Democratic renewal

Renewing Democratic Leadership

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Jason Lowther and Sonia Bussu

Legislative Theatre with West Midlands Combined Authority

As local government in England undergoes significant restructuring, with fewer councils serving larger and more diverse populations, the role of councillors is under pressure. At the same time, democratic innovations, such as citizens’ assemblies, or creative methods of participation, such as legislative theatre and digital engagement, are gaining traction. These innovations offer new ways to engage communities and strengthen democratic legitimacy.  But how do they fit with the role of elected councillors?

Recent research and practice suggest that councillors can play a crucial role in facilitating inclusive and impactful citizen participation.

Politicians’ Views on Participation

Across the UK and Europe, many elected representatives have expressed support for citizen participation in policymaking. They see it as a way to build trust, improve decision quality, acknowledge a wider range of perspectives and knowledge, engage citizens more deeply in political life, and potentially identify novel solutions to politically difficult issues. However, research by Kersting shows that this support is often conditional. Councillors tend to favour participatory instruments that reinforce their representative role, such as advisory boards or structured consultations. They are more sceptical of online platforms and randomly selected citizen assemblies (so-called minipublics), which they worry may not be genuinely representative of their electorate and may lack the capacity to understand complex issues.

Werner and Marien’s comparative experiments in Sweden and the Netherlands provide further insight. Their work shows that participatory processes consistently increase perceptions of fairness. This matters because fairness perceptions are closely linked to trust, policy compliance, and perceived legitimacy. Importantly, these effects are not limited to winners (who support the outcome of the exercise); even those who lose in participatory decisions tend to view the process more positively than in purely representative settings.

These findings highlight a tension. While democratic innovations can enhance legitimacy, councillors often feel uncertain about their role within them. Without open discussion, clear support, and integration, these processes risk bypassing councillors altogether.

Reimagining the Role of Councillors

Inlogov’s 21st Century Councillor research offers a compelling framework for renewing councillors’ roles. It describes councillors as hybrid connectors who build relationships both online and offline, multi-level diplomats who navigate partnerships across governance layers, and system stewards who shape democratic innovation and institutional change.

To fulfil these roles, councillors need support. This includes help to understand democratic innovations and any potential concerns.  They need understanding of key areas such as facilitation skills and digital engagement, confidence in narrative-building around democratic innovation, access to mentoring from peers with experience of these approaches, opportunity to explore difficult scenarios, and chance to reflect on their practice. Councils must also empower community members to scrutinise participatory outputs, and help councillors to navigate tensions between citizen input, officer advice, and party lines.

The Camden Model: Embedding Participation

Camden Council offers a practical example of how participatory processes can be embedded within representative governance. The council has institutionalised citizens’ assemblies as regular tools for major policy development, including planning, climate change, and health and social care. Assemblies are commissioned by council boards, which commit to formally responding to recommendations. In the case of the 2019 Climate Assembly, all 17 proposals were endorsed and integrated into Camden’s Climate Action Plan, with the citizen’s assembly referenced throughout the document.

This approach demonstrates how local government can lead participatory processes, ensuring they are not just consultative exercises but integral to policy development. However, several recommendations from the Camden climate assembly extended beyond the council’s jurisdiction, highlighting the structural limitations of local deliberative processes in addressing systemic issues like the climate. Councillors could have played a stronger bridging role, helping to clarify expectations and ensure that recommendations were grounded in the council’s remit. Stronger involvement from elected representatives might have thus enhanced democratic accountability.

Inclusive youth engagement in policymaking in the West Midlands

There is much more to learn and do to make democratic innovations more inclusive and effective, supporting participation from historically marginalised groups, which tend to ignore invitations to participate in citizen assemblies or formal consultation exercises.

A recent example of inclusive approaches comes from the West Midlands, where the INSPIRE project, led by the University of Birmingham, used legislative theatre to engage young people in shaping youth employment policy. Legislative theatre is a method developed by Augusto Boal that uses performance to explore lived experience, test policy interventions, and co-create solutions. It involves watching a play co-created by the participants on real issues and based on their lived experience. During the event, an audience of community members and policymakers become spect-actors, acting out alternative scenarios, proposing policy changes, and voting on them in a public forum.

