Elections

Oops!  We lost two Mayors – let’s overthrow a sensible system

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Chris Game

I assume it was the 2021 mayoral election results that finally clinched it. With the Conservatives winning just two of that year’s 13 mayoralties to Labour’s 11, it was time to enact the party’s 2019 manifesto pledge – “to continue to support the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system of voting, as it allows voters to kick out politicians who don’t deliver, both locally and nationally”.  Specifically, the Supplementary Vote (SV) system – despite also, like electoral systems generally, featuring the kicking-out of politicians – had to be replaced for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections asap.

True, the counting of electors’ supplementary – second preference – votes had just enabled West Midlands Conservative Mayor, Andy Street, to be re-elected with the useful perk of a narrow overall majority of votes cast, along with the party’s rising star, Tees Valley’s Ben Houchen, who’d swept in with nearly 73% of first preference votes.

No supplementary second round necessary there, but nor should there have been, reformers reckoned, in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, where the established Conservative Mayor, James Palmer, had been a victim of the dastardly SV ‘system’. He’d comfortably led Labour’s Nik Johnson after the count of first preference votes – by nearly 18,000 votes or 8%. Yet, by some foul trickery, or possibly because he simply wasn’t as broadly appealing his opponent, after the counting of relevant second preference votes, he’d fallen behind: 48.7% to new Mayor Johnson’s 51.3%.  Despite Government Ministers repeatedly claiming that “the candidate with the most votes” lost, he hadn’t. He’d won – he just wasn’t Conservative.

Anyway, Palmer threw what looked like a wobbly, promptly retired from politics, and SV elections for Mayors and PCCs would be retired with him, though not in time for last May’s Mayorals, which very nearly produced a Croydon re-run of that Cambs & Peterborough result. First count: Jason Perry (Con) 34.8%, Val Shawcross (Lab) 32.7%. Second count: Perry 50.4%, Shawcross 49.6% – the candidate with the leadership-resonant first name just edged it.

By then, though, the FPTP legislation was well under way. The next Mayoral elections – this May – would use FPTP, as will next May’s PCC elections. It seemed a good time for a review of the whole SV lifespan, facilitated by the invaluable statistical records of my polling specialist friend, David Cowling.

Quickish review: the Supplementary Vote is obviously not a proportional system, which would be tricky when electing single Mayors, Police & Crime Commissioners, etc.  Rather, it’s a simplified majoritarian system, enabling voters to rank their two most favoured candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference.

If no candidate gets over 50% of first preference votes on the first count, just the top two candidates continue to a run-off, thereby encouraging candidates from the outset to seek support beyond their core supporter base. The winner may still get less than half the total vote, but will need significantly wider support than under FPTP, and especially under FPTP with a lowish turnout.

Both, however – ultra-topical insert – are more democratic than this past weekend’s Spanish ‘mayoral’ elections, in which Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, almost certainly the nation’s best-known mayor both at home and abroad, is seeking a third term of office … but as Leader of a two-party socialist coalition – for Spanish mayors aren’t even elected by ‘the people’, but indirectly by fellow councillors.

The name – Supplementary Vote – may have been new when it was ‘invented’ by an early 1990s Labour Working Party, but essentially similar ‘preferential’ systems had been quite widely used internationally for ages. France’s Presidential ‘double-ballot run-off’ was one example, but most obviously there was the Alternative Vote – the actual subject of Winston Churchill’s senseless but oft-recycled quote, about it rewarding “the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates” – although today’s Conservative critics have no difficulty unearthing and redirecting it to SV.

I’m old enough to recall lecturing about the SV’s UK ‘invention’ by a Labour Party working party in the early 1990s and the even then revered ‘psephologist’, the late Sir David Butler, getting uncharacteristically incensed about it – calling it “silly”!  But his sphere of matchless expertise was parliamentary elections, with turnouts at the time of consistently over 70%. Even they, though, have slipped a bit since, and well over a third of today’s MPs won less than 50% of their constituency vote, and that’s an awful lot of voters left feeling unrepresented.

