The meetings of the North West London Joint Health Scrutiny Committee, which I Chair, don’t usually set the pulses racing but the recent one was an exception.
My committee’s job is to keep a friendly but critical eye on how the NHS North West London Integrated Care Board (ICB) delivers its budget of over £4 billion to the 2.4 million population of the eight NW London boroughs.
What made my committee’s recent meeting special was that information had leaked revealing ICB plans for major changes in GP ‘same day’ services, replacing the system of individual practice reception staff passing calls on to GPs with a new system in which far fewer “hubs” would pass 93 percent of calls to other staff, with only 7 percent to be handled by GPs. The ICB had planned to introduce the hubs by April 1 as part of its ‘single offer’ local enhanced service, with practices obliged to sign up to access the funding — effectively mandating the hubs. They were forced to delay by a storm of protest from GPs and our residents.
While my committee meetings are held in public, the members of the public aren’t usually allowed to speak at meetings, but on this occasion, I thought it right to ask Merril Hammer, a Hammersmith resident, Robin Sharp, a Brent resident, and Dr Vishal Vala, a local GP, to set the scene.
Merril spoke eloquently about the risks of triage or assessment in hubs by care co-ordinators or others who were not qualified or experienced GPs. The lack of any analysis of the impact on different groups and of proper risk assessment and of any reports from pilots was also of great concern.
Robin stated that Brent Patient Voice had urged patient involvement in any trials when the pilots were first mentioned, but the ICB had failed to listen. What had emerged to be implemented without any consultation with GPs had caused a great surprise and undermined the role of GPs as established since the NHS began.
When members of my committee gave voice to their questions and concerns, there was heavy criticism of the way in which the scheme had been developed by management consultants behind closed doors and without any prior engagement with the local government. There was concern that only long-term patients with complex needs would be referred to their GPs, when practices were made up of patients of all ages with needs that varied from time to time.
The ICB has now apologised for ‘poor communications’, arguing there had been ‘misunderstandings’ about triaging. They now talk of “co-production” with residents and local government at local level. So we look forward seeing the ICB’s plan for this and for wider engagement with the public as a revised scheme is developed.
Cllr Ketan Sheth chairs the North West London Join Health Scrutiny Committee
As I’ve aged, I’ve become ever keener to find mnemonic tricks that might help my increasingly faulty memory to recall potentially useful stuff – like, this week, key dates in the history of women’s suffrage. At some point somewhere during the extended celebrations of International Women’s Day (IWD) beyond March 8th, for example, there’s almost bound to be some reference to women gaining (or, in Afghanistan, losing/regaining?) the right to vote.
I used to lecture about this historic stuff and my women’s suffrage mnemonic was/is 1869, the year at least a few women – unmarried ratepayers in GB & Ireland – gained the right to vote in local elections. Which, while obviously not globally record-breaking, sounds tolerably progressive – until you deploy the mnemonic, reverse the central digits, and recall that women in the Dutch province of Friesland had been at it for nearly two centuries – or since 1689, to be precise.
This IWD contribution, unsurprisingly, is not about women gaining the vote, but how, in post-war Britain they’ve collectively been exercising it in successive General Elections. And it’s aided by the following striking graph, whose ‘gender gap’ approach was developed by Inglehart and Norris back in 2000. They and their successors duly updated it in successive elections, drawing comparisons/contrasts with other countries, but only in the past few years has it really come into its own, and for the obvious reason: that it’s so visually, and politically, striking – as the version prepared for me by the Birmingham Post’s editorial team demonstrates.
All but one of the first 19 bars/columns are blue, showing women as more likely to have voted Conservative by varying percentages up to a mighty 17% in the early 1950s. The sole exception was 2010, the first of the recent run of ‘hung Parliament’ elections, when men and women were equally likely to have voted Conservative, so no column at all.
It had become a truism: that, certainly in Britain, women were at least marginally more Conservative or right-wing than men in their voting behaviour. Until suddenly, in both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, they weren’t – in each case being a sizeable 12% LESS likely to have voted Conservative than men.
Some unknowable proportion of what was swiftly tagged our Flipping Gender Gap was undoubtedly attributable to women’s consistently greater enthusiasm for remaining in the EU, but those striking 2019 gender gap figures are still worth detailing. Conservative: 47% of men, 42% of women; Labour: 29% of men, 37% of women – representing a massive 18% Conservative lead over Labour amongst men, and just a 5% lead amongst women.