The University of Birmingham partnered with the Young Combined Authority and Youth Focus West Midlands to recruit a diverse group of 15 young people (14-17 years old) who, under the guidance of legislative theatre practitioners, developed a play about barriers to work experience and youth employment. Through performances and structured dialogue with policymakers, they co-created six policy proposals. These include reforms to careers advice, work experience, and employer accountability.

Crucially, policymakers were invited to participate not just as observers but as co-creators and champions. Their involvement can help bridge the gap between lived experience and institutional action, demonstrating how local government can play a central role in democratic innovation for social change.

Councillors as Democratic Innovators

Democratic innovations in Camden and the West Midlands are two examples of how local government can promote democratic renewal. Councillors can and should play more central roles in these processes, beyond party politics, to facilitate and nurture dialogue between citizens and institutions, ensuring follow-through on recommendations, and using committee structures to embed participatory outputs.

Rather than seeing participation as a threat, councillors can embrace it as a tool to strengthen their representative role and reconnect with communities. They are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between citizen voice and institutional action. This requires a shift in mindset and practice.

Dr Jason Lowther is Director of Inlogov (the Institute of Local Government Studies) at the University of Birmingham, and was Assistant Director (Strategy) at Birmingham City Council from 2004 to 2018.  His research focuses on the use of evidence in public policy and central intervention in local government.

Dr Sonia Bussu is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham Department of Public Administration and Policy where she studies and teaches public policy. Her main research interests are participatory governance and democratic innovations, and creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement. 

This article was first published in the Municipal Journal, 25th September 2025, available online here: https://www.themj.co.uk/renewing-democratic-leadership

Picture credit: Inspire Legislative Theatre, March 2025 – photo by Bucuria Maria Polodeanu – Insta: @reelmasterproduction

Openness of council finances is key for a functioning democracy

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Matty Edwards, Research For Action

Local authorities are under immense pressure to find savings whenever they can. After more than a decade of austerity, the collective deficit in the sector is expected to reach £9.3bn by next financial year. Local authority finances have also become increasingly speculative, as budgets are prepared on the basis of unpredictable grant allocations and single-year financial settlements, sometimes without audited accounts. Pressures to find new sources of income through commercial investments and private sector partnerships have also increased the complexity of council funding.

This creates a challenge: scrutiny of local government finance is more important than ever. Yet even with the best intentions, local authorities struggle to produce open and accessible financial information. 

In a research collaboration between Research for Action and the University of Sussex, we set out to explore how financial information — such as council budgets and accounts — could be made more accessible to the public. Our research found that even experienced researchers, accountants and councillors struggle to find and understand local authority financial information.

We spoke to 26 people from the local government sector over three months this spring to examine barriers to making local authority financial information accessible to councillors and the wider public. Interviewees included councillors from a range of authorities, council officers, academics, accountants, journalists and key sector bodies like CIPFA. 

Our key findings were a lack of standard reporting requirements, strained council capacity after years of austerity and a fragmented data landscape with no standard formats for publishing financial information. These barriers make it difficult to understand a single council’s finances and make comparisons across the sector, hindering effective scrutiny by councillors and journalists, and democratic participation by the public. 

Some interviewees argued that accessibility was less of a priority in the face of a mounting crisis in local authority finances, but in our view, openness is not a luxury. It is key to effective local democracy. 

How to improve open up council finances

Based on our findings, we set out a series of recommendations for greater transparency and openness. 

The government should introduce new data standards for local government to improve accessibility, potentially via a Local Government Finance Act. This should include making financial information machine readable where possible and using accessible file formats. An easy win in this area would be to create a single repository for all local government financial information.

Local audit reforms are also an important piece of the puzzle. The new Local Audit Office (LAO) should be made responsible for local government financial data, including making it publicly available with tools to enable comparison and oversight. A more ambitious idea for the new LAO could be to create a traffic light warning system for the financial health of local authorities based on indicators that are timely and easy to understand, taking inspiration from Japan. 

Council accounts were highlighted as a particularly technical and opaque part of local government finance. That’s why councils should be mandated to attach a narrative report to their annual accounts, as previously recommended by the Redmond Review.

We think that the Local Government Data Explorer, recently scrapped, should be replaced with a data visualisation that is genuinely accessible and interactive, perhaps taking inspiration from a dashboard created by academics in Ireland. There should also be funding for local open data platforms, because there have been isolated examples of successes, such as the Data Mill North. 

