Democracy representation and participation

Buying local votes? Campaign spending effects in Belgian local elections

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Gert-Jan Put, Bart Maddens and Jef Smulders

In democratic countries worldwide, elections are being organized on an increasingly larger scale. This makes it more challenging for political parties and candidates to communicate with voters and reach their target groups. Alternatively, they resort to mass media and costly electoral campaigns, for which parties and candidates are often prepared to spend exorbitant amounts of money.

Research on campaign spending in general elections has shown that these investments do matter, especially for political challengers: by raising personal expenses, challengers are able to close the gap with incumbent candidates. The latter group enjoys the obvious advantage of their office, which provides them with more (campaign) visibility and organizational capacity. As a result, spending is significantly less effective for them than for challengers, who need to compensate their lower visibility with more expensive campaigns. This incumbency effect is confirmed in majoritarian electoral systems such as the US, UK, Sweden and Canada, but also in some proportional systems such as Ireland and Belgium.

But local elections are of course a different story compared to general elections. In these smaller-scale electoral contests, voters are more familiar with candidates because of their closer geographical proximity. This changes the nature of the electoral competition and campaigning: voters will be more inclined to cast personal votes, candidates use different campaign techniques and the media plays a more limited role.

Does this imply that campaign spending effects will also be different in these elections? Is it worthwhile to invest a huge amount of personal resources in local campaigns? Does it increase the number of preference votes a candidate receives, and more importantly, does it raise one’s odds of getting elected? In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we address these questions and examine the effect of individual campaign spending on the results of local election candidates.

The article focuses on the case of the Belgian municipal elections of 2012, for which we collected data on 30 municipalities in the district of Leuven (in the Flemish region). We registered the declared campaign expenses for all the 172 lists and 3.632 candidates in these 30 municipalities. However, many of these candidates cannot be considered ‘serious contenders’: their candidature is merely symbolical to support the party, they are not interested in holding local office and will arguably invest little in their campaign. Therefore, we only included candidates who already held office in the municipality or at a higher political level, as well as candidates with some level of media attention during the campaign. This group of 1.006 serious contenders (28.4% of all candidates) were included in our analysis.

The results show that the personal investment in the campaign does have an effect on the electoral result. Candidates who spend more in absolute terms or outspend their rivals (at the list and the municipality level) obtain a better result, even though the effect is small. We even found some traces of an effect of personal spending on the odds of obtaining a seat in the municipal council. This finding points at an intriguing difference with national elections in Belgium, where such an effect was not found. Winning a seat is obviously what matters most to a candidate. If a candidate can increase the number of preferential votes, but not to such an extent that he or she can capture a seat, the investment is useless. In this way, investing in the campaign can be considered as more effective for local than for national elections. At the same time, this result should not be overstated. The chances of obtaining a seat in Belgian municipal elections are still overwhelmingly determined by other parameters, such as the position on the list and the incumbency status of the candidate.

Indeed, holding any type of local or higher office increases the number of preferential votes. There are also indications that spending is less effective for candidates holding an executive office in the municipality (as mayor or alderman). Interestingly, holding higher office (i.e. regional and national MP, MEP, minister) has a smaller effect than important local offices such as mayor or alderman. These findings confirm that the result of local elections (at least with regard to preferential votes) is still largely determined by local dynamics, as it should be.

This post is based on the authors’ full length article, ‘Buying local votes: the effect of individual campaign spending under a semi-open PR system in the Belgian local elections‘, published in Local Government Studies.

gert-jan

Gert-Jan Put is a researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) affiliated to the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium. His research interests include candidate selection, legislative turnover and campaign spending.

maddens

Bart Maddens is professor of political science at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium. His research focuses on political party finance and elections.

jef

Jef Smulders is a researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) affiliated to the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium. His research interests mainly include party and campaign finance and political party organization.