Which begs the obvious question of whether we’ll see something comparable this time, and, if so, to what degree? Or was it, say, Brexit in those two elections that produced a kind of two-off aberration? Either way, these ‘gender gap’ statistics will be among the most anticipated and intensively studied, as commentators prepare their voting forecasts.
Indeed, they already have been, the commonest immediate reaction from those who study these things, particularly following the 2019 election, being that “at last” UK women voters were catching up.
For the stats have shown that for years now many/most other established democracies – the US outstandingly, but also the Scandinavians, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Canada, even Italy – had seen the development of a modern-day gender gap, with women more likely to vote for left-leaning parties than men, while our gender gap showed the reverse.
No longer, then, did the UK seem to be bucking the global trend. As in these other democracies, as more women entered higher education and paid work, some at least became more socially and economically liberal and supportive of gender equality, pushing them to the left of men in their party choices.
Even just typing that ‘UK women voters’ label, though, I’m conscious of risking over-simplification. And indeed, it obscures significant and unsurprising differences across age cohorts. Younger women are considerably more likely to support Labour and less likely to support the Conservatives than younger men, but this modern gender gap lessens and eventually disappears among older voters.
So how will all this affect what happens in this year’s General Election? The estimable UK Women’s Budget Group commissioned a YouGov poll last autumn which reflected and updated some of the above findings – starting with almost a law of UK electoral politics: women take their time to decide.
Asked for their voting intentions, 18% of respondents hadn’t, with no election in the immediate offing, made up their minds: 11% of men and a full 25% of women. Those that had decided split very similarly between the major parties: Men – 20% Conservative, 31% Labour, 7% Lib Dem; Women – 17%, 31%, 8%.
The big difference came with the then Don’t Knows: just 11% of the men, but one in every four women. So, if they hadn’t then decided, perhaps they won’t vote? By no means: 13% of males were ‘would not voters’, and just 3% of females.
Probably not surprisingly, their policy priorities differ somewhat too. NHS and healthcare is highest ranked by all, but that was 48% of men and 64% of women. The economy was “most important” for 44% of men, but only 28% of women, and the reverse was the case for ‘Environment and climate change’ and ‘Education and schools’ – the latter ranked “most important” by 18% of women but just 9% of men.
And, to quote the ever-flexible Forrest Gump: that’s all I have to say about that – for the time being.
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.
In the Electoral Reform Society’s recent review of the King’s Speech the first “conspicuous omission” identified, ahead of democratically reconstituting the Lords and electoral reform, was the repeal of Voter ID – “an unnecessary step backwards for our democracy and should be scrapped before it causes any more damage”. Though I’m an ERS member, that’s not my personal view – as I’ve previously indicated, here and elsewhere – which is partly why I embarked on what has become a two-part blog, of which this is the second and – I promise! – final instalment.
Rationalising posthoc, the first part summarised the key data – published mainly by the Electoral Commission in its June Interim Analysis of the Voter Identification returns from Returning Officers, its September Demographic Analysis Research, plus its specifically Voter ID-related policy-and-practice recommendations. This second instalment covers, or at least references, some of the varying and more eye-catching reactions to all these data.
The first of which – partly for its comprehensiveness, but also because it provided the blog’s chosen title – is the early September review published on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of senior MPs and Peers on Democracy and the Constitution and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Undertaken by a cross-party panel chaired by Jon Nicolson (SNP), its four main conclusions were that:
The voter-ID system, as it stands, is a “poisoned cure”, disenfranchising more electors than it protects. It quotes the well publicised statistic of there having been just eight convictions/cautions for personation in person since 2013, plus that detailed in the earlier blog of more than 14,000 possibly entitled voters having been turned away by ‘greeters’ in May before even entering the polling station – sufficient, arguably, to have swung the result of up to 16 constituencies in the 2019 General Election.