The other part of the problem is that councillors often don’t have the knowledge and skills to properly scrutinise the complicated world of local government finance. That’s why we’re calling for greater support and training for councillors to enable better financial scrutiny, as well as public resources to improve literacy around local government.

While the sector faces great upheaval in the next few years through local government reorganisation and English Devolution, these reforms also present an opportunity to improve transparency – whether that’s at unitary or combined authority level. 

We believe that greater openness will ultimately facilitate better public participation and healthier local democracies.

Matty Edwards is a freelance journalist based in Bristol who also works for Research For Action, a cooperative team of researchers that in recent years has investigated PFI, LOBO loans, the local audit crisis and scrutiny in local government.

Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement

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Jason Lowther

The Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) has published a new report, Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement, which sets out a compelling case for reimagining the relationship between local authorities and the communities they serve. At a time of structural reform, fiscal constraint and lower public trust, the report argues that citizen engagement must become fully embedded local governance, rather than a peripheral activity.

The report identifies three interrelated conditions that are essential for effective engagement. First, local authorities must convene inclusive democratic spaces that enable deliberation, dialogue and collective decision-making. These spaces, whether in the form of citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting or neighbourhood forums, can help to rebuild trust and foster more responsive policymaking.

Second, councils must invest in building community capacity. This involves supporting citizens, particularly those from groups whose views are often neglected, to participate meaningfully in public life. It also requires sustained investment in community infrastructure, such as local venues, networks and organisations, which provide the foundations for civic engagement.  The report recognises that 15 years of austerity since 2010 has significantly reduced the availability of community meeting places such as libraries, neighbourhood offices, youth and community centres, and cultural and leisure services.

Third, the report highlights the importance of co-producing public services. By involving service users in the design and delivery of services, councils can ensure that provision is more closely aligned with the lived experiences and priorities of local people. Co-production also fosters innovation and strengthens the legitimacy of public institutions.

The report draws on a wide body of academic research and practical experience, both in the UK and internationally. It shows that democratic innovations are already taking root in many councils, despite the challenges posed by austerity and institutional inertia. Examples include digital engagement platforms, youth-led initiatives, and the devolution of powers to neighbourhood and parish levels.

However, the report also acknowledges the barriers that councils need to address. Organisational cultures, limited resources, the need to develop new skills in officers and members, and legitimate concerns among elected members about the implications of participatory approaches can all inhibit progress. The report calls for leadership, reform and investment to embed engagement in the everyday practices of governance.

We pay particular attention on the vital role of councillors, who are well placed to act as facilitators and mediators between communities and institutions. Supporting councillors to develop these roles is essential if engagement is to be sustained and meaningful. The report also emphasises the need to engage young people and to make appropriate use of digital tools.

In conclusion, Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement offers a clear and evidence-based framework for strengthening local democracy. It argues that by embedding citizen engagement in governance structures and practices, councils can foster trust, improve outcomes and build more inclusive and resilient communities.

We will be discussing our findings with councils, central government and related think tanks and sector organisations over coming months.

The full report is available here:

Rewiring local government for citizen engagement_WEBDownload

Dusting down the cautious welcome: Initial reflections on the devolution white paper

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Phil Swann

When I was director of strategy and communications at the LGA I was frequently criticised, by the late professor John Stewart among others, for issuing press releases “cautiously welcoming” one Blairite initiative or another.

The criticism was probably justified, but I would definitely have deployed that phrase in response to the government’s recently published devolution white paper.

There is undoubtedly a lot to welcome, not least the stated commitment to devolution, the additional powers for metro mayors, the revival of strategic planning, its reference to struggling small unitary councils and the focus on audit and standards.

There are, however, at least four reasons to be cautious.

First, every serious reformer of local government since George Goschen in the 1860s has argued that local government finance and structures should be reformed together. No government has ever had the political will or energy to do so. This government has also ducked the opportunity. As a result, this white paper will not fulfil its potential.

Second, the current mess and confusion in the structure of English local government is the result of incremental change. Just think of Peter Shore’s “organic change” and Michael Heseltine’s ill-fated Banham Commission. There is a real danger that this government will run out of restructuring energy or time. The contrast with Scotland and Wales, where local government was reorganised in one go, could not be starker.

