Democracy representation and participation

Learning from the 2026 elections

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Photo credit: https://www.southoxon.gov.uk/south-oxfordshire-district-council/local-democracy-and-elections/elections-and-voting/first-time-voters-guide/what-happens-at-an-election-count/

Jason Lowther

The Electoral Commission’s new report on the 2026 English local government and mayoral elections provides largely positive picture of local democracy. Turnout was the highest seen at comparable local elections for a decade, public confidence in the electoral process remained strong, and the overwhelming majority of voters reported satisfaction with both registration and voting. At the same time, the report highlights several challenges that local authorities, elected members and policymakers will need to address if they are to further strengthen local democracy.

Perhaps the most striking finding is the increase in voter turnout. Participation reached 41.2% in metropolitan, London borough, unitary and district council elections and 45.2% in county council elections. The latter represents the highest county council turnout for three decades outside elections held alongside a general election or referendum. These figures suggest that local government increasingly matters to citizens and that many voters remain willing to engage when they feel local issues have real consequences for their communities.

The report also points to generally high levels of public confidence in election administration. Around 94% of voters were satisfied with the voting process.  While 73% of eligible voters expressed confidence that the elections were well run, 9% were not satisfied – reasons for this include the perceived lack of useful information about candidates and/or parties, the voting system being seen as unfair, or the belief that the process of voting is not secure. Local authorities and electoral administrators should take credit for delivering elections effectively despite continuing operational pressures and resource constraints.

However, the report identifies several areas where citizen engagement could be improved. One concerns voter registration. Although most people were satisfied with the registration process, younger voters were less positive, and a significant proportion of dissatisfied respondents argued that registration should be automatic. The Electoral Commission reiterates its support for a consistent automated voter registration system and urges governments across the UK to coordinate reforms.

Accessibility is another continuing concern. Despite very significant efforts by returning officers to provide equipment and support in polling stations, disabled voters still face barriers to participation. Awareness of available assistance remains relatively low, even among people who could benefit from it. This finding highlights the importance of ongoing public communication and inclusive service design.

The report also raises important questions about information quality and democratic engagement. While awareness of the elections was high, many voters remained concerned about misinformation. More than half of respondents reported seeing misinformation during the campaign and around one in ten reported encountering deepfake material. Although the Commission’s pilot work found no evidence that political deepfakes were widespread, the findings underline growing risks associated with digital campaigning.

A major challenge concerns the experience of candidates. Abuse, intimidation and harassment, especially online, continue to affect many people standing for election. Candidates who were female, from an ethnic minority background, had a disability or were standing for Reform UK were more likely to experience abuse and intimidation.  The report warns that these experiences are influencing how some individuals campaign, for example avoiding canvassing alone, and one third of respondents considered not standing for election because of harassment, intimidation or concerns about future abuse.

The report also highlights a wider issue for local democracy: the availability of reliable information about candidates and parties. Although large majorities found it easy to obtain information about voter ID requirements and voting methods, fewer found it easy to access information about candidates. This suggests that there remains a gap between procedural information and substantive information about political choices.

Finally, the report notes the pressures facing electoral administrators. Recruitment challenges, supplier issues and uncertainty surrounding potential electoral reforms all created difficulties for those delivering the elections. While these problems were largely managed successfully, councils and government need to address the long-term capacity and resilience of local electoral services. Effective citizen engagement ultimately depends on electoral systems that remain adequately resourced and capable of adapting to future reforms.

Overall, the 2026 elections offer grounds for cautious optimism. Higher turnout, strong voter satisfaction and confidence in election administration suggest that local democracy remains resilient. Yet the report also shows that participation cannot be taken for granted. Improving accessibility, modernising voter registration, combating misinformation and protecting candidates from abuse will all be central to sustaining citizen engagement and local democracy.

When mayors hold the pencil: gerrymandering inside a territorial reform

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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

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

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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/

Do female mayors make local government more transparent? Only when politics lets them

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Bruna Ribeiro (University of Minho), Miguel Rodrigues (University of Minho) and Francisca Tejedo-Romero (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Why do some municipalities open their books, publish their contracts and document their decisions online, while their neighbours – operating under exactly the same legal framework – remain opaque? Freedom of information laws set a floor, but the striking fact about local government transparency is how much variation survives above that floor. If the law were the whole story, all councils would look alike. They do not.

