‘The Great Parliamentary Resistance’ – some of the outcomes

27/05/202227/05/2022 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

Back in early February, I wrote a blog dissecting one of two big and controversial Government Bills involved in what I slightly hyperbolically termed the “historic Monday evening of the Great Parliamentary Resistance” – Monday, 17^th January, when the Elections Bill received its Third Commons Reading, while across the way the Lords were savaging the ‘flagship’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill by defeating the Government a Parliamentary record 14 times in the same sitting[1].

Both Bills, in being big and controversial, were fiercely contested throughout their Parliamentary progress and significantly amended – to the extent that my initial idea of highlighting and summarising such amendments in two linked blogs in, say, February and March, proved ludicrously unrealisable. Not least because neither received their Royal Assent until 28^th April.

On the ball, as ever, Jason Lowther blogged immediately about the particular aspects of the now Elections Act with which he had been particularly concerned – the Government’s ‘solution’ to the undemonstrated ‘problem’ of ‘personation’, of having in future to show counter-signed photo ID at UK Parliamentary and English local and PCC elections.

This single blog, therefore, will attempt two ludicrously daunting tasks: (a) to at least mention some of the additional, less publicised, measures in or out of the Elections Act, and (b) similarly, but even more summarily, for the considerably more complex Police, Crime etc. Act.

There were two key and particularly controversial Elections Act proposals, that went down to the proverbial wire at the so-called Ping pong stage of the Parliamentary process (pp.79ff. of the H/Commons Library briefing noted by Jason).

First, obviously, the several proposed age-discriminatory and non-photographic forms of ID that had been in and out of the Bill throughout – mentioned again here frankly as a pretext for reminding anyone who needs it of just how long and how implacably opposed the PM himself has been to ID cards of any description, and accordingly what we can presumably look out for come Election Day.

election1

The other long-running dispute concerned the Act’s provision for the Government to set a “strategy and policy statement” for the constitutionally independent Electoral Commission. Some suspicious Parliamentarians suggested this might go beyond scrutiny and accountability, and “potentially into providing guidance about how [the Commission carries out its] functions on a day-to-day basis”.

They wanted it “not bound by” the Government’s “statement”, but apparently they were guilty of a “mischaracterisation” of the Government’s intentions, and the relevant amendments were defeated.

The Government’s listing of the Act’s additional benefits appears, of course, on the relevant Gov.UK page – summarised under the comfort blanket of the several “greater protections” it provides for voters, and also for candidates and campaigners.

Protection from fraud through photo ID, of course, but also from intimidation at the ballot box – the latter by fines, up to 5-year bans, and even imprisonment for offenders convicted of attempting an extended definition of ‘undue influence’.

Voters with disabilities must in future be provided with specialist equipment, and may be accompanied by an adult. And the 15-year limit on the voting rights of British ex-pats, retired or working abroad, will be removed. An estimated 3 million potential voters are currently affected by the limit, and – read into this what you will – it fulfils a pledge in three recent Conservative manifestos.

Finally – although it was actually the first bit of the legislation I blogged about, back last April – the Act will change the voting system for both Mayoral and Police & Crime Commissioner elections from the ‘transferable’/choice-extending Supplementary Vote to First Past The Post – on the basis of “no other plausible argument” than it might fractionally reduce the numbers of rejected ballots”.

I have views – as doubtless do Mayors Tracy Brabin (Lab – West Yorkshire), Ben Houchen (Cons – Tees Valley) and Andy Burnham (Lab – Greater Manchester), all recently elected after transfers – but not here.

And so to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act – a real pantechnicon of a Bill/Act, highly technical in places, with even the ‘short’ and definitely the ‘long’ (150-word) titles signalling how impossible it is seriously to summarise.

It makes major changes across the criminal justice system, significantly extending police powers and the treatment of suspected, arrested, charged and convicted offenders. Again, there is a substantial (100+ pages) Commons Library summary of the whole legislative process; also a detailed House of Lords account – presented, slightly disconcertingly, in reverse chronological order – covering the fate of at least some of the Lords’ 17^th Jan. amendments.

I was never keen on listing Wiki on student reading lists, but in this case I might well make an exception. For this blog, though, I have borrowed (sounds so much better than plagiarised!) the content of the next few paragraphs from the BBC’s summary –mainly because it focuses, as many of those Lords motions did, on the implications for and threats to the right to protest.

