of the IDBs offers some interesting avenues to explore. One question that presents itself is around Government’s intention to respect that it is often the local community that holds local knowledge and solutions to problems existing within communities. Now, one can see that the Environment Agency itself has a few problems to deal with – it has not escaped media attention that the Agency is facing cuts at a time when the headline news is demonstrating that many local people are living with persistent flooding. Clearly one significant advantage of a large scale Agency is that it learns lessons from previous practice and can then make judgments as to the best way of dealing with problems. It can lay down standard operating processes and procedures and is in a position to balance a wide range of competing issues such as general environmental and ecological sustainability, whilst at the same time responding to social need.

However, if the flooding problems in the Somerset levels are allegedly a direct product of the failure to dredge rivers (and here we are not offering any opinion on that matter), should the decision be one that is taken locally or should it be one that conforms to a standard operating process? We have on one hand a body open to public scrutiny that is made up of local people and elected representatives who are resourced through a local precept taxation system and a national body that is answerable to citizens through national government. In this type of situation, very complex inter relationships develop between the principals and their agents! This complexity is furthered by the addition of principal councils and DEFRA – who also have an interest in flood prevention policy and measures.

If, as we have seen through the introduction of locally elected Police and Crime Commissioners, government has an appetite for bringing public institutions closer to the people, then it may seem more than a little strange that in some of our most sensitive localities this argument over prioritisation is between Ministers, local people and a government agency. Perhaps we should look to promote a more visible role for the Local Drainage Board.

They are clearly important to local people in high risk areas, but with increasing pressure on local authorities to absorb ever increasing numbers of new houses and reports that new homes are being constructed on flood risk zones, we may need to think more deeply about how we manage this tension between control at a local level and the advantages of having a national response to such emergencies.

Philip Whiteman is a Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies. He has research interests in the impact of central government and regulators on the role, service delivery and performance of local government and other local bodies. He is currently looking at developing a case for researching how guidance is an important instrument for steering local government over and above legislative instruments.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV, and sits on a rural Parish Council in Warwickshire. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

When will they ever learn?

03/02/201428/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Staite

The news of the death of Pete Seeger has reminded me again of his old song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ The line ‘oh when will they ever learn?’ has been running through my head since I saw an item on the local news about police officers and mental health professionals working together to prevent people with mental health problems ending up in police cells for want of the right support. ‘Good stuff!’ you might think. Indeed it is – but it is also profoundly depressing to hear such a venture being reported as ‘new’.

In 1993 I led a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary team, which diverted people with mental health problems and learning disabilities from custody. The team included all the right skills and necessary statutory powers – a specialist social worker, two community psychiatric nurses, a senior probation officer and a police inspector. We had the backing of all the chief officers and the team went wherever they were needed, the police station, the bridewell below the magistrates court and the remand and hospital wings of the local prison.

The approach was simple but effective. By bringing the right skills into the system at the right time, we were often able to help get the right decisions and find the right services. Within a year, the prison hospital wing was no longer full of prisoners with mental illness and learning disabilities. This was a time when the local mental hospital was being run down for closure, so it was no small feat. Of course, some of our clients were very disturbed and a small number were dangerous, or had committed very serious offences so they had to stay in prison or be moved to a secure hospital but at least we knew who they were and where they were. We advocated for them. They were not dumped and forgotten.

We shared our learning and even wrote a book about our approach which was replicated and adapted all over the country. It was cheap and effective because it made better collective use of existing individual professional skills, capacity and powers and partner agencies’ budgets. It was about reducing demand, reducing costs and reducing re-offending – but most of all it was about reducing risk and suffering.

‘What’s not to like?’ you might ask and you’d be right but, somehow or other, twenty years later, police officers and mental health nurses are re-embarking on the same journey. Is it because mental health services are still the “Cinderella’ – and their budgets have been cut even when the rest of the NHS has had increases in funding? Is it because we are still so ignorant and fearful about mental illness? Or is it because innovation is generated by enthusiasts on short-term funding so it doesn’t get mainstreamed or embedded? Perhaps it is all of the above.