In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we explore one part of the answer that has attracted growing attention across Europe: who leads. Specifically, we ask whether female leadership changes how much information municipalities actively disclose to their citizens — and whether the political context in which women govern conditions that effect.

Why leadership and gender?

The theoretical case is well established. Research across countries has associated women’s political presence with lower tolerance of corruption, different risk preferences, and a stronger orientation towards accountability. Earlier work on Spanish municipalities found that women’s representation in local councils has a positive influence on transparency levels. But representation on the council and leadership of the executive are different things. Mayors set administrative priorities, control the machinery that produces (or withholds) information, and answer personally for what appears on the municipal website. If gender matters for transparency, the mayor’s office is where we would expect it to show.

Portugal offers an unusually good laboratory. Since 2013, the Municipal Transparency Index (MTI), produced by Transparency International Portugal, has scored all 308 municipalities from 0 to 100 on the information they make available through their official websites. This gives us a consistent, externally produced measure of active disclosure, in a system where women remain a small minority of mayors but where the 2006 Parity Law — recently strengthened from a 33% to a 40% candidate quota — has been steadily reshaping who enters local politics.

What we did

We linked each municipal election to the transparency performance of the government it produced: the mayors and councils elected in 2009 and 2013 were matched to the Municipal Transparency Index scores of 2013 and 2017, across all 308 municipalities. This temporal structure ensures that who governs strictly precedes what gets disclosed. We then tested whether the gender of the mayor is associated with transparency — on its own, and in interaction with two features of the political context: whether the mayor governs with an absolute majority, and whether they belong to a left-wing party. The models control for women’s presence in the council, financial autonomy, unemployment, turnout and population, and the results hold when we exclude Lisbon and Porto and under alternative specifications.

What we found

The headline result is not the one either optimists or sceptics might expect. Female mayors, on their own, have no statistically significant effect on municipal transparency. But the average conceals a striking conditional pattern. Without an absolute majority, female mayors are associated with transparency scores roughly 7.5 points lower on the 0–100 index than their male counterparts. Give them an absolute majority, and the association flips: the interaction adds around 10 points, turning the net effect positive — female-led municipalities with strong political backing outperform male-led ones. There is also suggestive (though weaker) evidence that belonging to a left-wing party partially offsets the negative baseline.

In other words, the question “do women govern more transparently?” is badly posed. The better question is: under what conditions can they? Women in Portuguese town halls are still rare — only about 7% of municipalities had a female mayor in the period we study — and those governing without a majority face weak institutional support that appears to hinder the implementation of transparency measures. Political strength provides the stability, resources and authority to translate leadership values into open governance; without it, being a pioneer is mostly an uphill struggle.

Why this matters beyond Portugal

Three implications travel well beyond the Portuguese case.

First, transparency policy is usually designed as if compliance were a purely administrative matter — build the portal, mandate the disclosure, audit the result. Our findings suggest that who is in office, and the political incentives they face, shape how far councils go beyond the legal minimum. Transparency is a political choice dressed up as an administrative one.

Second, the debate on gender quotas and parity laws tends to focus on descriptive representation — how many women get elected. Our evidence suggests that numbers are not enough. The mere presence of women in leadership does not, by itself, deliver more open government; what matters is whether they hold real power to act. Quotas should therefore go beyond numerical representation and be accompanied by the conditions for women to exercise actual influence — party support, resources, and genuine political authority. Putting women in office without power risks setting them up to underperform against expectations the literature itself created.

Third, for practitioners and transparency campaigners, the lesson is about where to aim. If disclosure responds to political context, then rankings and indices like Portugal’s Municipal Transparency Index are not just measurement tools — they are interventions, changing the reputational payoff of openness for the leaders most sensitive to it.