Third, the effectiveness of the structures being proposed will depend on the quality of the relationships between mayors and councils, between councils and parishes and between ministers and mayors, councils and parishes. In England we are not good at relationships like these and there is precious little in the white paper to signal the trust, effort and imagination that will be needed to make these relationships work better than the previous ones did.

Finally, key to the revival of local government and effective devolution is a revival of citizen engagement in local politics and local governance. Word has it this will be addressed in a forthcoming white paper, but it should be central to this one.

So, a very cautious welcome it is.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on central-local government relations at INLOGOV.

Local Democracy in Crisis?

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Peter Hetherington

Battered by fourteen years of austerity, is local government losing its once-proud standing and status? Probably. For a start, It’s no longer as ‘local’ as it should be. And it certainly isn’t ‘government’ as we once knew it.


These days, we sometimes tend to lump ‘democracy’ and ‘crisis’ together in a global context, forgetting that close to our doorsteps – in countless civic centres, town and county halls – there’s another crisis: restoring faith in local democracy, while sustaining councils literally facing insolvency.

At a hybrid event, organised by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Newcastle University, we asked a simple question at the start: Do we need a new, positive direction for once-powerful towns and communities where meaningful democracy has disappeared as local government has withdrawn?

We attracted a great range of speakers putting, broadly, two cases: first for a new local government structure in England based on economic geography embracing combined authorities for big city areas alongside large county-wide single purpose unitary authorities, underpinned by a more equitable funding formula; and, secondly, for varying degrees of town and parish governance, sustained by participatory democracy, including citizens assemblies, with powers – parks, libraries, leisure facilities for instance – devolved from existing larger authorities. Often, such an asset transfer is born out of necessity because larger councils can’t afford to keep them anyway and parishes/towns can raise money through a council tax precept while sometimes creating stand-alone community interest companies.

The case for a genuine new ‘localism’ appeared strong. That’s because, currently, a continuing process of abolishing councils to create larger units with few, if any, local roots has created a sense of powerlessness, a collective loss of identity with little or no attachment to people and places. Fifty years’ ago England had almost 1200 councils, from the smallest urban/rural district to the largest city. “We were run by our own,” recalled the writer, broadcaster and ultimate polymath Melvyn Bragg, in his 2022 memoir ‘Back in the Day’. Born in Wigton, Cumbria, his small town had a rural district council (which I knew well): “We could challenge the elected councillors who made the decisions” Bragg continued. “They were not a separate cadre…they were just people you had been to school with…(approach) on the street…to whom you could write a personal letter knowing it would be read, considered, answered.”

No longer. His council disappeared in 1974. Today, after several rounds of ‘reorganisation’ under the dubious label of efficiency – although there’s little concrete evidence of cost saving – that number has been reduced to 317, with little if any public debate. A forthcoming devolution White Paper is expected to advocate more reorganisation and even fewer councils in a country where local authorities already cover much larger areas than in mainland Europe.

Against this background, it’s probably no surprise that Carnegie UK, in its recent ‘Life in the UK’ index, reports that a lack of trust in politics and government is undermining collective well being. Three-quarters of people, says Carnegie, feel they can’t influence decisions. Surely reconnecting them begins locally. But how local?

If the government’s approach so far is a broad definition of ‘taking back control’, could an over-arching contradiction be emerging? Will the apparent obsession with more all-purpose councils, the prospect of an all-unitary England – similar to the structure in Scotland and Wales – make people feel even more distant from power, disaffected? Carnegie insists that restoring faith in democracy should be the Government’s ‘mission of missions’.

If that’s one challenge, there’s another, interlinked: the crisis of financing local government, with 7 councils theoretically insolvent and many more heading that way; legally, they can’t go bust and have been forced to borrow the equivalent of pay-day loans on a mega-scale to stay afloat, adding to a debt mountain. Now Conservative-run Hampshire has said issuing a section 114 notice – prelude to technical insolvency – is “almost inevitable”, with a sting of others close behind. And as Prof Andy Pike, and Jack Shaw have outlined in their recent excellent, but chilling paper (‘The geography of local authority financial distress in England’) 96% of English councils won’t balance their books by 2026-27.

Of course, alongside that unparalleled financial crisis in local government, we’re also facing an alarming democratic challenge nationally with the lowest turnout ever recorded in the recent general election; almost half the electorate didn’t vote! Surely, the place to renew trust in the democratic process begins at the grass roots, perhaps reviving some of the 10,000 town and parish councils, some of which want to take over functions from larger authorities (some are obliging out of necessity). Could this – call it double devolution – provide one small way forward?