Until now, it has generally been the police’s responsibility, if they want to restrict a protest, to show it may result in “serious public disorder, property damage, or disruption to the life of the community” (emphasis added). They can also change/restrict the routes of marches. For major events, like the COP26 protests, details are typically agreed with the organisers weeks in advance.

The new Act enables particular measures to be designed for ‘static protests’, like those of Extinction Rebellion, whose modus operandi is to force governmental action on the “climate and ecological emergency” through non-violent civil disobedience, the occupation of roads and bridges, etc. Start and finish times and noise limits will now be set, even for protests involving just one person, with fines up to £2,500.

Edward Colston, the C18th merchant/slave trader whose statue was pushed into Bristol docks gets his own clause, with damage to memorials earning up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has described the “rushed” legislation as creating “incredibly widely drawn” powers …”, allowing the police to stop and search anyone in the vicinity of a protest, including passers-by, people on the way to work and peaceful protesters.”

The Government/Home Office/Police viewpoint is set out in a Home Office Policy Paper.

[1] It appeared on 4^th February, at the start of what proved a particularly active blogging month, with the consequence that, to access it, you may need to key ‘Older Posts’ at the end of the February 2022 selection.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan. He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

What ID for Voter ID?

22/04/202230/04/2022 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Jason Lowther

*Photo credit: Liz West, https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/*

Last October, I wrote in this blog about the many positive aspects of the Elections Bill currently working its way through parliament. It clarifies what “undue influence” on voters means, improves poll accessibility, reduces the risk of intimidation of candidates and requires all paid for digital political material to have an imprint. The big problem, though, is the plan to require voters to present certain restricted types of identification in order to vote. This month the House of Lords voted to mitigate this problem.

As part of the “Report Stage” of the bill, on 6^th April the Lords agreed an amendment which radically expands the range of identification documentation which voters could use. The new list is fairly extensive including an adoption certificate, bank or building society statement, P45 form, asylum seeker letter from the Home Office, and even a library card or National Railcard.

In the debate, Cross-bencher Lord Woolley of Woodford claimed that the government had failed to make a convincing case on voter fraud – quoting one conviction from 47 million voters, which he likened to the chance of winning the national lottery jackpot. He said that the cost of insisting on photographic ID could be to disenfranchise 2 million voters.

For the Greens, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb labelled the policy ‘a cynical ploy’. She went on to claim: “It is a clear attempt by the Government to make it harder for people to vote in elections. That is the only motive I can see when we have this sort of Bill in front of us. More cynically still, it will disproportionately stop BAME, working-class, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people voting. These people find it hard enough to vote already. Anything you put in their way will stop them voting completely; that is preventing democracy’.

One of the amendment’s sponsors, Conservative former cabinet minister Lord Willetts, said that there was little concern with voter personation in the mainland and raised the concern that a future government elected with a small majority could face questions if significant numbers of voters had been unable to vote due to the new requirements. He concluded that the amendment was ‘protecting our system from a major political and constitutional risk while remaining consistent with the manifesto on which the Conservative Party fought the last election’.

The vote on ‘Amendment 8’ in the Lords was 199 to 170, with three Conservative peers in favour and 155 against. The House of Lords has its final sitting on the Report Stage on Monday (25^th April), after which it will complete the Third Reading before the bill returns to the Commons for its consideration of the amendments. The Government is known to be concerned at the inclusion of ID which does not have a photo, so the amendment is likely to be further challenged.

UPDATE (30/4/22): As anticipated, the Government rejected Amendment 8 in the Commons as the Government’s view was the types of ID listed were not sufficiently secure and might be prone to fraud. More detail is available in the excellent summary by Elise Uberoi and Neil Johnston for the House of Commons Library here.

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies (writing in a personal capacity).

Women in (West Midlands) Governance: A patchy metamorphosis

01/04/202227/03/2022 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

Yes, I did blog really rather recently on the topic of ‘Women in local and national governance’; and yes, I did conclude it by pledging to “retire gracefully from this particular field of research”.

But that was before I found myself fruitlessly upending my flat for anything conceivably useful to the Ukrainian refugees for whom one of my ward councillors was commendably collecting. Finding virtually nothing I could honourably offer, it was cash to the Disasters Emergency Committee, who assured me the UK Government would double my donation.

However, among the dust-covered treasures I’d totally forgotten, and spared the Ukrainians, was my 1975 Municipal Year Book (MYB) – a hefty, royal blue tome of 1,400-plus extremely closely printed pages, taking up over three inches of shelving.

myb

In pre-computer decades, when I joined INLOGOV, it was the proverbial local government bible – the 1975 MYB listing all 564 of the UK’s so-called principal local authorities plus, individually, their 26,467 councillors and further thousands of principal officers.