The regime’s inherent ambiguity creates a real risk of injustice and potential discrimination.Most obvious – “shamelessly obvious” to quote the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee in her coverage of the topic – was the selection of documents acceptable as ID, discriminating particularly, but not only, against young persons: Oyster 60+ passes [requiring proof of name and address] acceptable, but not student IDs, library cards, bank statements, etc. The panel also noted that “independent observers” had recorded evidence of racial and disability discrimination at polling stations, with “non-white people being turned away even when they had qualifying ID, while some white people were permitted to vote without showing ID at all.”
The regime lacks the flexibility necessary to avoid injustices – being over-reliant on decisions made by polling clerks and presiding officers, against which there is no formal right of appeal.
The problems identified are systemic, but not fundamental – meaning that, with targeted reforms, the voter-ID regime can, as in many other states, be an asset to UK democracy. That was my emphasis, and, for what it’s worth, with all Europe and almost all developed countries requiring in-person voters to use photo ID, the panel give less emphasis to this point than I would have. A corollary of that point, however, is that these countries have polling station staff familiar with the demands of voter ID, and there is growing evidence of the need to address with some urgency the recruitment, training and retention of electoral staff.
Overall, the panel’s conclusion is that the regime should remain in place, subject to three main structural reforms:
Permit electors to ‘cure’ a failed ID check by utilising an existing mechanism in UK law and signing a declaration attesting to their identity and right to vote (as in Canada).
Broaden the range of accepted identification documents and in doing so set clear criteria for deciding which forms of ID are accepted.
Provide better training for polling station officers.
It’s a lengthy production (well over 100 pages, incl. research appendices) and a recommendable one for anyone new to the topic, not least in reminding us how the VID debate was actually kicked off – by a 2010 BBC Panorama investigation, leading eventually to a 2015 High Court case in which Tower Hamlets’ then Labour (and today Aspire Party) Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of involvement in a string of “corrupt and illegal electoral practices”, one of which was ‘personation’.
Whereupon the Cameron Government instructed its ‘Anti-Corruption Champion’, Sir Eric Pickles, to prepare a report examining electoral fraud – one of whose 50 recommendations was that it should consider options for electors having to produce personal ID before voting at polling stations. Which led in turn to the 2018/9 trials, which reported a degree of increased public confidence in elections where VID was required – but not, as the All-Party review notes (p.9), that “electoral fraud ranked consistently last in public perception of problems around elections” [and administrators’ perception – see table below], or that they are “far more concerned about political funding and the redrawing of constituency boundaries than about personation”.
If the legislation did eliminate personation, the APPG’s view was that this came at the cost of “disenfranchising” electors: preventing or discouraging certain electors from voting – considerably more than the recorded 14,000 or so without ID who failed to return after being turned away by polling station staff. Excluding those turned away by party political ‘meeters and greeters’, this number was considered for several reasons to be “a significant underestimate”.
The democratic cost, in the name of preventing in person personation – occurring, on average 0.88 times p.a. – was to deny at least 14,000 people the opportunity to cast their ballot, which is “unacceptable and unjustifiable”.
Politically, however, the Panel reckoned that even these probably undercounted numbers of non-returnees could potentially impact on a General Election result – two West Midlands examples being Sandwell and Walsall, where 1,135 and 797 electors (respectively) were turned away.
There is, obviously, a great deal more, but almost simultaneously other contributions were appearing on the scene, perhaps most noteworthy being the Local Government Information Unit’s The Impact of Voter ID: The Views of Administrators. Based mainly on a survey of 171 electoral administrators who helped deliver the May 2023 elections, some of these ‘behind the scenes’ views are almost inevitably predictable: that VID is just the latest of the pressures added to the burden of electoral administrators already contending with resource constraints, complex legislation, tight timetables, temporary staff recruitment, etc.; and that a General Election offers an “opportunity for serious disruptions” (p.5).
Perhaps most striking, though, appearing on the Introduction page (6), but without a word of direct reference, is the following bar chart. The words follow in the remainder of the report: yes, administratively elections in England have serious weaknesses: staffing pressures caused by “short timetables, convoluted legislation, inefficient processes and inadequate resourcing.” (p.11). Administrators’ question for this research is how voter ID has impacted on these issues, as well as, of course, on “personation in the polling station”.