What happened to the NOC councils after the May elections: a moan and a puff

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Chris Game

‘Five Days in May’: the time it took in 1940 for Churchill to manoeuvre the War Cabinet into a five-year World War, in 2010 to form Britain’s first post-war peacetime coalition – and in 2014 for Tower Hamlets LBC to announce its local election results. OK, I’ve exaggerated – it was actually 119 hours after the polls closed, so only 4.96 days, but still not good, even discounting the malpractice allegations.

However, as in all competitive contests nowadays, there are positives to be quarried. First, as a mayoral authority, Tower Hamlets’ key result, announced a mere 28 hours after the polls closed, was the re-election of Mayor Lutfur Rahman. And here’s the second positive: in TH that key result is effectively the outcome. Once you know the mayor and his party (Tower Hamlets First), you know the politics of the administration – just as with a majority party in a non-mayoral council.

My first moan, therefore, in the grumbly part of this blog, is less about TH’s dilatoriness than about that of too many of the 30-odd councils whose results were reported in the media as NOC – No Overall Control, and where, from the parties’ seat totals, we couldn’t deduce or guess the eventual outcome.

The BBC’s Vote 2014 table is an example of what happens nationally. It’s authoritative up to a point, listing the parties’ seat numbers and net gains or losses. But then, right at the bottom, after all the parties, the Independents,  and even the council-less, member-less Socialists, we have No Overall Control 32 (8 net gains). And, of course, it’s still there, six weeks later and possibly in perpetuity – the media’s limited interest in local elections having completely evaporated after the horse race bit.

However it’s used, NOC is an unsatisfactory term – conjuring up, for the highly-strung, alarming images of packs of out-of-control, newly elected councillors roaming the streets wreaking who knows what havoc, for apparently the next four years. It’s more seriously misleading too, as noted recently by Democratic Audit (DA), the blog run by the LSE’s Public Policy Group. NOC gives no hint that a perfectly conventional governing administration will be formed, probably within days, but signifies only that no single party has a majority of council seats.

Moreover, in excluding from the lists of councils gained and lost those in which a party has the largest, but minority, share of councillors, it distorts the parties’ true performances – this year at the expense of the Conservatives and Lib Dems. Their councils ‘won’ would increase respectively by a third (41 to 58) and a half (6 to 9), if their NOC councils were added, compared to Labour’s barely 10% increase (82 to 91).

But Democratic Audit’s greater concerns are with the bigger democratic picture, with the lazy NOC label as but one of a whole catalogue of ways in which all of us – and particularly the civically disengaged young people politicians claim to be so concerned about – are kept lamentably under-informed about all aspects of local elections.

This is the crucial point, and it stems, like so much else, from the huge difference in the public and media attention paid to national and local government. Given the pre-election scaremongering in 2010 about the dire consequences of a hung parliament – from a run on the pound to more or less the end of western civilisation – there was immense pressure on the leading players to come up with something that could be sold to us as at least short- and optimistically medium-term ‘Control’.  So we were informed of this outcome, the Coalition Agreement, almost literally within an hour of its settlement.

In local government, all too often, we’re never officially told of the outcome – not even the residents and electors of the NOC councils themselves – as was highlighted this year not just by DA, but also by Local Government Chronicle editor, Nick Golding. During its local elections coverage, LGC monitored councils’ and local newspaper websites – with not just disparate and depressing, but often downright ‘incomprehensible’, findings. It was disappointing, suggested Golding, if “perhaps unsurprising … that some newspapers buried their coverage or failed to work out how individual results could change the political complexion of an authority”.

“What was incomprehensible was the failure of many authorities to highlight their polls. Many council homepages made no reference to the elections and hid elections news in obscure corners; many seemed incapable of promptly posting the results for each ward or revealing how their chamber’s political make-up was changing as a result. Others seemed to think it was the job of someone else to tweet results.”

Of all the defining characteristics of local authorities, the one that most differentiates them from the other local bodies with whom they increasingly work, and that gives them their unique legitimacy, authority and accountability, is surely their direct election. As Golding exhorts:

“Local elections are therefore a big deal. Councils should do everything in their power both to generate excitement about the poll and ensure people know their representatives’ identity. Such tasks are not gimmicks – they are essential components of serving as place leaders. If councils cannot show an interest in their own elections, it is hard to see why their residents should.”