Several years later a thoughtful colleague, Ray Puffitt, bequeathed me his signed personal copy, possibly in exchange for my not pressing him to lecture to my undergraduate students.

Thoughtful because 1974/75 was, of course, the year of large-scale local government restructuring – or, in MYB-ese, ‘re-organization’. There were now far fewer councils and councillors, but these were the ‘new’ and therefore more relevant ones – which explains how I acquired my edition, though obviously not why it wasn’t binned decades ago.

Anyway, having discovered this 1975 stash of raw research data, I thought I’d share with you (and Birmingham Post readers) how much statistically women’s presence and visibility in our West Midlands local governments have changed in the past nearly half-century.

My earlier blog concluded by noting how Paulette Hamilton’s recent by-election victory for Labour in the Birmingham Erdington by-election had taken the proportion of women MPs over 35% for the first time. Moreover, that she and the six other women by-election winners since 2019 had – another first – made the Commons more gender-representative than our elected local governments, whose UK-wide proportion of women councillors has seemingly become stuck in the low 34%s.

Internationally, both percentages would get us, just, into the top quarter of the respective rankings. In educational lingo, though, it would be a “disappointing, could surely do better”.

If the Parliaments of Cuba, Mexico, New Zealand, Iceland and all Scandinavia can have more than 45% of elected women, why can’t we – or, more precisely, why doesn’t our huge Conservative Party majority comprise even a quarter? Similarly, if local government in countries as diverse as Bolivia, Tunisia, Iceland, Uganda, Namibia and Mexico can attract at least 45% of women elected members, why can we barely manage one in three?

At least, though, the picture has changed, or improved, hugely in the past half-century, which is what the rest of this blog is about – focusing on the metropolitan West Midlands.

I hadn’t moved to Birmingham in 1974/75, but I reckon that even without research I could probably have named the incumbent West Midlands’ women MPs – because, though few, they were all exceptional and established national reputations.

One, indeed, would have me as an Edgbaston constituent for the latter part of her elective parliamentary career: Jill (later Dame Jill) Knight, MP from 1966 to 1997.

The other three were all Labour: in West Bromwich another Dame-in-Waiting, Betty Boothroyd (1973-2000), latterly Speaker of the Commons. In Coventry West was Audrey Wise, and in Wolverhampton NE Renée Short. A formidable quartet.

Their successors are, necessarily, impressive too, and the reason I couldn’t immediately name them all is not just my ageing memory, but that there’s a full dozen of them. Eight Labour – including all three of Coventry’s – and four Conservatives out of West Midlands’ 28, or 43%.

Yardley’s Jess Phillips is, I’m guessing, probably best known, and she is one of just two of Labour’s eight who aren’t from minority ethnic backgrounds. Overall, another massive change from the mid-70s.

What about councillors? Would the MYB’s council listings actually identify women members, and, if so, how? Fortunately, they all risked the accusations of chauvinism and did – though in differing ways.

Birmingham, for example, gave first names – of all women members, while initialising the men. Then, as now, it was a Labour-dominated Council, 21 (17%) of whose 126 Members were women, including two Fredas, two Marys, and an exotic-sounding Carmen from Coleshill Road, B16. Oh yes, and a future Leader of the Council, Birmingham Lord Mayor, and wife of a Professor John Stewart.

bcccllrs

The other councils preferred marital status: almost always Mrs, with the very occasional Miss. Across the seven West Midlands councils Labour members outnumbered Conservatives by two to one, which was broadly reflected in women’s representation, with comfortably Tory Solihull managing just one woman out of 51 members.

However, the gender blend on Labour-run Coventry and Walsall Councils wasn’t that much better – four women on councils of well over 50, and one can only imagine how, on occasion, they must have been treated.

And no point whatever seeking empathy from senior women officers – because quite simply there weren’t any. Sorry, not strictly true. Of the 101 listed Principal Officers in the seven WM Councils, Miss H Clark, Wolverhampton’s Housing Manager, was the sole woman.

It’s here that the culture has changed most dramatically. Today, try counting the number of women in the senior managements of the seven West Midlands metropolitan councils, and the very first name you’d encounter would be Birmingham City Council Chief Executive: Deborah Cadman OBE – heading a 13-strong team of service Directors, including four more women.