Local (including mayoral) election turnouts, however, are proverbially in another ballpark – and this is probably the blog’s key point. Except when they coincide with parliamentary elections, they average around 40%, and that’s on good days. PCC turnouts, unsurprisingly, are significantly lower still – not one of the 39 areas in England and Wales managing even 51% in May 2021, and Durham and Wiltshire not quite achieving 17%.  All of which, under FPTP, will mean large percentages of the votes of the most civically conscientious and politically committed citizens being ‘wasted’ and, arguably even more importantly, the mandates of the elected mayors and PCCs correspondingly diminished.

And then there’s the loss of the visual aids – for SV also produces what I only recently discovered are called ‘Sankey charts’, illustrating how the second-round count both produces a winner able to claim a statistical majority of positive votes and a dramatic reduction in the proportion of ‘wasted votes’ – on the part of voters choosing not to make use of their possible second choice. Good, isn’t it!

The Supplementary Vote, then, still favours the two main parties, but, returning to recent history and as shown in the following table, one in three of the 67 SV Mayoral elections going to second counts were won by Lib Dems, Independents and other parties. Labour won by far the most mayoral contests, but they also lost most in second counts. All of which contributes to SV hovering around mid-table in global democratic rankings of electoral systems – nothing to shout home about, except when compared with FPTP’s ranking as ‘least democratic’, apart from maybe Djibouti’s ‘Party Block Voting’.

SV’s statistical merits apply in principle to any elections, but particularly to a set in which two-thirds of turnouts were under 50% and nearly a third under 40% (see table). First, it hugely reduces the number and proportion of so-called ‘wasted votes’ – those cast for neither of the leading two candidates – and secondly it ensures that the winning candidate can claim the majority backing not necessarily of all voters, but at least of those the system counted.

My presumptuous guess would be that West Midlands PCC Simon Foster likes knowing, and possibly even mentioning now and then, that he was elected with 53.7% of the vote, rather than 45.5%. And, while I don’t know any of these people, that Surrey PCC Lisa Townsend (one of 12 women PCCs, if you were wondering) definitely prefers her 58% to 33.5%.

Time to start closing, by checking out the arguments Ministers sought to make to justify their replacement of SV with FPTP – or, rather, plundering the critique the Constitution Unit’s Alan Renwick and Alejandro Castillo-Powell made at the time.

  1. That SV increases the number of spoilt ballots – possibly, very fractionally; but, if so, why not work on improving ballot paper design?
  2. It allows ‘loser candidates’ to win – stupid argument (see above); they won the election they were required to contest.
  3. It reduces the accountability voters have in expressing a clear choice – but increases it by saving them from calculating how best to cast their single vote ‘tactically’ to elect or defeat a particular candidate.
  4. “FPTP is the world’s most widely used electoral system.”  Tricky – needs its own separate blog; also a bit silly. Depends a bit on whether you mean number of countries or number of voters. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the US give FPTP a head start. More to the point, a 650-Member legislature isn’t the same as a single elected mayor or PCC.
  5. SV is an “anomaly … out of step’ with other elections in England.” True, it was decisively rejected in the 2011 referendum for the election of MPs, but these are the country’s only public elections to executive offices. In short, they’re completely different.  

None of which, of course, stands the remotest chance of influencing, never mind changing, anything … but it was quite enjoyable to ‘research’ and write!

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.

Picture credit: Theresa Thompson at www.flickr.com/photos/theresasthompson/

Local councils must work harder at enabling women to be councillors

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Picture: Haringey Council’s 2022 cabinet

Jason Lowther

Local councils can and must do more to enable women to be councillors. Haringey’s new cabinet shows that this can be done, but fifty years after all government elected officials across the UK were finally elected under universal suffrage, new research shows barely a third of local councillors and MPs are women, whereas earlier research showed less than a quarter of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) candidates were women.   This matters not only in terms of democratic fairness, but because politicians’ characteristics impact on public policy.

The research published last week by the Fawcett Society and Democracy Club reflects councillor representation in August 2022 across the UK.  To collect the data, they had to scrape individual council websites since (incredibly) there is no official record of councillors’ gender (or other protected characteristics).  This is because the relevant section of the Equality Act 2010 has still not yet been enacted and in any case as drafted would apply only to candidates in national elections.  This is in contrast to council staff, where the Equality Act applies and has led most councils to capture and publish reasonably detailed assessments of workforce equality issues – as shown by the recent SOLACE / Shared Intelligence report, ‘Understanding and Improving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Local Government Workforce’ which we discussed on the blog last autumn.