‘Everything in their power’!  Yes, indeed, but let’s at least start by eliminating the ‘incomprehensible’. What Golding and I find truly incomprehensible is why scores of councils should CHOOSE NOT to announce – on the home page of their websites and at the earliest opportunity – the overall result of their local elections; PLUS how, within a single click, voters and residents can find their own ward results – vote totals and percentages, turnouts, and whether gained or retained – and the equivalent for the whole council.

Ultimately, though, even more important than results are outcomes. If one party has an overall majority of seats and will in all probability form a one-party administration, this too should be indicated – with, if felt necessary, the date of Annual Meeting at which this will be formally confirmed. And, for the NOC councils considered here, there should be some brief explanation of the implications of no one party having a majority, and again an indication of when the prevailing inconclusiveness will be resolved.

Right, grumbling mainly over; time, overdue, for a change of mode – from moan to puff. As ever with local government, some authorities already do these things exemplarily – one example cited in the INLOGOV Briefing Paper for which this blog is a promotional puff, being West Lancashire BC, whose only two parties exited the elections with 27 seats each and facing a three-week hiatus until the council’s AGM. Prominently on the council’s website, within days, was a model holding statement of the “next step for the Borough’s political management structure”, explaining that the incumbent Conservative Mayor would have the casting vote at the Annual Meeting, and that therefore the new Mayor would probably be another Conservative, who in turn would have a casting vote in the determination of the Council Leader of a likely Conservative minority administration.

It was informative without appearing, given West Lancashire’s political culture, to compromise officers’ political neutrality; also predictively absolutely spot-on. It was, though, at the ‘helpful’ end of a really rather a long scale – at the other end of which were the councils who took several days even to post their election results, and those who still treat councillors’ party identifications as if they are Official Secrets, refusing to divulge even those of executive members until you go to their individual contact details.

Anyway, the thing is that such councils do exist and, to adapt the much parodied advert, I’ve crawled through their various hoops so that you don’t have to – if indeed it ever occurred to you to do so. Structured around the accompanying table, it provides in one place a record of the eventual outcomes of the elections in this year’s 30 NOC or hung councils (32 if you add  two mayoral authorities), and of how, particularly in some of the more noteworthy cases, these outcomes emerged.

2014 Election results table

Let me conclude, then, with one summary and one taster paragraph. Single-party minorities are undoubtedly the current NOC administration of choice, outnumbering 20 (13 Conservative, 6 Labour, 1 Lib Dem) to 10 two- or multi-party coalitions, the cause of the latter possibly having suffered from events at (the Palace of) Westminster. The coalitions, though, are striking for their almost Cleopatran infinite variety. The Lib Dems are involved in 8: 4 with Labour, 3 with Conservatives, and in Weymouth & Portland’s all-party administration with both. The Conservatives are involved in 6, Labour in 5, Independents, themselves of impressive variety, in 7, Greens in 1, and, depending on whom in Basildon you believe, UKIP in 1.

If there’s a positive by-product of having to ferret out from councils’ websites information that should be readily accessible, it must be the serendipity factor: you do occasionally come across quirky or gossipy stuff you didn’t previously know. Like, in alphabetical order, the new administration committed to getting on first-name terms with officers and staff (Brentwood); the political group whose acquisition of just one additional councillor necessitated a name change (Colchester); the city with probably the least love lost between its MP and council leader – of the same party (Peterborough); the council where UKIP took power from Labour and then gave it back again (Thurrock); the council whose first and only UKIP member is one Francis Drake (Weymouth & Portland); and finally, the council (some of) whose members seem least inhibited about confirming the public’s worst suspicions of politicians’ motives (Worcester).

game

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

Strengthening democracy and participation: routes to re-connection and engagement – a provocation

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Catherine Durose

This post is based on a provocation which I posed at INLOGOV’s recent Summer Symposium. It is an attempt to move on the conversation about engagement between local government, other public institutions, citizens and communities.