The bigger research picture

This article is part of a wider research agenda at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP, University of Minho) on gender and local politics in Southern Europe. Companion studies have examined how women break the political glass ceiling at local level (Governance, 2025) and how voters respond to female candidates in local elections (South European Society and Politics, 2026). Together, they trace the full pipeline — from candidacy, through election, to what changes once women actually govern.

The transparency question sits at the end of that pipeline, and it may be the most consequential part: representation matters not only for who sits in the town hall, but for whether citizens can see what happens inside it.

Bruna Ribeiro recently completed her PhD in Administrative Sciences at the University of Minho (CICP). Miguel Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho. Francisca Tejedo-Romero is based at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The full article, “Transparency in local government: exploring the impact of female leadership and political context”, is available in Local Government Studies: https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2025.2612054

The Participatory Party

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Phil Swann

The urgency of Sonia Busso’s call for councils to develop participatory governance arrangements is evident in her recent INLOGOV policy paper[1], The Participatory Council. Bussu recognises that politicians can enable or block this development and argues that progress can be impeded if the council as an institution is not prepared for meaningful participation. I argue in this blog that an equally important precondition of action is that political parties are engaged in participatory processes, reflecting their roles in both councils and wider civic society.

The Participatory Party should sit alongside the Participatory Council.

Bussu sets out a convincing set of recommendations to advance inclusive participation including developing the role of boundary spanners, building on existing community assets and resources, and adopting an intersectional approach to engage marginalised voices.

She recognises the part that political parties played in two of the five case she refers to: the introduction of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil; and the radical widening of the participatory infrastructure and processes in Barcelona. A third case, the deployment of citizens’ assemblies in the London Borough of Camden, was initiated by the then council leader Georgia Gould[2] following her recognition of the councils’ failure to listen to the residents of tower blocks in the borough before the tragic Grenfell Fire.

Bussu distinguishes between “disjointed events vulnerable to the political cycle” and “coherent processes embedded in day-to-day policymaking”, an ambition which is reflected in Gould’s final leader’s annual report in which she claimed the council was “getting on with a radical shift in power that is seeing democratic renewal led from the bottom up”.

In my view, however.  more attention needs to be paid to how political parties can play bigger roles both in enriching civic society and in embedding participatory process in the way that Bussu seeks. This is particularly important at a time when populist parties are opting for simplistic solutions rather than engaging with the hard graft of participatory policymaking.

Gould, for example, in a lecture in 2022 called for a move beyond a transactional model of public services. Demanding the abandonment of traditional structures and hierarchies and a recognition of the power of communities and the ability of residents to change their lives, she warned that “services that don’t have a connection to communities or an understanding of their needs can be de-humanising, paternalistic and create a transactional model of public services that cannot make lives better in the longer term.”

In terms of the contribution of politicians and political parties to this, there are three key lessons from the experience of three of Gould’s predecessors: Herbert Morrison, leader of the London County Council and dynamo of Atlee’s post-war government; Richard Crossman, Minister for Housing and Local Government in Harold Wilson’s first cabinet; and David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield and holder of three cabinet posts in Tony Blair’s government.

First, the potential for exploiting the contribution of political parties as an important feature of the wider civic society. Morrison, for example, was clear that it was impossible to understand local government without understanding how political parties worked. It was “out of the clash of opinion and principle between the parties” that progress was made. For Crossman vibrant local government hinged on overcoming public apathy and that political parties had the potential to do that so long as party membership provided substantive opportunities to influence party policy. Writing when he was leader of the Labour Group on Oxford City Council in 1939 he said: democracy inside our parties is as valuable a part of our liberties as the right of voting at elections.”

Blunkett believed that the value of local politics was not confined to its legal powers, but to its ability to extend and develop democracy enabling the emergence of new social movements. During the period when he was leader of Sheffield, Blunkett argued that “if we can stimulate the community action that brings people into the [Labour] party and gets them to relate their community problems to a sense of political purpose, then we have begun to change society.”

Second, the value of engagement beyond the council and the party. Towards the end of his period as a leading local politician Blunkett warned that town halls could feel “impossibly remote and anonymous”. Reflecting on the state of local government in 2023, he said council leaders should do more than run their authority: they should see the council as a mechanism for fully engaging local people. Morrison, in his reflections on his period as leader of the LCC in the 1930s, came to a similar conclusion: “It was important that councillors and aldermen, once elected and appointed, should still move among the people they represented. They should be with and for the people, not above them.”