Whatever the reason, our collective inability to use the available evidence to guide our thinking and to take shared professional and organizational responsibility for public policy challenges means we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes.

When will we ever learn?

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.

The prospects for a dramatically more representative Parliament post 2015 are bleak

31/01/201431/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Durose, Liz Richardson, Ryan Combs, Francesca Gains and Christina Eason

Whilst the likely outcome of the next election maybe still far too close to call, one feature of the next Parliament is very predictable. The 2015 Parliament is likely to remain as deeply unrepresentative of the make-up of the UK population as the current legislature. Although the 2010 Parliament showed some improvements in diversity, while women represent 51% of the UK population they formed just 22% of MPs; and although the ethnic minority population is 8% the number of ethnic minority MPs is half that at 4%. Representation by other underrepresented groups: for example people with disabilities or openly LGBT is also less than would be reflective of the makeup of society more generally although this is harder to count.

This poor representation is despite all three main party leaders stating their support for efforts to improve the diversity of representation in Parliament in evidence given at a specially convened Speakers Conference before the last election. While Lord Hurd has argued recently that greater diversity in political representation is a ludicrously radical demand, the Conference argued that improved diversity would support better policy making as MPs would draw on a wider range of experiences, and could act to enhance the legitimacy of Parliament and encourage greater political engagement.

Our research for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, conducted just after the election in 2010, set out to explore the barriers to representation from underrepresented groups and to examine the pathways to politics taken by successful politicians from those groups protected by the Equalities Act to see what lessons could be learned. We gathered primary qualitative data from a purposive sample of 62 national politicians and candidates, some who had been successful, and some who had not managed to achieve selection and/or elected office. We also heard from around 20 lobby groups for under-represented groups within and outside political parties, and other stakeholder organisations.

In some cases shocking examples of sexist and racist attitudes were reported. One black candidate was asked whether she was ‘one of them happy-clappy churchgoers’. One candidate recounted the experience of a local party member ‘hitting me on the bottom and asking me what a nice girl like me is doing in the Labour Party.’ A female ethnic minority candidate expressed her perception of the “double whammy” of discrimination she faced. This also ran the risk of reducing support for diverse candidates. In one example, other women in a candidate’s party assumed that she would get support from ethnic minorities in the party, but the other minority members were: “reluctant to support me because I am female and they are all men”. Other attitudes towards women were less overtly expressed but still exclusionary. Women in politics perceived themselves as facing heightened expectations to justify their presence in a way that men did not. Yet, women were not taken seriously or seen to have the gravitas of male politicians.

While possibly horrifying, these might be familiar complaints about lingering outmoded common-or-garden prejudice. However, beyond this, our analysis, published in Parliamentary Affairs, identified a systemic and institutional problem with local party ‘selectorates’. A key issue mentioned by those we spoke to was the critical veto role played by the local selectorates, the local party activists who are responsible for selecting candidates. Women and ethnic minorities reported facing ‘selector hostility’ struggling to secure the nomination for winnable seats as local party elites look for so-called ‘archetypal’ candidates. The archetypal candidate reflects selectors’ own characteristics, but more importantly, those of previously successful candidates. It is partly based on assumptions about electoral risk, and who different parts of the electorate will be prepared to vote for. Candidates and sitting politicians saw this attitude reflected in the suggestions put to them to ‘have a go’ in ‘unwinnable’ seats. Analysis by Maria Sobolewska at the University of Manchester has shown that, pre 2010, the Liberal Democrats selected the overwhelming proportion of their minority candidates in highly ethnic diverse seats, most of which were unwinnable and the Conservatives selected more than half of their minority candidates into hopeless seats. The Labour Party selected the highest proportion of ethnic minority candidates for safe and winnable seats.