It is unlikely that anyone attending the Symposium – or indeed, probably reading the INLOGOV blog – has not had a conversation about either the desire or difficulty of re-connecting government and other public institutions with local communities and citizens. We may agree that this is an important conversation to have, but why is it one that we keep having? Why despite years of this issue being high on the policy agenda and the subject of so much academic research, why does it feel like little has changed?

A common response is that this lack of change is the fault of citizens: there is little appetite from citizens to engage, they are apathetic.

What is often neglected, is that apathy (which we could question in and of itself) is generative, it is a response to opportunities to participate which are often what Arnstein calls ‘empty rituals’ but it is also caused by a repeated undermining of citizens’ sense of agency and efficacy: as one activist said to me recently, ‘we felt we were being done to, over and over again’.

The reason that many of the attempts to ‘re-connect’ that come from local government feel stale, over- and misused, cynically applied, ineffective, and superficial; is because they often are, it is an appropriate reaction.

So how can we shift the conversation, using the words of Archon Fung, what are the ‘vision and grammar’ of alternative ways to re-connect: what are the principles and design that may move the conversation on a different way?

We may want to think about:

Vision…

  • Principles: how do we see democracy and accountability working in localism, it is about building consensus or allowing space for contesting power and creating alternatives? What are the underlying values that we are seeking to advance? What kind of world do we want to create?

Grammar…

  • Intermediaries (boundary spanners, civic entrepreneurs, community organisers, deliberative practitioners, active citizens, 21st century public servants): who are those individuals who are able to build ‘vital coalitions’ to make things happen and get things done in neighbourhoods and communities? How can we support and facilitate their work?
  • Organisational change: How can we challenge a culture in local government that often struggles to let go, where officers and members thinks they’re in charge, second guesses, patronises the public, but also to find a starting point for a conversation that resonates with people?
  • Institutional design: What are the democratic potentialities in institutional design? Do we need to start with a perfect design or can we work it out along the way? Can we mix, match and merge?
  • Tools: Can a different medium be a different message? Can using spatial or visualisation tools, geo-apps help to change the parameters of the conversation and let citizens shout a little louder?

How can we use these different ideas to go from the inspiring, yet marginal, to the ‘new normal’?

Related blogs from the Summer Symposium can be read here

 

duroseDr Catherine Durose is Senior Lecturer in INLOGOV and Director of Research for the SChool of Government and Society at the University of Birmingham.  She is co-author of the forthcoming book, ‘Re-thinking public policy: why co-production matters?’ for Policy Press.

 

 

 

Re-valuing The Public

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Teresa L. Córdova

When we are on the ground getting the policies implemented, or perhaps even making the policies, we focus on doing what we can get done. One of our first questions is, “what are the constraints, the limits of what is possible (or probable), given current fiscal conditions, regulatory structures, or political dynamics.” In focusing on getting done what is more likely in our power to influence, we might also make the decision to leave the more difficult – or nearly unattainable – goals behind. Working under conditions of limited government resources, our focus might be to accept the constraints of the “changing times” and focus our efforts on budgets, minimizing as much as we can, cuts to vital services. We might implement strategies for “efficiency,” introduce new technologies, or shift organizational structures. We work with what we got; we adapt; we innovate. As politician, as manager, as innovator, as activist, we act with the best of intentions. It makes sense; it is a way for good-minded people to be engaged, to contribute.

Does it also make sense to evaluate our choices to engage in these ways? Does it make sense to ask about the implications of given actions as to whether they contribute to solutions or unintentionally exacerbate the problems? How might our choices with respect to local governance, for example, strengthen or weaken our mechanisms to govern ourselves in ways that promote the collective good? Because if we look closer, we can make the connection between the conditions that exist at the level of local governance (i.e. insufficient revenue and decreasing ability to deliver) as part and parcel of the same set of dynamics that are creating disparities that threaten the foundational fabric of our communities.