And my carefully considered conclusion, following this attempted overview of the welter of reports and evaluations that appeared several weeks ago now? I should have done what I’ve habitually done for years in comparable situations: relied on the House of Commons Library, whose estimable staff – here Neil Johnston and Elise Uberoi – produced a characteristically thorough (and, unlike mine, unopinionated) 59-page Research Briefing covering pretty well everything I’ve attempted to. And, to quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that!
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.
It’s easy to claim, but there are times when I miss not having classes of students to endeavour to entertain – partly because, at least from a distance, it can seem rather easier now than back when I had that responsibility.
One gift I’d certainly have used during this year’s exam revision period was the YouTube rap video made by T-Dawg – aka Broadland and South Norfolk Councils’ Managing Director, Trevor Holden – ‘reminding’ intending voters in the May local elections to take photo ID with them to the polling station. Like the whole topic, the video received a mixed reception, but it certainly got my vote (sorry about that!) as an introduction to this split-blog’s attempted overview of the profusion of recently released Voter ID material. I’ve at least flick-read most of it, so you won’t have to worry about not doing so.
First, though, an additional declaration of personal interest, referring back to that opening paragraph. My students weren’t, of course, learning directly about ‘political literacy’, but high on my short list of ‘research stats I’ve managed to remember for more than a few weeks’ was the depressing finding in the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Political Literacy’s 2021 report that, of a 3,300 sample of secondary school teachers in England, only 1% [felt] “fully prepared” to teach courses aimed at developing young people’s political literacy.
The ”fully”, omitted in some reports, was in the question and doubtless partly explains the dispiriting response. But anyway the finding was highlighted by the APPG, led directly to the creation of the social enterprise Shout Out UK (SOUK), and these two bodies’ influence is clearly evident in some of the Electoral Commission’s recommendations for more focused information and awareness raising.
There had, of course, been earlier assessments of May’s elections – principally the Electoral Commission’s Interim Analysis in mid-June, reporting the anonymised returns from the Voter Identification Evaluation Forms (VIDEF) that Returning Officers were required to complete (see table below), plus results of three YouGov pre- and post-election public awareness surveys of between 1,700 and 3,700 adults each.
This first, stat-heavy part of the blog will present, in highly summarised form, some of the key data, with the second covering some of the more recent interpretative contributions – including that of the All-Party Parliamentary Group, from which I’ve appropriated the blog’s slightly giveaway title.
First, some scene-setting stats, taken from the final report. The total electorate was 27.3 million, ballot box turnout 32%. For the record, Labour took 33% of the vote and control of 70 councils; Conservatives 28.6% and 33; Lib Dems 37% and 20. 5.2 million postal ballots were initially issued to 19% of the electorate, 3.5 million (67%) of which were returned, of which 89,000 were rejected, mainly for missing or mismatched signatures or dates of birth. OK, it’s only 2.6%, but, after making the effort, it was higher than I might have guessed.
Key findings from the analysis included that:
Immediately post-election, in areas with elections, 92% of people in England were aware they now needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station. They weren’t asked, however, if that awareness extended to knowing that they couldn’t obtain ID – e.g. the Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) – on polling day itself.
Awareness was significantly lower (74%) among those who didn’t already have an accepted form of ID – and, unsurprisingly, among youngest age groups (82% for 18-24 year olds), Black and minority communities (82%), etc.
Approximately 89,500 people applied for a VAC before the 25 April deadline, some 28,000 certificates being subsequently used – i.e. under one-third of the 250,000 to 350,000 estimated likely not to have any other acceptable ID.
At least 0.25% of people (c.14,000) who had tried to vote at a polling station were not issued with a ballot paper because of the ID requirement, but this excludes those who reacted to the ID reminder before they could be recorded in the data – thereby inevitably underestimating, as do the post-election analyses generally, the actual impact of the voter ID requirement.
This was essentially the ‘headline’ picture we had to content ourselves with over the summer, until quite suddenly, come September, there was a whole lot more – and it seems logical, if not strictly chronological, to start with the Electoral Commission’s full-scale Voter ID Demographic Analysis Research. The analysis aimed to identify patterns in areas where relatively higher or lower proportions of intending voters were turned away from polling stations due to the new ID requirement.
18 authorities with apparently relatively socioeconomically diverse wards were selected, including the West Midlands’ Coventry and Sandwell – the latter being the sampled borough with the nationally highest “initially turned away” percentage of 3%. The Census-based ‘proxy’ variables measured were unemployment, ethnicity, household deprivation, and social renters.