In our research, we argue that where candidates from under-represented groups have been successful, this is often because they were ‘acceptably different’ and shared particular ‘pathways’ into national politics which mitigated against the perceived electoral disadvantages of being from an underrepresented or minority group. One younger, male, ethnic minority politician highlighted how other aspects of his identity were able to make his ethnicity ‘acceptable ‘I think my age and colour ticked certain boxes and ex-military, public school boy ticked others’. For women, this could take the form of being ‘one of the boys’, as explained by one respondent: “It’s how you fit in so they don’t think you’re a girl […] Once one of my colleagues described me as one of the boys, I think he meant it as a compliment but I’m not sure that it is.” Such candidates are also likely to follow a pathway into politics which emphasises university education and a ‘politics facilitating’ or an increasingly prominent ‘professional politics’ route. Many of the new female or ethnic minority MPs elected in 2010 had experience in national politics as advisers, or lobbyists. Of the 27 ethnic minority MPs, at least ten have legal backgrounds (37%).

Whilst this new type of pathway into politics can help to overcome selector hostility if candidates are filtered both through local selectorates and through professional pathways, then a key policy question in increasing diversity in representation becomes how to open up politics. One of our interviewees said “When I was trying to become a Parliamentary candidate I was asked on more than one occasion what my qualifications were and they meant academic qualifications. One woman even said it was a real shame because one of the other candidates was a lawyer and another one had a PhD and although I seemed like a really nice woman I wasn’t really [of] their calibre”.

Although the Labour Party is persisting with the unpopular but effective policy of making 50% of its target seats selected from all women shortlists, this willingness for the party elites and the party machinery to work with local selectorates to overcome selector hostility is not found elsewhere. Although David Cameron is clearly committed to wider diversity, Conservative members are deeply resistant to either interference from the national party or equality measures, as highlighted by recent media reports, and supported by other research by Sarah Childs and Paul Webb. And the Liberal Democrats are also struggling to take any positive measures, with the ongoing furore over sexual harassment claims still making headlines.

Without tougher efforts by all parties to address their own openness, attitudes and ‘selectorates’, the portents for the 2015 Parliament being radically more representative than 2010 do not look good.

This blog first appeared on Democratic Audit, http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=2540 27 January 2014

Dr Catherine Durose is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham and works with the Public Services Academy.

Dr Liz Richardson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, and a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her previous roles include Co-ordinator of LSE Housing at the LSE. Liz is co-editor of the journal, Local Government Studies. She is also a Director of a community charity, the National Communities Resource Centre.

Ryan Combs is a Research Associate at Centre for Primary Care, Institute of Population Health at the University of Manchester.

Francesca Gains is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Manchester. Before entering academia she worked in local government and the probation service, and has both government funded and Parliamentary research experience. Her research agenda explores the relationship between political management arrangements and policy outcomes.

Christina Eason has a PhD from the University of Manchester’s School of Social Sciences and has research interests in British politics, gender, women, representation, and institutions.

The impact of media logic on democratic legitimacy in local governance networks

30/01/201430/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Iris Korthagen and Ingmar van Meerkerk

Many policy- and decision-making processes in today’s democracies increasingly take place in governance networks, these are interactive or network forms of governance. This raises an important question of how democratic legitimacy is being shaped in these networks and which factors impact upon this.

The opportunity for citizens and stakeholders to give voice are viewed as important sources for democratic legitimacy in governance networks, with this enhancing the quality of deliberations between stakeholders and accountability of decision-makers. An important factor which is scarcely examined is the impact of media on these sources of democratic legitimacy. The media can give voice to actors, they can provide a forum for deliberation and they can provide an important channel for decision-makers to account for their decisions.

Rather than neutrally transmit information and images the media select and frame news stories by a commercial logic: news needs to be made every day and it needs to be sold. This means that news is relatively more negative than positive, skewed towards dramatic human interest stories and content designed by public relations professionals. This raises the important question of how this media logic affects democratic legitimacy.

We recently examined this relationship by comparing three local governance networks in the Netherlands. Using content analysis of documents, case studies and interviews, we came to the conclusion that the media logic increased the potential of certain sources, while it decreased others.

Voice

The media are a vehicle to generate attention for certain issues and to gain influence in the process. By adapting to the media logic we found citizen groups succeeded in attracting media attention and were able to put their issues on the political agenda. However, the media logic restricted the messages of citizens’ groups that came through. For instance, having harsh, negative sound bites and organizing protest actions were more attractive than a nuanced and collaborative attitude.