I’m aware there’s a danger that events, like the latest one at CURDS addressing the crisis in local democracy, can produce a combination of hand-wringing and hot air. But, hopefully, we concluded with a practical, positive outcome. As Professor Jane Willis, geographer and champion of community empowerment – now in Cornwall- noted: “It’s not all gloom and doom – there is good news.” In her county, communities are taking back control, again out of necessity – a really positive story and a lesson for elsewhere? Willis advocates a new social contract under a layered system of local government to “re-franchise” people.


In the meantime, the chair of the event urged those present to make their views known to MPs, and the government, as the forthcoming devolution White Paper foreshadows a pre-legislative consultation process. As Professor Andy Pike, of CURDS, noted in summing up, one leading question needed answering above all: “What is local government for, and how to fund it?”


All we know so far is that the White Paper, according to the Treasury, will include …“working with councils to move to simpler structures that make sense of their local area with efficiency savings from council reorganisation helping to meet the needs of local people…”. Contradictory or otherwise – will more larger councils “make sense” of local areas? – we must surely intensify a campaign for a genuine new ‘localism’, embracing places, communities, towns and some cities now without any form of local government. That doesn’t necessarily mean sidelining the case for a new – and/or revised – local government structure in England tied to a ‘needs’-based funding formula. The current one favours the richer parts of the country and penalises the poorest with the lowest tax bases.


But the time for national government to act is during the first year or so of a new administration. It assuredly won’t go down well with the ‘middle England’ target readership of – say – the Daily Mail. There’ll be howls of protest. But it must be a priority to bring a sense of fairness to a deeply unequal country and, equally importantly, deliver some hope to voters in the so-called ‘red wall’ seats who either returned to Labour at the last election or voted for an ascendant Reform. We live in a fragile democracy. Restoring faith in government, local and national, begins in community, neighbourhood parish and town. We need the Labour government to think big and act local. We haven’t much time.

Peter Hetherington is a British journalist. He writes regularly for The Guardian on land, communities, and regeneration.  He is also a vice-president, and past chair of the Town and Country Planning Association, former regional affairs and northern editor of The Guardian and the author of the 2015 book, Whose Land is Our Land? The use and abuse of Britain’s forgotten acres, and the 2021 book, Land Renewed: Reworking the Countryside.

The Little Black Book of the Populist Right

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Jon Bloomfield

The spectre of the Populist Right haunts our politics: Farage and Trump, Orban and Le Pen. Why and how has this reactionary movement managed to redraw the political map from Warsaw via Workington to Wisconsin? Co-written with playwright David Edgar, our Little Black Book of the Populist Right is a crucial analysis of one of the greatest challenges of our time. Who votes for the 21st century demagogues eroding our politics – and why? What structural forces have aligned to enable their rise to power around the world?

In one short book, we provide a concise, accessible history and analysis of the Populist Right.

  • How the failures of globalisation – wealth inequality, outsourcing, the instability of global financial markets – and the retreat of social democratic parties from their traditional defence of ‘the labour interest’ and public services has left the space for cynical right-wing demagogues to exploit and come to power under the guise of “taking back control”.
  • How its ideology of national populism rewrote the right’s playbook, throwing up charismatic, often racist leaders, who appealed to new coalitions of abandoned voters.
  • How descendants of the interwar far right sanitised their parties, new anti-immigration movements emerged in Europe and the populist right invaded existing mainstream parties in Britain and America.

The book exposes the fallacies, flaws and fantasies of national populism. It tackles head-on the ideas of its main ideologues – the 4 Gs: Matthew Goodwin, David Goodhart, John Gray and Maurice Galsman. It then shows how progressives can fight back.

To halt the forward march of the populist right, we argue for a new paradigm, a progressive, bold vision of an alternative globalisation; a politics built on empathy and solidarity; new industrial and urban development strategies; and much, much more.

“Combines clear and concise analysis with a compelling case for action” Professor Jonathan Portes.

“A brilliant book” Neal Lawson, Director of Compass.

“Vital reading” Helena Kennedy KC

Available in all good bookshops £9.99 or on-line. Populist Right — Byline Books

Dr. Jon Bloomfield. Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.