Hyper-summarising, the analysis suggested there was “a potential linear relationship” between each selected socio-economic variable and the proportion of voters initially turned away and those who didn’t return to vote. These results are obviously tabulated, but also graphed, as illustrated in what is described as the “moderate relationship” between ethnicity and the proportions initially turned away.
Overall, 13 of the 18 authorities showed at least a moderate relationship between the independent variables and the proportion of voters initially turned away, and 6 exhibited “strong relationships between one or more independent variables”. Strongest correlations were with areas having a high proportion of non-white British individuals, higher deprivation, and higher unemployment.
Following this specifically Voter ID-focussed report, the Electoral Commission had published in June its overall Report on the May 2023 Local Elections in England, which it updated in early September. It made nine main recommendations, including increasing awareness of the support available for disabled voters, and improving data collection at polling stations.
Four, however, related specifically to voter ID: review the list of accepted ID; improve access to the Voter Authority Certificate (see above); improve options for voters who don’t have or can’t access any accepted form of accepted ID – e.g. allowing ‘attestation’ by a named and verified elector; and polling station staff to continue to collect voter ID impact data at future elections.
Which brings us to about mid-September, already some way over this blog’s preferred length, and quite the wrong time, therefore, to address the “poisoned cure” and other reactions to these primarily statistical analyses – which will follow, with luck, fairly shortly.
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.
A year’s gone and I’ve been given the OK to start year two of my PhD, but what have I achieved? Three passes in the taught modules on social science research and piles, nay heaps of reading.
And have I learned anything? That fairness is a complex subject. It is one of a number of moral behaviours that humans (and some other animals) have evolved over deep time to improve cooperation within groups. It’s innate, like language ability, and like language ability conceptions of fairness can differ depending on upbringing and life experiences. You can change your notions of it too although the chances of that recede as you grow older.
Does any of this relate to local government? I plan to look at councillors’ views on fairness; to see how they vary within and across persons in reaction to different case examples, ones they might typically come across in their daily interactions; all treated with confidentiality of course.
Opinions on fairness are usually made very quickly, within a second, and in any group of councillors (past and present) you can be sure that some will react one way and some another.
There are many realms on planet fairness: equality, merit, equity, opportunity, process, power and rights to name a few. Each has different sensitivities and opportunities for disagreement. My working model is that people will respond differently to the same situation due to their diverse backgrounds or assumptions; some will immediately fly off to one realm whereas others will jump to another. Some will be talking merit and just deserts whereas others will be thinking equality. This can lead to profound divergence over perceptions of fairness of a proposed policy or decision.
In local government much emphasis is placed on fairness of process. Areas of responsibility like social care, licensing and planning for example will have policy, and a decision based on policy is deemed fair if due-process has been followed; meaning no bias and a right to hear about and state one’s case. Public acceptance relies on a ‘fairness heuristic’, a natural mental shortcut, where one assumes fair treatment as long as the process followed is fair. Most research studies, but not all, show this heuristic. But is this fair? Firstly, local government policy can be set many years earlier, in different economic or political times, long before it is used to guide decisions. And secondly, was the policy making itself fair or was it dominated by large organisations or outdated assumptions.
The academic study of fairness has extra complexities…the term ‘equity’ is understood differently by those working in psychology (and business) to those in education and health. To the former it means merit; with rewards and punishments proportional to effort and input. To the latter it means giving a helping hand to those that need it. As humans we engage with both meanings.
Fairness is a field rich with research opportunity – too much for me to test them all. So in the coming year, once I have finished the readings, I need to discuss which areas might be of interest to councillors and create some examples for discussion in interviews and focus groups.
This is all with an aim to do what? That’s dictated by the results. For example, if it is discovered that there are some fairness situations which are more likely to trigger discord then, perhaps, adding more context and creating opportunity for discussion and reflection before councillors take a view might lead to better, fairer and more efficient decision making; especially when discussing mitigation of harm to affected residents or businesses.
Clive was a Bristol City Councillor and author of the book of his experiences, After The Revolution. He is entering Year 2 of a PhD at the University of Bristol. He blogs at https://sageandonion.substack.com/ and can be contacted at [email protected]
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