Deliberations

The media can function as a watchdog, as checks and balances in the process and as a platform for diverse deliberations. We found deliberative processes were broadened by the perspectives of the citizen groups that gained media attention. Nevertheless, as the media are more interested in entertaining stories, with a focus on conflicts and drama, this partly reduced the quality of the deliberation process. Images seemed more important than well elaborated deliberations. Furthermore, the media, in our cases, were more a platform for citizen groups than for political authorities.

Accountability

The media are a communication channel for generating transparency and accountability. Since the media were at times so negative about the proposed project plans, they forced political authorities into a reactive communication style: they had to fight against a negative image. Proactive communication, such as branding, is difficult in the context of the citizens’ dramatic stories.

We observed that citizen groups deployed active media strategies at times when they were losing faith in the outcomes of the interactive governance process. Indeed, some decisions were partly changed in favour of the citizen groups that gained media attention. In that sense the mediatized reality can have a substantial impact on the reality of governance.

Certain citizens’ groups thus extended their influence on the policy- and decision-making outputs through their media strategies. At the same time these strategies can be seen as go-it-alone strategies that can damage trust relationships with the authorities and the other actors involved and even isolate the group from the interactive governance process. This also raises an important challenge for political decision-makers. To what extent should they listen to those citizens who are barking loudly in the media, while other stakeholders are trying to reach compromises in an interactive setting?

A full account of this research is available in our recent article in Local Government Studies, published online 09 Jan 2014.

Iris Korthagen is a PhD studenet at the Department of Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the research group Governance of Complex Systems (GOCS). Her PhD project focuses on the mediatisation of public decision-making processes. She studies how the logic of news reporting influences the content and the process of decision-making in governance networks.

Ingmar van Meerkerk is a PhD student at the Department of Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His PhD thesis focusses on the role of boundary spanners and the impact of boundary-spanning activities on the democratic legitimacy and performance of interactive governance settings. For his thesis he has published in several international peer reviewed journals, such as Policy Sciences, European Planning Studies and Environment and Planning C.

Can local government govern in the digital age?

29/01/201430/01/2014 / inlogov / 2 Comments

Paul Hepburn

The digital age continues to bring policy challenges for local government. From harnessing ‘big data’ for the public good to developing ‘smart’ cities the policy expectation is that local authorities will deliver appropriate governance without which, it is argued, urban life in the 21^st century is likely to be rendered more complicated, fragmented , unequal and potentially dystopian through ad hoc technological fixes.

All very well and Hobbesian but ‘good’ or ‘smart’ governance in this context is one where the citizen is centrally involved in the decision making process. It is questionable then if the local government institution is fit for this assigned purpose given that many commentators view it as having failed to meaningfully engage citizens during the well-funded e-government programme run by the previous New Labour government.

Since that time the social web and apps development, to name but two, have opened new opportunities for local policymaker wishing to involve citizens in the policy making process. My article, based on empirical research into the online activity associated with the Manchester Congestion Charge Referendum, illustrates the political difficulties local government faces in turning these opportunities into effective online engagement and in doing so suggests some remedial policy responses.

The local online influence of the sad, the bad and the very rich

The promise of e-democracy is that it will renew the democratic process and enable ‘ordinary’ citizens’ voices to be heard above those that have traditionally dominated politics. This proved not to be the case during the Congestion Charge Referendum and analysis of the related hyperlink network and interviews with actors prominent in this network revealed how powerful economic businesses offline were dominating the political narrative online. Evidence collected here showed how these businesses used their offline political connections to diminish the online voices of those that opposed them.

Along with the influence of the very rich online engagement on this issue was often characterised by angry, offensive and anonymous postings which served to deter people from participating or sharing information. It also reinforced the belief of some policy-makers in the superiority of traditional forms of communication.

Local government and the online network

The role of local government during the referendum was to ensure that all relevant information was made available to the voting public and to attempt to engage them on the issue. Of course they used online media in this process but their engagement was hampered by a toxic mix of institutionalised ‘silos’ of information, a prevailing culture of anxiety about the new media and an inability to assign any real political value to online engagement. As a consequence their tepid interventions online were often counter-productive and helped to fuel a lack of trust amongst the public in the information they were trying to impart.