Though we may be at the ground level attempting to sustain both the public sector and its value to local governance, we might remember that the cuts to public sector budgets didn’t just happen. There are economic interests that with their power have directed wealth to themselves through tax and regulatory policies – thus depleting the revenue base of the public while adding to its costs. The concentrated wealth does not however, make its way to job creation and shared benefits. Instead, anti-government rhetoric makes government itself the scapegoat and further erodes the public’s belief that government should be valued. All of this makes way, for the further privatization of government functions and policies that serve, not the public interest necessarily, but the drive for generating profit through the administration of those functions, e.g. prison industrial complex in the U.S.

Under conditions of our stewardship with its limited power, how might we sharpen our abilities to get at the root cause for the conditions we face, perhaps change, but at least not make worse? We might ask, does our approach to democracy and local governance strengthen the collective good or take us to the door of furthering the demise of the public sector, or more to the point – the public’s commitment to itself. Hopefully, the desire to salvage from what is possible does not deliver us deeper into the entrenched logic of furthering the concentration and centralization of power, decision-making and wealth. The choices that we make in how to address conditions of reduced revenue streams, new technology and pressures for privatization will either reinforce the very forces that create those conditions – or challenge them. We need to pay attention to our policy choices, their logical extension and their implications. Articulating values of the collective good, making way for multiple stakeholders, working in coalitions and partnering with citizen organizations are among the strategies that we can employ to re-create – and strengthen the public, for the public.

 

 

Teresa L. Córdova, Ph.D. is Professor in Urban Planning and Director of The Great Cities Institute, representing UIC’s Great Cities Initiative and commitment to its Urban Mission.  Professor Córdova is an applied theorist and political economist whose focus is community development and Latino Studies.  She approaches her work as a scholarship of engagement in which her research, pedagogy and service are integrated.  She studies the impacts of globalization on Latino communities with particular interest in global/local dynamics.  Throughout the span of her academic career, Professor Córdova has engaged with communities outside the university and is an expert in community/university partnerships.

The 2014 local elections – a preview

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Chris Game

Two EU countries this May will hold local elections that coincide with their European parliamentary elections: Greece and ourselves. On Sunday 25 May Greeks vote in the second, ‘run-off’ round of elections to all their 13 regions and 325 municipalities. England, though nearly five times as populous as Greece, also has 325 lower-tier and unitary authorities. We, however, will elect mostly only fractions of fewer than half of our councils, yet still it takes seven lines of a table to summarise the 161 authorities whose voters on Thursday 22 May will probably have both a local and Euro vote. We bemoan our disappointing local turnouts, but we don’t make the system exactly voter-friendly.

game

Inevitably, the Euro elections will dominate the campaign, and the all-out London borough elections will dominate the local results. In this preview too – though less so in the longer INLOGOV Briefing Paper – all-out elections are accorded priority.

May 2010, when most of this year’s retiring councillors were elected, was Labour’s second worst parliamentary election performance in 80 years. Given a different context, though, its local and particularly its London election performance would have been justifiably celebrated – three boroughs won directly from the Conservatives (Ealing, Enfield and Harrow), seven more from No Overall Control (NOC), and more London seats than the Tories for the first time since 1998.

There’s no mystery about the national-local discrepancy – just two big reasons: the four-year electoral cycle and the General Election-boosted turnout.  The seats up in 2010 were those contested in 2006, when Labour’s estimated 26% of the national vote barely topped the Lib Dems’ 25% and was way adrift of the Conservatives’ 39%. By 2010 that 13% national vote gap had halved, bringing big Labour gains in both votes and councils – thanks partly also to hugely increased turnouts of over 60%, benefiting the large parties, especially Labour, at the expense of minor ones.