Finally, the key link between local government and wider civic society. Crossman was clear that “the real basis of successful political democracy is not to be found in politics at all, but below the surface in the organisation of a whole network of popular interests”. He argued that the future of the Labour party depended on not on the competence of its leaders and its electoral success, but also on the creation of “new organisations for the conquest of liberties yet unwon.” Blunkett was equally honest about the need for local politicians to avoid paternalism. Writing in 2002, when he was Home Secretary, Blunkett described how every since his first experience of canvassing in his council ward he had been “keen to inform and involve as many residents of Sheffield and its environs as possible in the aims and decision-making of the council.”

Bussu is right to stress that participatory governance requires sustained political commitment and is vulnerable to political change. The work of Gould and politicians such as Morrison, Crossman and Blunkett has created the foundations on which to build a participatory party. And Andy Burnham’s statements about how he intends to lead the Labour Party and listen to communities suggests that now is a good time to do so.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations at the University of Birmingham.

[1] The Participatory Council
http://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4443/

[2] Now an MP and minister

New Inlogov Policy Papers

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Jason Lowther

I am delighted to let you know about four new policy papers published today by Inlogov. 

Challenger Parties in Power Locally

https://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4446

This report examines the experience of ‘challenger parties’, political parties without previous experience of government, on entering power in local government. It examines the experiences of challenger parties in English local government following electoral gains in May 2025, focusing on how Reform UK and the Green Party of England and Wales have adapted to executive roles. Evidence from multiple case studies shows that, rather than transforming local governance, these parties have generally worked within existing institutional frameworks, with some early disruption typically giving way to learning and stabilisation as members adjust to formal procedures and constraints.  The research was developed with colleagues in Inlogov’s monthly Local Government Network webinar. 

The Participatory Council

http://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4443/

Councils need to develop participatory governance arrangements to address the declined levels of public trust in government, by giving residents a meaningful voice in decision making, improving transparency, and ensuring policies better reflect community needs and priorities. This report examines how councils can support institutional culture change towards participatory policymaking, drawing lessons from UK and international experiences. Too often, great work by individual officers, members or specific projects is lost because the council as an institution is ill prepared for public participation. The report argues that participatory policymaking must be deeply embedded within governance structures to enable meaningful engagement, mobilise diverse communities, and support mutual learning and transformative change. Achieving this requires facilitative leadership and the cultivation of boundary-spanning roles that bridge divides between government, civil society, and local communities. Advancing inclusive participation also demands an intersectional approach that centres marginalised voices to address systemic inequalities. This paper was written by Dr Sonia Bussu.

Paying For Democracy

https://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4445

Councillor remuneration plays a critical role in shaping participation in local democracy and the effectiveness of council governance, yet the current system in England remains inconsistent and increasingly misaligned with modern expectations. The total annual cost is around £230 million. Allowances vary widely between councils, reflecting a structure that has not kept pace with inflation or the growing demands of the role. This misalignment contributes to persistent barriers to participation, particularly for working-age individuals, those without independent financial means, and carers, with evidence indicating that remuneration levels directly affect both the diversity of candidates and their retention in office. Addressing these challenges requires setting more accessible allowance levels to broaden participation, enhancing consistency and transparency, expanding and normalising support mechanisms, and improving the evidence base to support informed and equitable remuneration decisions. Thanks to Emeritus Professor Colin Copus and Mr Ray Tomkinson for co-authoring this paper.

Constitutionalising English Local Government?

http://epapers.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4444

Government discourse increasingly accentuates devolution and local autonomy, using constitutional language. This paper aims to take the debate forward by examining the prospects for constitutional entrenchment of English local government within the existing uncodified constitutional framework. Encompassing both strategic and principal authorities within the term “local government”, it assesses what entrenchment could mean in the absence of a codified constitution, what obstacles stand in its way, and how constitutional weight could accumulate over time. The paper was written by Inlogov associate Prof Jonathan Davies.