Remedial policies

Some of these obstacles to more effective online intervention by local government are more straightforward to resolve than others. The modernisation of local government needs to be driven forward and the institutional structures, culture and prevailing perceptions of citizenship need to be aligned with the requirements of the digital age. How far and how fast local government will change is contingent upon a number of factors, countering the online influence of the sad the bad and the very rich is probably dependent upon how far local government climbs Arnstein’s ladder of participation.

A full account of this research can be found in my recent article ‘Local Democracy in a Digital Age: Lessons for Local Government from the Manchester Congestion Charge Referendum’, Local Government Studies.

Dr Paul Hepburn is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Hestletine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool His work explores the potential of the new digital media to enhance local democracy and local governance. He uses methods and tools for analysing and explaining the structure of online political networks. Paul previously worked in local government where he implemented an e-government programme.

Health and wellbeing boards: a new type of partnership?

28/01/201428/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Anna Coleman

A great deal rests on Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs), a new type of local partnership. These were established under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, to act as a forum in which leaders from the local health and care system could work together to improve the health and wellbeing of their local population and promote integrated services.

Last year, the House of Commons Communities and Local Government (CLG) Committee concluded that HWBs have a pivotal role and their success ‘is crucial to the new arrangements’. However, it also warned of the danger ‘that the initial optimism surrounding their establishment and first year or two in operation will falter and go the way of previous attempts at partnership working that failed and became no more than expensive talking shops’ (House of Commons CLG Committee, 2013 paragraph 22, 14). We examine these issues and the early development of HWBs in our recently published article in Local Government Studies.

While partnerships are seen to be a prerequisite for tackling ‘wicked issues’ (those issues so complex that their solution lies with a multi-agency response), historically they seem unable to break free from the ‘silo-based’ structures which govern how many UK public services are organised and delivered.

The official vision for HWBs from the Department of Health emphasises: joint local leadership between Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and local authorities; key roles for elected councillors, clinicians, and directors of public health, adults and children’s services; the enablement of greater local democratic legitimacy of commissioning decisions, and provision for opportunities for challenge, discussion, and the involvement of local representatives (Department of Health 2011 p15). However, HWBs have no formal powers, and their ability to influence others will depend upon their success in building relationships.

Established as sub-committees of local authorities, the exact membership of HWBs is not formally mandated, and locally HWBs can choose how they wish to work. Recent research (Humphries 2013) has suggested several features of HWBs which could potentially set them apart from previous partnership initiatives. These include: involvement and engagement of GPs; better governance and accountability (due to being sub-committee of the LA); encouragement of wider relations between the NHS and broader LA (not just Social Services); and opportunities afforded by the move of Public Health functions to local government. However similar initiatives have historically fallen short of initial expectations.

In the complex new system, resulting from the many changes under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, and characterised by potential fragmentation and confused accountability (see our other recently published paper from research with Clinical Commissioning Groups – Checkland et al 2013), HWBs are the one element within the new system with a specific mandate to encourage integration between local bodies. This has led to potentially unrealistic expectations that they can solve longstanding and intractable problems, such as joined up working between health and social care (Vize 2013), but also provides opportunities for them to work differently and make a difference locally to the health and wellbeing of local populations. Watch this space.

Anna’s article Joining it up? Health and Wellbeing Boards in English Local Governance: Evidence from Clinical Commissioning Groups and Shadow Health and Wellbeing Boards is published in Local Government Studies.

Anna Coleman is a Research Fellow in the HIPPO team (Health policy, politics and organisation groups), part of the Institute for Population Studies at the University of Manchester. HiPPO also constitutes, jointly with researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Kent, the Department of Health Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System (PRUComm). PRUComm provides evidence to the Department of Health to inform the development of policy on all aspects of health-related commissioning.

Disclaimer: The research for both referenced papers is funded by the Department of Health. The views expressed are those of the researchers and not necessarily those of the Department of Health.

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The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

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