Of nearly 1,600 minor party and independent candidates in London, just 23 were elected: 2 Greens, down from 12 in 2006 (Camden, Lewisham); 1 Respect, down from 15 (Tower Hamlets – now 2); no BNP, and no UKIP – though the party has since reached double figures, mainly through Tory defections. This year turnouts will be down again, and minor party representation – including, but not only, that of UKIP – equally certainly up.

London is not a UKIP priority, and its best prospects may be in those boroughs where it already has defectors – Hounslow, Merton and Havering (from the Conservatives), Barking & Dagenham (from Labour). But UKIP influence – countrywide but particularly in London, where electors have potentially three local votes – will also be more subtly felt through vote-splitting, helping Labour to gain control, or possibly the Lib Dems to retain it, where they might not otherwise have done so.

With its long-term opinion poll lead, though, it is again Labour that will be expecting to win councils as well as seats. Back in early January, Sadiq Khan, Shadow Minister for London, announced the party’s ‘suburban mindset’ strategy, and its five Outer London ‘battleground boroughs’ – Conservative-controlled Barnet and Croydon, and the currently hung Harrow, Merton and Redbridge.

The latter are the proverbial low-hanging fruit. In HARROW Labour actually won a majority in 2010, but then, as described in a blog at the time, lost it through splits and defections, handing control to the current Conservative minority administration.  In MERTON it took minority control, strengthened it through Conservative defections to UKIP, and achieved a good result in last summer’s Colliers Green by-election.  In REDBRIDGE the Conservatives and Lib Dems signed a partnership agreement just as their leaders were doing the same at Westminster. In all three boroughs Labour will be aiming for majority control, in Redbridge for the first time ever.

In CROYDON the Conservatives narrowly retained a 4-seat majority through an electoral system rewarding nearly 19% of Lib Dem voters with no councillors at all. Here too a modest swing would give Labour an equally workable majority, and more than justify the party’s decision to employ a full-time agent.

BARNET, though, seems an altogether tougher proposition. Numerous issues have incensed residents – from the ‘One Barnet’ mass privatisation of council services, through the closures of libraries and children’s centres and the scrapping of sheltered housing wardens, to the ever-contentious increased parking charges.  But Labour has never won more seats than the Tories, and to do so would require a nearly 10% swing plus the Lib Dems clinging on to their three very marginal Childs Hill seats.

Labour’s last listed London target is the TOWER HAMLETS mayoralty, held by the controversial Independent and Labour expellee, Luftur Rahman.  Opponents have accused him of everything, from dubiously selling off and granting planning permission for the hotel conversion of the listed Poplar Town Hall to trying to buy his own re-election, but little of the mud really seems to stick and it may, if anything, boost his support. Panorama recently had a go, following which Eric Pickles sent in his inspectors – though not to report back until well after the May elections.

The other four mayoral contests all involve incumbents who were elected in 2002 and are now seeking their fourth consecutive terms: Jules Pipe (Hackney), Steve Bullock (Lewisham) and Robin Wales (Newham), all Labour, plus the Lib Dem Dorothy Thornhill in WATFORD. All four have their policy initiatives and successes, but only Thornhill can claim in addition to have totally recast the politics of her town and council.  Watford in 2002 was an apparently permanently Labour-run town. Yet its voters chose as their mayor a Lib Dem councillor and assistant head teacher, whose party coattails have since transformed the council chamber to the extent that two-thirds of members today are Lib Dems.

Returning to London, with the Lib Dems’ local election performance having collapsed almost as grimly as its national poll ratings, the party’s two majority-controlled London boroughs are bound to be under scrutiny. SUTTON they’ve held since 1990 and, although they lost one councillor to Labour, arithmetically at least they look safe for another term. In KINGSTON UPON THAMES, though, with one councillor resigning to sit as an Independent, plus a lost by-election following their disgraced leader’s imprisonment, their 2010 six-seat majority now hangs on a single seat – and on the hope that UKIP may take votes from the Conservatives in the right places.