The Fawcett Society / Democracy Club results show no party yet has parity of representation between women and men, but some are doing much better than others.   The highest proportion of women is found in the Labour Party (47%) and the lowest in the Conservative Party (29%), the SDLP, DUP, and Ulster Unionist Parties. 

Source: Gender representation on local councils, Fawcett Society and Democracy Club (2022)

At individual council level, the highest proportions of women councillors were found in Haringey (65%), Rossendale (61%), Brighton and Hove (56%), Lewisham (56%), and Southwark (56%).  In contrast, Perth and Kinross, Pendle, Comhairle nan Eileen Siar and West Berkshire each have 15% or less of the council made up of women councillors.

One effect of having fewer women decision makers may be that issues that disproportionately affect women are given insufficient attention.  Policymakers play key roles in promoting status-based policies.

Recent research by Professor Francesca Gains (University of Manchester) and Professor Vivien Lowndes (Inlogov) published in the journal Politics & Gender in 2021 analysed the effect of Police and Crime Commissioner’s gender on policymaking around violence against women and girls (VAWG).  An earlier quantitative phase of their research found that policy prioritisation was linked to Police and Crime Commissioners’ own gender, with female PCCs twice as likely to prioritize VAWG.  Their later research analysed how this difference occurred, identifying ‘seven sets of rules that have shaped policy prioritization in favour of VAWG: the right to make key appointments; the requirement to set policy priorities; the obligation to utilize equalities duties; the power to commit resources; the expectation of partnership working with other agencies; the commitment to hold operational police officers to account; and the maintenance of diverse channels of contact with victims of crime and the wider public’ (Gains and Lowndes, 2022, p. 396).

To improve the situation, the Fawcett Society / Democracy Club report makes recommendations to government, political parties and local councils.  For councils, the key actions are:

  • implement parental leave policies, to make being a councillor more accessible to those with caring responsibilities;
  • ensure that caring and dependency allowances reflect the real cost of childcare and are accounted for separately from ‘main’ members’ allowance;
  • pilot alternative ways of working including online and hybrid engagement mechanisms to enable councillors with caring responsibilities to carry out their duties more effectively; and
  • adopt codes of conduct, based on the model developed by the LGA in 2020

Local councils can only be truly effective when they represent the communities they serve.  The Fawcett Society report is a timely reminder that we have a long way to go, but the first steps are clear and practical.

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham

Reference

Gains, F. and Lowndes, V. (2022) ‘Identifying the institutional micro-foundations of gender policy change: A case study of police governance and violence against women and girls’, Politics & Gender, 18(2), pp. 394-421.

Mission Possible? 

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Jason Lowther

With under 700 days to the next UK general election, political parties are busy developing their manifesto documents.  In February, Labour leader Keir Starmer made a major speech laying out his “five missions for a better Britain”.   How do these five missions relate to local government?  And is the turn to “mission driven” government likely to work?

The five missions vary in their level of specificity and challenge.  Securing “the highest sustained growth in the G7, with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country…” is a little vague but likely to be difficult, especially given we are currently ranked 6 out of 7 in terms of output per worker.  Mission #2, “make Britain a clean energy superpower”, accelerating the move to zero-carbon electricity from 2035 to 2030, is specific but very challenging.  Mission #3, reform of health and social care and reducing health inequalities, will require a re-focus from secondary (hospital) care to social care and addressing the social determinants of health.  Mission #4 is about community safety, and likely to involve more community policing.  Finally, mission #5 is to “break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage” through reform to the childcare and education systems.

Local government potentially has important roles in each of the five missions.  Local education, skills and economic development functions will be critical to improving productivity.  On energy, Net Zero requires at least a doubling of electricity generation by 2050, from decarbonised sources.  Decarbonisation strategies need to be place-based, taking account of the geography, building types, energy infrastructure, energy demand, resources and urban growth plans.   We’ve recently argued here for the key roles of councils in this area. 

Turning to health and care services, local government clearly has leading roles – including ensuring place-based planning to address the social and behavioural causes of health inequalities.  Analysis by the Liverpool and Lancaster Universities Collaboration for Public Health Research in 2021 concluded: “investment across the whole of local government is needed to level up health including investment in housing, children’s, leisure, cultural, environmental, and planning services”.  Similarly community safety, child care and education are areas where local government could be enabled to have much greater positive impact.