Remarkably, though, that 38% female senior management puts Birmingham at the foot of this particular league table, which is headed by Dudley and Solihull with 75% and 67% women senior managers respectively, followed by Walsall with 57%, headed by CE Dr Helen Paterson. In this sphere of local government at least, there has indeed been a metamorphosis.

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A version of this blog – ‘Equality progress – but room for improvement’ – was published by the Birmingham Post, March 24^th, 2022 https://www.pressreader.com/uk/birmingham-post/20220324/textview

Getting under the skin of council budgets: what does good scrutiny look like?

08/02/202202/02/2022 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Cllr Ketan Sheth

It’s a testing but all-too-familiar mix: funding cuts from central government, skyrocketing demand for local services, a growing population, tough choices and communities vulnerable as they recover from the social and economic shocks of the pandemic. As we approach budget setting, our situation in Brent – a NW London borough – mirrors the position of local authorities around the country.

Against this challenging backdrop, I believe the role of effective Scrutiny is more important than ever, and so too is learning from one another.

This year, I co-chaired Brent Council’s Budget Scrutiny Task Group. It was our job to get under the skin of budget proposals, to grasp their real-world effects, to understand any mitigations, and to make recommendations where we felt the decisions of our Cabinet, and Full Council, could be strengthened.

To bring forward a balanced budget, this year we were called to scrutinise a package of savings totalling £2.7million, alongside Council Tax increases.

A deeper approach to scrutiny

Given the stark financial picture across the country, from the outset, we wanted to make sure that scrutiny was grounded in the complex reality of the difficult decisions that the Cabinet needed to take. We were determined that the scrutiny process must add value.

As a group, we worked with officers to develop a much broader approach than simply reviewing proposed savings. Instead of solely relying on the community consultation undertaken by the Cabinet, we went into detail on the impacts and sought out testimony from people on the ground. We felt we needed to get a deeper understanding of the experience of those who use Brent’s services and the complexity of their situations.

The idea was to test underlying assumptions made in the proposals, in order to give Cabinet and Full Council information and evidence to base their decisions on. We identified a number of areas to probe:

1. Impacts of Covid-19 on income from business rates, Council Tax and rents;

2. The impacts on health inequalities work when grant funding ends;

3. Implications of Covid-19 on the adult social care budget, especially mental health;

4. Pressures within the Dedicated School Grant; and

5. How the council’s £17m Covid-19 recovery package is being spent

The task group agreed a mix of less conventional scrutiny methods to build this holistic view, including focus groups and detailed evidence sessions with people on the ground. From local head teachers to voluntary and community sector partners, teams from our well-being services, and Brent Hubs staff (Brent Hubs are spaces in the community bringing lots of services together under one roof to improve access for residents with more complex needs).

By taking this approach, we were able to assess the wider financial and service context, identify possible future budget pressures and the likely emerging needs of our communities.

It allowed us to make a number of nuanced, practical recommendations when reporting back. Most focused not on the savings themselves, but on how the Cabinet might work differently to overcome and address some of those pressures. Helpfully, the group also identified areas where we felt the Council could effectively lobby for more support nationally and regionally. We’ve also put in place mechanisms for pulling insights from these testimonies as well as learnings from this deeper process through to future budget scrutiny cycles. Ultimately, we are all trying to deliver a better outcome for local people, and so I’m a big believer in the power of scrutiny to support good decision-making. I think that this is best realised by being a “critical friend”. The deeper, more contextual approach we took in Brent this year achieved just that, and I look forward to seeing these efforts bear fruit when the budget is taken to Full Council later this month.

Cllr Ketan Sheth is Brent Council’s Chair of Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee and co-chaired its Budget Scrutiny Task Group

Monday Jan 17th 2022 – The Great Parliamentary Resistance (Part 1)

04/02/202202/02/2022 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

About the first sizable 2022-dated research-based publication I at least scanned was the alliteratively subtitled The Great Reset: Public Opinion, Populism, and the Pandemic by Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy. Based on massive international data sets, it finds that (summarising outrageously), while the pandemic has generally reversed the rise of populist leaders, parties and attitudes, the cost has been “a disturbing erosion of support for core democratic beliefs and principles, including less liberal attitudes with respect to basic civil rights and liberties, and weaker preference for democratic government.”

The UK Government can obviously provide numerous illustrations – from its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers to a Justice Secretary who wants to rewrite the Human Rights Act minus its “wokery”.

But then, literally following the weekend of my coming across The Great Reset, we had the extraordinary, in parts even historic, Monday evening of the Great Parliamentary Resistance.