The other all-out elections are those caused by boundary reviews, two resulting in slightly enlarged unitary councils and two in smaller district councils. MILTON KEYNES has been run in the recent past by all three major parties, and since 2011 by a minority Conservative administration.  Labour will be aiming to become at least the largest party on the new, enlarged council.  SLOUGH, it is totally safe to say, will continue to be Labour. In THREE RIVERS the Lib Dems will seek to maintain the majority control they’ve held since 1999; and in HART Labour will be wistfully recalling when it last won even a ward – in 1976.

Of the 36 metropolitan boroughs, Labour already controls 29 and so has little need of a target list here. Of the two Conservative councils, TRAFFORD looked the more vulnerable even before the recent shock resignation of Matt Colledge as both council leader and councillor. Having reduced the Tories’ majority to 3 in a recent by-election, Labour will hope to win its own for the first time since 2003. The SOLIHULL Conservatives look securer, partly because their principal challengers, the Lib Dems (now 9), have been defecting to the Greens (now 7), who will be seeking to supplant them as the official opposition.

The West Yorkshire trio of Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees have all been hung since at least 2000, but this could be about to change.  In BRADFORD Labour’s 2012 hopes of turning its minority control into a majority were thwarted by the coattails effect of George Galloway’s parliamentary by-election victory for Respect. The coattail councillors all resigned last October to become Independents, and Labour should make it this time.

KIRKLEES and CALDERDALE travel in parallel. Five years ago, both boroughs were run by Conservative minorities, which were replaced by Labour-Lib Dem coalitions, which were succeeded in turn by Labour minority administrations. In both boroughs all three main parties have groups numbering at least double figures – a measure of the difficulty any one party has in trying to win an overall majority. Arithmetically Kirklees looks the more attainable for Labour, but the party would probably have to take seats from the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens. In Calderdale, in the wards being defended that require swings of less than 10% to change hands, Labour is unlikely to be the chief beneficiary, having finished in second place in 2010 in just three to the Conservatives’ ten.

In STOCKPORT, the Lib Dems now have only minority control of their metropolitan flagship, and are defending 12 of their 29 seats. Labour is the leading opposition, but, having finished second in only two of them in 2010, its gains may be limited. Already the largest party in WALSALL, its chances should be better. If it won the same wards as in 2012, but without this time losing a couple of others to Independents, the party could gain majority control for the first time this century.

game

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

Councillors and their disappearing pensions

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Chris Game

There’s no doubt about the domestic conversation topic of the past week: pension pots. Which for many councillors, following a budget with little good news for local government – unless you’re a pothole hoping for a makeover under the Chancellor’s ‘potholes challenge fund’ – must have felt like being kicked when already down. No tricky Lamborghini or Bugatti choice for them. Their ministerial April Fools’ Day gift is having their Local Government Pension Scheme policies terminated at the end of their current term of office, and barred to their successors.

To put it in context, only a minority will be affected, they’ve had fair warning, and it’s unlikely their constituents, should they hear of it, will be overly distressed. There is another perspective, though: the democratic one – which, by chance, is being debated in Strasbourg this week by the Congress of Regional and Local Authorities of the Council of Europe (CoE).

The Congress of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with the wholly different Council of the EU) is the representative voice of Europe’s 200,000 regions and municipalities in the 47 CoE member states. Its function is to promote local democracy, which it does in myriad ways, including writing expert monitoring and advisory reports – like that being presented in Strasbourg, on the state of local democracy in the UK.

Disappointing and worsening would fairly summarise the report’s verdict, which is particularly critical of our councils’ highly centralised grant funding, their very limited local tax base and financial discretion, and the severity of the budget cuts imposed on them through the Government’s debt reduction programme. The effect can be to leave elected councillors, “the backbone of the local government system”, unable to exercise properly their political choice of weighing the benefit of services provided against the cost to the local taxpayer or user.

Ministers, by contrast, would seemingly prefer a completely invertebrate system. As the CoE report politely put it, they prefer and promote a “part-time logic of engagement” for councillors, who should see themselves not as paid elected representatives, but as altruistic volunteers – like scout troop leaders, the comparison chosen by Conservative Chairman, Grant Shapps, in a BBC Today interview last year.