Perhaps as important as the specific “missions” is the approach to governing which the party is proposing.   Labour’s document characterises this as a move from top-down, target-led, short-term, siloed approaches, to government which is more “agile, empowering and catalytic”, working across the public and private sectors, and civil society.  This, it argues, requires organising government around a shared vision, focusing on real world outcomes, concentrating on ends with flexibility and innovation concerning means, devolving decision making from Westminster, increasing accountability including central and local data transparency, and adopting long-term preventative approaches including greater financial certainty for local areas. 

In some ways the idea of mission-driven government echoes the 1990s thinking of Ted Gaebler and David Osborne’s book “reinventing government”, which argued for a more entrepreneurial approach to the delivery of government.  Their work pointed to entrepreneurial companies setting overall missions and goals, and then leaving managers to figure out how best to deliver these – for example, by providing an overall budget for a service rather than detailed line-by-line budgets which disappear if not spent by year end.  The focus on managers rather than considering the perspective of politicians is one of the problems identified in subsequent evaluations of the reinventing government model, together with difficulties in sustaining the approach.

Mission-driven policies addressing ‘grand challenges’ of society are increasingly common, for example in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and various EU policies.  Mazzucato et al recently argued that addressing such challenges requires strategic thinking about: the desired direction of travel, the structure and capacity of public sector organisations, the way in which policy is assessed, and the incentive structure for the private, public (and I would add community) sectors. Labour’s paper makes a start (albeit at a very high level) on thinking through these areas. The litmus test, though, will be in developing the detail and how far this engages with local areas.   

Over the next few months, we will be contributing to the debate on the upcoming party manifestos with some research-informed thoughts on a variety of local government related policy areas.  If you would like to be involved in developing these, please get in touch. 

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

Picture credit: BBC

Responding to National Populism

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Picture credits: https://www.spiked-online.com/ and https://unherd.com/

Jon Bloomfield

The playwright David Edgar and I have written a two-part essay for Byline Times which was published before Xmas. It focuses on the role of two distinct web-sites – ‘Unherd’ and ‘Spiked’- in shaping the debate on culture wars and promoting national populist ideas across British politics. Here is a brief summary of the essay, full links below.

So, now the dust is settling, what is the ideological future of the Conservative Party? With kamikaze supply-side Trussonomics so thoroughly discredited, will Rishi Sunak and his – relatively – big-tent Cabinet return to a 2020s version of Cameronian fiscal austerity? If so, what happens to the Johnsonian cocktail of high public spending and social conservatism which proved so palatable to the voters of the Red Wall? And what is the role of online ideologues – notably writers for the websites Spiked and Unherd – in the battle for the party’s soul?

British national populism has proved much more than just a short-term political tactic, unexpectedly successful in the Brexit referendum and re-conceived as an election-winner three years later. Like the free market ideologues of Tufton Street, national populists are organised into influential groups of intellectuals and political campaigners who have gained considerable reach into mainstream media. The role of The Spectator is well-known but this article focuses on the profound influence of two websites: Unherd and Spiked. 

What makes these sites so significant and successful is that many of their lead writers originate not on the right but on the mainstream and indeed the far left, and now promote ideologies that seem contradictory but – in practice – are increasingly allied.

The emergence of national populism has seen strange, paradoxical political alliances emerging within the two main political parties exemplified by the Red Tory and Blue Labour tendencies. Even stranger has been the ideological overlap between the website of a formerly Marxist, now right-libertarian think tank and the main online home of anti-liberal communitarianism. So why – on the issues that are tearing Britain apart – do Spiked and Unherd appear to be bedfellows?   

Both are prolific sites supplying a daily flow of political and cultural commentary. Spiked is an outgrowth of the  Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which developed an increasingly eccentric version of Trotskyism with its magazine Living Marxism. Launching the website Spiked in 2000, its cadres – including former RCP guru Frank Furedi, polemicist and now Brexit-supporting peer Claire Fox, and Munira Mirza, later to become Boris Johnson’s policy chief  – continued the RCP’s trajectory towards anti-statist, economic libertarianism while retaining its original Leninist discipline and capacity for harsh polemic. 