Both Houses were involved, and two separate Government Bills, both as controversial as they are important, both the subject of consequential, even history-making action simultaneously throughout the evening – and virtually all of at least interest, where not of direct relevance, to an Institute of Local Government Studies.

This Government, even in its legislative behaviour, is greedy, disorganised and unscrupulous, and on that Monday 17th it was all on display – the problem being that, with the more complicated (House of Lords) action being summarily and potentially misleadingly reported, doing justice to the historic legislative events seemed a bit too much for a single blog. What’s more, I didn’t come across a single stealable visual aid.

So, I took a decision: two separate but linked blogs. The second – because it makes better chronological sense – will cover the hugely controversial Elections Bill, that seeks to ‘Reset’ some of those core democratic beliefs and principles referred to above: among other things, introducing mandatory voter ID at polling stations, undermining the independence of the Electoral Commission, and changing the electoral system for Mayors and Police & Crime Commissioners.

Its intentions to restrict voting are blatantly partisan; it has been rammed through Parliament, added to and amended, minimising legislative scrutiny; and on that Monday evening it received its Third Commons Reading on more or less straightforward partisan lines (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60037651), and thereby progresses to the Lords.

Both Jason Lowther and I have blogged previously about aspects of the Bill, and Part 2 of ‘The Great Parliamentary Resistance’ will shortly update them.

For the remainder of this Part 1, though, it’s across to the Lords and their truly historic Monday evening, when they savaged the Government’s ‘flagship’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – and not once or twice but an apparently Parliamentary record 14 times!

Even the Bill’s title suggests a huge legislative gallimaufry, and it is – a classic Priti Patel production, taking the whole of the second part of last year to progress through the Lords to last Monday’s Report stage. That time lapse proving, pleasingly piquantly, the key to some of the Government’s difficulties.

For Patel evidently thought it would be a clever wheeze to use the Lords’ extended deliberations as an opportunity to add all sorts of additional clauses to the Bill, covering some of the myriad things that had enraged her since March – like Insulate Britain’s M25 traffic obstructions last September and Extinction Rebellion protests around November’s UN Cop26 climate summit.

All of which meant that there were three distinct types of Government defeats – sorry, votes – taking place at this Lords Report Stage. First, the ‘normal procedural’ ones, on parts of the Bill as received from the Commons last July, that the opposition parties in the Lords would like to see reconsidered by MPs and ideally amended or removed. This will kick off the process so whimsically known as ‘parliamentary ping pong’ between the two Houses.

Patel’s ‘late additions’, though, are another matter entirely: criminalising protests deemed too noisy and disruptive … and protesters ‘locking on’, either to each other or immovable objects … and interference with key national infrastructure … and obstructing major transport works … and allowing police to stop and search without giving reasons … and allowing courts to ban regular protesters from even attending protests … The Lords defeated all of these and MPs can’t reinstate them, as they never voted them into the Bill in the first place, so they’re removed altogether – or at least until Patel repackages them into another Bill for the new parliamentary year starting in April.

Then there are the Lords’ own ‘late additions’ – reviewing the prevalence of ‘drink-spiking’ crime … and crime motivated by ‘misogyny’ … and removing police powers to determine what constitutes a ‘noisy’ assembly … and belatedly repealing the 1824 Vagrancy Act, thereby establishing that begging or sleeping rough should no longer, in this post-Napoleonic/Waterloo era, constitute criminal offences.

None of these were in the Bill when it left the Commons, but they are now – and if MPs don’t like them, they’ll have to vote them down.

What concerned me about the initial reports I read of the Great Lords Monday Night Rebellion was that most seemed, albeit understandably, excited by the record 14 Government defeats, to the point of failing to note the really rather significant differences in the categories and potential significance of the defeats – even some of those with a stake in some of that detail, like Police Professional or Green World.

So, having recently received my copy of the Inlogov Associates Handbook and being slightly apprehensive that the Director might try to inveigle me into some actual lecturing, I thought I’d prepare the first new overhead I’ve attempted for, well, a few years now – summarising at least my understanding of the current state of play. Hope it helps!

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

Democracy representation and participation

‘The Great Parliamentary Resistance’ – some of the outcomes

What ID for Voter ID?

Women in (West Midlands) Governance: A patchy metamorphosis

Getting under the skin of council budgets: what does good scrutiny look like?

Monday Jan 17th 2022 – The Great Parliamentary Resistance (Part 1)