European observers’ basic difficulty with this ‘logic’ is a linguistic one. They’re used to the ‘local’ in local government meaning, well, local – as in local pub, or shops, or school, or bus stop; stuff in one’s locality or neighbourhood.

They accept the French are a bit extreme with their 36,000 communes, whose mayors and roughly half-million councillors they are currently electing, and all of which constitutionally have more powers and service responsibilities than our district councils.

But, even excluding France, their Europe is one in which the bigger countries’ most local tier of government comprises several thousand local councils, with an average population of 8,000. England has just 325 equivalent councils with an average population of 160,000, and consisting – in cases like Cornwall (population bigger than Luxembourg), and Northumberland (area the size of Trinidad and Tobago) – of what even we until recently called ‘county’, rather than ‘local’, government.

And that’s our councillor problem. Successive national governments have taken a Tescoesque approach to local authorities and their elected members.  Instead of “Pile’ em high, flog ‘em cheap”, it’s been “Make ‘em huge, and pay ‘em peanuts”.

It’s a logic that bewilders advocates of local democracy like the CoE, who would prefer local government on a recognisably local scale, but also accept that there is a choice. If you want councillors to be genuinely part-time volunteers, then the size of councils, of councillor workloads and their ward electorates has to be kept manageable by sufficient numbers of such volunteers.

But if, in the interests of what you consider to be efficiency, you want enormous councils, huge budgets, large wards and the smallest number of councillors you can get away with, then you should acknowledge the time commitment that’s inevitably involved and allow them to be paid accordingly.

Trying to have it both ways – humungous local authorities run by overstretched, parsimoniously paid part-timers – is a recipe for poor quality government and a betrayal of local democracy. For many councillors, the apparent choice is: get out and leave it to those who don’t need the money, or grab what financial compensation you legitimately can through other means, like pensions.

Ministers should recognise the phenomenon, because it’s essentially the same as they and their parliamentary colleagues do: making up what they consider their inadequate salaries by ‘stretching’ their expenses. The difference, of course, is that MPs do get salaries, of £66,400, while the average councillor’s basic annual allowance – before PAYE and National Insurance deductions – is around £7,000 and already incorporates a Public Service Discount of between 25 and 50%, in explicit recognition of the principle of council work as voluntary service.

Despite Labour’s pledge to vote against abolition in Parliament, the Blair Government’s intention, when it first proposed extending council employees’ Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) to councillors, was to restrict eligibility to those receiving Special Responsibility Allowances.

Not surprisingly, the Local Government Association (LGA) wanted the LGPS open to all councillors, arguing that any differentiation on the basis of work patterns would be both discriminatory and unhelpful to the cause of attracting and retaining councillors. But it was the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority who ruled that, for pension law purposes, all councillors should indeed be treated as employees, and therefore entitled to join the LGPS – which is what happened.

Ministers invariably label them ‘gold-plated’ or ‘taxpayer-funded’ pensions – as if councillors themselves made no contribution. They do, of course, but the package is undeniably attractive. It’s a tax-approved, career-average scheme with retirement and death benefits based on years in the scheme and average pay over those years in basic allowances and SRAs. Councillors contribute a flat-rate 6% of their current allowances, with the council paying the employer’s contribution, at a fluctuating rate averaging, according to the Government, around 22%.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) found that in 2010/11 over 4,500 or one in five UK councillors were enrolled on the LGPS – at an estimated annual cost, now quoted authoritatively by Ministers, of £7 million.

Numbers, though, aren’t really the issue.  Nor, apparently, is making any coherent case for change – the best the Government has bothered with being that allowances look a bit like a salary (a mini-salary, presumably), which could blur the distinction with paid employees, compromise councillors’ independence to represent their communities, and so have a negative effect on local democracy.

Really?  A more negative effect than gratuitously insulting and financially punishing your local democratic representatives?  Intriguing argument.