Unherd has more conventional origins within the Conservative party.  Its founder Tim Montgomerie set out its stall in Prospect arguing for a “social Thatcherism,” which would re-balance “from a conservatism of freedom to a conservatism of locality and security.” Montgomerie argued that within the Conservative Party “the magnetism of national sovereignty has finally overtaken the magnetism of free markets.” However, Unherd has also attracted former left polemicists, including ex-Labour-supporting, Prospect-editing journalist David Goodhart – now ‘Head of Demography, Immigration and Integration’ at the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange; academic turned national-populist advocate Matthew Goodwin; trade union activist and anti-woke campaigner Paul Embery; and the ex SWP-flirting, Tory-convert vicar Giles Fraser. 

The reason for this unexpected cross-fertilisation of ex-Trotskyites, traditionalist Tories and communitarian, socially-conservative Labourites is their ideological alignment on many of the key cultural controversies of the day. A fervent commitment to Brexit and belief in the unreformed UK nation-state are central, but what gives the two platforms their raison d’etre is the consistent vitriol directed at the mainstream left and the new social movements that have emerged around it over the last few decades. A bitter animosity against social liberalism and a caricatured ‘woke’ left is their most distinctive, current and common thrust. Their ideas – particularly on multiculturalism and the ‘woke agenda’ – have been eagerly lapped up by the mainstream right-wing media. 

Within the Sunak government, in their various ways Kemi Badenoch, Michael Gove and Suella Braverman are all signalling their wish to return to the national-populist ‘culture wars’ agenda. Like their counterparts in Europe and the US, the national-populists want to roll-back the advances that have been made in the past 50 years. The likes of Spiked and Unherd are crucial propagandists in this battle. In particular, these two sites have mounted a consistent assault on progressivism on the major social and cultural issues of the day: climate justice, feminism and anti-racism. On three of the great social issues of our era – climate change, women’s inequalities and structural racism and discrimination – the editorial lines of Spiked and Unherd are marching in lockstep, deploying similar arguments and even phraseology, to minimise the issues or to deny that there’s any problem.

National-populism has its own logic. Mobilising ethnic nationalism; arousing fears about race and religion; attacking social liberalism; overtly or covertly promoting the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. All lead in just one direction.

This is a moment for liberals, progressives and the Left to wake up. 

It’s time for them to draw on their own history and re-build the alliances that have led to so much social and economic progress in the past.  In the more variegated, less homogenous world of 21st Century capitalism, finding the ways to navigate common ground between movements and build cross-class alliances is more important than ever.

The provocations of Spiked and Unherd stand in the way. At a moment when the hard-Right is showing a readiness to indulge in racist and nationalist politics reminiscent of dangerous eras of the not-too-distant past, it is time for progressives to prioritise unity, rebuild alliances which have done so much good in the past, and direct their firepower at their main opponents.

Red Tory to Blue Labour – How Spiked and Unherd are Keeping National Populism Alive – Byline Times

Fighting Back Against National-Populism – Byline Times

Jon Bloomfield has been involved with the EU’s Climate KIC programme for over a decade, helping to develop educational and training programmes and experimental projects which help companies, cities and communities to make effective transitions to a low carbon economy.

Voter ID – in theory, practice and mirrors

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Picture credit: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-the-governments-mandatory-voter-id-plans-are-a-terrible-idea/

Chris Game

“ID cards for polls are nothing more than suppression of voters” – D Butler. I’d forgotten precisely when and where I first read this pronouncement – May 2021 in The Times, as it turned out – shortly after the Government’s Elections Bill, now Act, was published. But I certainly remembered it.

Partly the phrasing, as personally I’d have gone for “nothing less than”, if I was hoping to galvanise readers into outraged protest. The seriously striking bit, though, was obviously the author.

Since first becoming fascinated by elections and electoral studies – thanks initially to Prof Richard Rose at the Univ of Manchester, then the late Prof Tony King at Essex – there has only ever been one D Butler in that file of my academic consciousness. Populariser of the Greekish word ‘psephology’ for the study of elections, and original authority figure in the BBC’s General Elections coverage: Nuffield College, Oxford’s Sir David Butler, who died earlier this month, aged 98.    

I knew him – distantly, but sufficiently to know he’d never have uttered anything resembling that strongly opinionated opening sentence – and, of course, ’twas not he. Rather, as I almost immediately realised, it was Dawn Butler: recent candidate for Deputy Labour Party Leader and, it so happens, MP for the London Brent constituency in which I first voted – shortly before she was born.

All of which might have excused a quickish blog return to the contentious Voter ID issue – within weeks of its last coverage – even if it hadn’t once more been prominently in the news this past fortnight, with Parliament finally getting its first full sight of the Government’s Voter Identification Regulations and the Electoral Reform Society leading the call for a parliamentary inquiry into its implementation.

The Elections Act requires voters, from next May, to produce photo ID at UK Parliamentary and most English local elections. And now, a mere six months or so later, we – and the local election officials required to implement them – finally have the Government’s list of acceptable forms of ID and proposed guidelines governing initially next May’s council elections: Coronation permitting, in most English councils – though not Birmingham, to save you checking.

The guidelines run to just the 344 pages, taking effect probably in January. Leaving already pressured election officials with minimal time (and as yet undetailed costs, beyond a ‘ballpark’ £180 million per decade) to process and issue electoral identity documents for those who gradually discover they don’t have acceptable forms of photo ID. Plus the near certainty that at least some would-be, and quite likely upset, voters will be turned away at their polling stations – which could add to the fun for the small army of volunteer poll workers.

At which point I should indicate my personal viewpoint. Instinctively – and certainly predating Birmingham’s own 2004 embarrassment of six Labour councillors getting elected through what was judicially described as a “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud campaign – I’ve long broadly supported, in principle, stronger election integrity rules in general and photo voter ID specifically.

And I have recounted in these columns the reactions of some of my overseas students to the frankly casual ID confirmation procedures they’ve observed when accompanying me to the polling station. Their surprise at the staff’s indifference to whether I’ve brought my poll card identification; and almost shock as I ‘helpfully’ point on the register to what I claim is my name and address.

So why my support in principle for photographic ID – as well as nowadays that of a substantial majority of voters themselves and the conditional backing of the independent Electoral Commission?  Simples!  Elections are the engines of our democratic system. They should be seen by all as important, and that perceived importance is diminished by not having visibly more robust voter identification procedures – like virtually all other ‘democratic’ nations.

On the Crime Prevention Research Center’s database of Europe’s nearly 50 such countries, “only the United Kingdom” does not require government-issued photo voter ID to vote in national elections.

Correction!  Not the UK, just GB. Northern Ireland introduced voter ID nearly 20 years ago, and now has numerous forms of acceptable photographic ID – including, as well as passports and driving licences, a free Electoral Identity Card, plus senior, disabled and blind persons’ ‘SmartPasses’.

Since when, the Electoral Commission has found that, far from prompting polling day protest riots, voters’ confidence that elections are well-run has steadily increased to at least match the levels in other UK regions[1]. The demonstrable message has been not that we elsewhere in the UK are uniquely virtuous and trustworthy – though even Ministers concede that fraud levels are minimal, if not invariably seen as such. Rather, it’s that for us – and successive Governments – voting has been seen as less big a deal than, say, collecting a parcel at a post office.

Until now, that is, following a decade of quite dramatic change in the voting behaviour of particularly our 18 to 24-year-olds. Their turnouts are invariably lower than the average, but still high enough to hurt. In the 2010 General Election these mostly fledgling voters split equally across the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, roughly 30% for each. By 2019, almost overlooked in the Conservatives’ overwhelming win, it was Labour 52%, Conservatives 28%, Lib Dems 11%.

That’s what evidently prompted the rush – not ‘personation’ or fraud, which for polling station voting are acknowledged as negligible. Rather, a possible early General Election campaign in which the Conservatives don’t start way ahead of the field. It also explains why the apparently generous range of 21 acceptable forms of ID is clearly weighted towards the better paid and over-60s. Older Person’s Bus Pass, Oyster 60+ card, Freedom Pass (66+), Scottish National Entitlement Card (60+), etc. – all welcome. Those particularly applicable to younger people, like Student ID cards or Railcards, remain “unacceptable”, as in the original legislation.

Yes, as in Northern Ireland, free ‘Voter Authority Certificates’ will be available – including online – and a public awareness campaign will remind you and your selfie to apply in time.  And no, none of this remotely approaches the legalised voter suppression we saw in some of this November’s American state elections. But – to coin a dreadful cliché – it’s from the same partisan playbook.

As are the £1.3 million-worth of 40,000 mirrors and privacy screens – one of each per polling station – that desperately cash-strapped councils must provide to check on would-be voters with religious face coverings. But they may well prove worth a blog of their own sometime before next May.

_______________________

A slightly publisher-edited version of this blog appeared in The Birmingham Post, 17th November – https://www.pressreader.com/uk/birmingham-post/20221117/textview

[1] Examples from the Electoral Commission’s ‘Winter Tracker’, Jan/Feb 2022:

   “Elections are affected by fraud/corruption?”  Total agree: 37%; W Midlands 37%; NI 30%.

Those “not confident that elections are well run: Some people have difficulties registering to vote”:                                          
Total agree: 20%; W Midlands 18%; NI 10%.

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.

Is Government Giving Value For Money?

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Jason Lowther

When money is short, how we spend it becomes even more important. As central government reheats its arguments for austerity following the chaos of the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the contents of the 2021 budget (just a year ago).  The 2021 budget set out not just spending plans, but also a souped up approach to measuring outcomes and cost-effectiveness of government spending. How are these playing out, and will they survive the No 10 merry-go-round?

Rishi Sunak, then eight months into the job as Chancellor, noted that government borrowing was relatively high after the pandemic, warned of the public finances’ exposure to rises in interest rates, and outlined how spending was being linked to the delivery of outcomes alongside across the board ‘efficiency savings’:

The fiscal impact of a one percentage point rise in interest rates in the next year would be six times greater than it was just before the financial crisis, and almost twice what it was before the pandemic…

Decisions have been based on how spending will contribute to the delivery of each department’s priority outcomes, underpinned by high-quality evidence. The government has also taken further action to drive out inefficiency; SR21 confirms savings of 5% against day-to-day central departmental budgets in 2024-25. (page 2)

The “priority outcomes” are the latest in a long line of attempts to prod government spending into delivering effectively on political priorities, rather than blindly increasing/decreasing by x % compared to last year.  A 2019 report from the Institute for Government helpfully outlines many of these earlier initiatives (summary from the House of Commons Library) including:

  • “Scrutiny programmes” and the Financial Management Initiative (FMI), introduced under Thatcher.
  • The Cabinet Office and Treasury set up the Financial Management Unit (FMU) in 1982 to help with creating plans under the FMI.
  • The “Next Steps” report, published in 1988, which recommended the establishment of executive agencies to carry out the executive functions of government.
  • Tony Blair’s administration developed a greater focus on performance targets and Public Service Agreements (PSAs) which put these targets on a formal basis.
  • In 2001, Blair’s government also set up the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU), which was intended to coordinate PSAs and bring them under more central control.
  • Under the coalition government in 2010-15, PSAs were abolished and replaced with Departmental Business Plans (DBPs). These shifted the focus from targets to actions – in other words, they listed what each department would do and by when, rather than what they sought to achieve.
  • Under the Conservative government in 2016, DBPs were renamed to Single Departmental Plans (SDPs), which were themselves renamed to Outcome Delivery Plans (ODPs) in 2021. According to the NAO, SDPs (and by extension, ODPs) are supposed to be “comprehensive, costed business plans”.

As well as having to write down what outcomes they want to achieve, and how they will know whether that is happening, under the SDP system departments were also required “to assess progress in delivering their priority outcomes [and] … share regular performance reports with HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office”. 

In the 2021 spending review, the departmental outcomes were spruced up to reflect the (now last-but-one) PM’s five priorities of levelling up; net zero; education, jobs and skills; recovering the NHS; and reducing the volume and harm of crime.  

This blog’s audience may be interested in “Where does local government fit in this compendium of key priorities?”  The answer is a little depressing: on the last line of the last page (page 30 of 33), just before the devolved government departments. The relevant outcome is inspiring enough: “A sustainable and resilient local government sector that delivers priority services and helps build more empowered and integrated communities”, albeit with the reassuringly non-SMART measure that “the department will provide narrative reporting on progress for this outcome”.  Of course I exaggerate, because local government has critical inputs to very many of the earlier outcomes too, but it’s hard not to conclude that local services and communities were not yet at the top of the ministerial attention list.

Will the “priority outcomes” survive the whirlwind of ministerial movements and unforced economic missteps?  After the last seven weeks, I’m not going to make predictions – but we should know in the next month, and alongside the financial figures they could be our best hint yet on where a Sunak government is heading.

Picture credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du_6mRV8Hm8

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther