In our research on the 21st Century Councillor, we’ve found that elected members are facing a barrage of challenges:
Perma-austerity has deepened with sustained underfunding of public services
Complexity of place has intensified, through combined authorities and integrated care systems, alongside local government reorganisation.
Communities are in distress, moving from the pandemic straight into the cost-of-living crisis
Incivility in public life has grown with rising issues of abuse and harassment for councillors in particular
The rising profile of equality, diversity and inclusion has drawn attention to how public services systematically fail some workers and citizens
Remote and hybrid working can enhance individual flexibility but can make it more difficult for councillors to build the relationships they need to function effectively.
From interviews with councillors, we heard about the strategies they use to cope with these challenges and to support their communities to thrive. They are keeping the system human on behalf of communities. They are zooming in and out, from the micro issues facing residents to the big strategic issues of place. They act as a lightning rod, absorbing hostility whilst keeping themselves grounded and safe. You can read more about the research findings here.
If you’re a councillor – or you work in a role supporting councillors – come and join us in Andover on 4 November to hear more about this research and chat to peers about how best to manage these challenges. You’ll also hear from the Local Government Chronicle about their new campaign to support councillors.
In a time of growing inequality, political disillusionment, and institutional strain, Birmingham is at a crossroads. The city’s bold initiative, Shaping Birmingham’s Future Together (SBFT), offers a timely and transformative opportunity: to reimagine how local government works with its communities.
A new report by Susana Higueras and Sonia Bussu lays out a compelling roadmap for how Birmingham City Council (BCC) can become a participatory council. Drawing on UK and international examples, as well as interviews with local stakeholders, the report argues that participatory governance must be more than a buzzword. It must be embedded into the everyday workings of the council, grounded in inclusive practices, and driven by a genuine commitment to share power.
Why Participation, Why Now?
Birmingham is one of the UK’s most diverse and youngest cities. This diversity is a strength, but also a challenge when it comes to ensuring that all voices are heard in policymaking. At the same time, the city faces deep structural inequalities, including the highest child poverty rates in the UK. Traditional top-down governance models are no longer fit for purpose. What’s needed is a shift from consultation to co-creation.
The SBFT partnership, launched in 2024, aims to tackle these challenges by fostering collaboration across public, private, and community sectors. But as the report makes clear, this vision will only succeed if participation is embedded, not treated as an add-on or a one-off event.
What Does Embedded Participation Look Like?
Embedded participation means making citizen engagement a routine part of how decisions are made, from setting priorities to evaluating outcomes. It requires:
Facilitative leadership that enables collaboration and power-sharing;
Boundary spanners, or individuals who bridge the gap between institutions and communities;
Strong partnerships with civil society, grassroots, and voluntary organisations;
Intersectional inclusion that centres the voices of those facing multiple, overlapping barriers to participation.
The report highlights that successful participatory governance is not about flashy new tools or one-off events. It’s about culture change, within the council, across sectors, and in how communities are engaged.
Lessons from Elsewhere
The report draws on global examples to show what’s possible, and what pitfalls to avoid.
Porto Alegre, in Brazil, was a trailblazer in participatory budgeting, enabling residents to directly allocate public funds, at one point transferring over $300 per person annually to community control. However, as political leadership shifted, the commitment to the process waned, and budget allocations steadily declined, leading to a loss of momentum.
Barcelona, Spain, embedded citizen participation through digital platforms like Decidim and cultivated strong ties with social movements. At its peak, over 40,000 citizens engaged in budgetary decisions. Yet, the experience underscores the vulnerability of transformative initiatives when overly reliant on charismatic leadership, making them susceptible to political cycles.
Camden, London, institutionalised citizens’ assemblies, integrating them into formal decision-making structures. Notably, all 17 citizen recommendations on climate policy were adopted. Still, challenges persist around ensuring inclusivity and maintaining consistent follow-through.
Reykjavik, Iceland, leveraged digital platforms to crowdsource citizen ideas and implement participatory budgeting. Initially successful in mobilising thousands of residents, the initiative faltered as political support diminished and the platforms remained peripheral to formal governance, highlighting the limitations of digital participation without institutional anchoring.
Ostbelgien, Belgium, established the world’s first permanent deliberative system linked to a legislative body. Its legally enshrined Citizens’ Council and Assemblies offer a promising model of democratic stability and accountability. However, the top-down design and limited community ownership reveal the critical need for co-creation and inclusive recruitment to prevent the reinforcement of existing inequalities.
These examples show that embedding participation requires sustained commitment, institutional support, and mechanisms for accountability.
Opportunities in Birmingham
Despite the challenges, Birmingham has a strong foundation to build on:
Crisis as catalyst: The COVID-19 response demonstrated that when urgency aligns with shared purpose, Birmingham can act quickly and inclusively.
Digital engagement: Platforms like Be Heard and virtual consultations have expanded access, especially during the pandemic.
But There Are Challenges Too
The report doesn’t shy away from the barriers:
Broken trust: Communities are tired of being consulted without seeing change.
Hierarchical leadership: A top-down culture limits innovation and responsiveness.
Structural silos: Departments often work in isolation, duplicating efforts and missing opportunities for collaboration and nurturing citizen participation.
Unfair funding mechanisms: Smaller community organisations feel sidelined and overburdened by bureaucracy.
These challenges are not unique to Birmingham, but they must be addressed head-on if SBFT is to succeed.
What Needs to Happen Next?
The report offers a clear set of policy recommendations.
Rebuild trust through transparent communication and visible follow-through.
Trust has been eroded by repeated consultations without tangible outcomes. BCC must commit to clear feedback loops, visibly acting on community input and explaining decisions transparently to rebuild credibility and legitimacy.
Embed participation in budgeting, service design, and scrutiny processes.
Participation should not be limited to one-off events; it must be embedded across governance functions. This can include participatory budgeting, citizen panels, and co-designed scrutiny mechanisms that give residents real influence over public decisions.
Foster facilitative leadership and cross-sector collaboration.
Leadership must shift from command-and-control to facilitation, enabling shared power and collaborative problem-solving. Cross-departmental working groups and partnerships with civil society can help break down silos and foster innovation.
Work better with communities, recognising them as co-creators, not just consultees.
Community organisations should be treated as equal partners, with fair funding, early involvement in policy development, and recognition of their expertise. This means moving from consultation to co-creation, where communities help shape solutions from the outset.
Design for intersectional inclusion, addressing overlapping barriers to participation.
Inclusive participation requires acknowledging and addressing systemic inequalities. Councils must create safe, accessible spaces and use diverse engagement methods, including arts-based approaches and multilingual formats, to ensure marginalised voices are centred and valued.
The SBFT partnership can be a catalyst of this change and become the space for shared governance and accountability.
A Call to Action
The SBFT initiative is more than a policy programme, it’s a democratic innovation. It’s a chance to reshape how power is shared in the city, how decisions are made, and how communities are valued. As one community leader put it: “We’re not asking to be asked. We’re asking to lead.”
If Birmingham can rise to this challenge, it won’t just be shaping its own future. It will be setting a national, and even global, example of what inclusive, embedded participatory governance can look like in the 21st century.
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.
Susana Higueras Carrillo is a Peruvian anthropologist. She is PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London and holds a master’s degree in Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford. She has worked at the University of Birmingham in the INSPIRE (Intersectional Space of Participation: Inclusive, Resilient, Embedded) project researching how to strengthen intersectional inclusion through arts-based methods such as legislative theatre. Her research interests lie in environmental and social justice and communicating research in creative and impactful ways.
“You won’t find many of them”, people quip when I tell them the title of my PhD; and my riposte, “that’s why I asked councillors”. And I was right; interviews with 17 councillors across four parties have revealed over 2,000 examples. Conceptions include: equality, proportionality, equity, fair opportunity, market fairness, fair administrative process and more. These conceptions were collected during the semi-structured interviews based on four carefully crafted vignettes (case studies). Thematic coding assisted their allocation into eight broad types (Realms) along with sub-categories like reciprocity, merit and efficiency. Sometimes the councillor denied they were talking about fairness, but they were; a simple reframing, usually changing a point of view, clarified the analysis, for example, council efficiency can be reframed as value for money and thus fairness to the taxpayer.
My PhD can be likened to an exploration. With me, the explorer, finding snippets of theory from various academic sources each describing a type of fairness and sometimes disagreeing with another. Thus equipped, I ventured into the jungle, Bristol City Council, and witnessed, watched and registered actual conceptions coming from actual politicians. I returned relatively unscathed and after analysis discovered much that agreed with theory but also much else. I now have a clear report to deliver about the eight, strange, fairness-beasts that rule their Realms and what happens when they mix.
Combinations
The findings map out the Realms more accurately and show that in certain circumstances a combination of Realms can elicit quite strong responses. For example, in one vignette, six councillors wanted to request a breach of council-house regulations to allow a tenant to sublet her flat. Reasons varied, but many were drawn to the description of her disadvantage, escaping an abusive relationship, and were impressed that despite all her problems she had not only sought work but actually landed a job. “Respect” and “this is the type of person we should be helping” were two of many responses. However, an equal number of councillors were totally unimpressed and thought she should be served notice as per the tenancy.
Another vignette, about a large donation to the Children in Care Service, offered councillors three policy options. Eight wanted to make policy changes; and every one of those changes was based on making the choices fairer.
Fair Process or Outcome?
With this more reliable set of fairness definitions, the data can be analysed in many ways. For example, there is debate about whether fairness in Local Government should be about fair process or fair outcome, some arguing one way and some the other. I recall a council officer telling me that if a decision follows fair process from a fairly formulated policy, then it must be right whatever the outcome. But is that fair?
This data lets me measure the number of conceptions of fair process and the number of conceptions of fair outcome; there was little difference whether the councillors were male or female, new or experienced, and from different parties. But it did change and dramatically, if the councillor was or recently had been in a cabinet or committee chair position compared with backbench councillors. The latter group were much more interested in fairness of outcome. This is a finding from a qualitative study, so not definitive, but I’ve already had a number of conversations saying “that’s not surprising” each with suggested reasons. Perhaps a more rigorous study could be done.
Party Dogma?
Another question I’m asked is about the influence of parties. The interviews were conducted singly and confidentially; I hope I reached the councillors’ true views. One vignette asked them to come to a conclusion and vote based on their values, and then asked whether their vote might change if it were whipped. Many said they might change out of loyalty. Loyalty, like fairness, is a moral value and clearly quite powerful.
Wicked Problems
One of many potential uses is in understanding intractable “wicked” problems. These are made more wicked if there are value differences between the stakeholders. Fairness is a human value, so perhaps an understanding of fairness could assist in some small way to make headway with such problems that seem nowadays to be popping up everywhere.
What next?
I have just entered the final year; out of the jungle but not quite out of the woods, yet; there’s a lot of writing up to do, and then I’d like to use the findings and meet up with people interested in better understanding other councillors’ or parties’ values.
An ex-councillor in Bristol and author of the book on Local Government, After the Revolution, Clive followed up on politicians’ conceptions of fairness. He is now his final year of a PhD at the University of Bristol, interviews complete and writing it up. His personal blog site is: https://sageandonion.substack.com/
In July, then Local Government Minister Jim McMahon announced a new Local Government Outcomes Framework (LGOF), which (he said) “forms an integral part of this Government’s reforms to ensure we have a sector which is fit, legal and decent”. These reforms are already pretty extensive, including LG reorganisation, devolution, community engagement, member standards and funding arrangements.
The LGOF framework, the Minister hoped, “will help to put the right checks and balances in place to ensure value for the taxpayer and results for citizens to whom councils are ultimately responsible”. Given the removal of most systematic monitoring of local performance and outcomes in England with the demise of the Audit Commission a decade ago, is this a new dawn for helpful local insights and intelligent central steering, or the raw material for a crude league table that obscures more than it illuminates?
History shows the difficulty of designing and using performance measures effectively. Whilst the logic of measuring what matters to inform management (and political) decision making is clear, and there are many examples of successful applications, there are enough examples of failures and unintended negative consequences to encourage caution.
The immediate precursor to LGOF was a set of measures developed by the ill-fated Office of Local Government (OFLOG). These were immediately manipulated by the Times newspaper into a league table, labelling Nottingham as the worst council. The fact that this took place during the pre-election period only made the impact more negative, leading to a stinging letter from the LGA to the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove. OFLOG was in some ways set up to fail. Sited inside the Ministry, its political independence was immediately open to challenge. And reconciling providing local authorities with better data at the same time as acting as an accountability mechanism to central government was always going to be tricky.
The health service experience of performance measures and targets presents mixed evidence. It appears that four-hour A&E waiting times targets were associated with reduced mortality, but at the same time there were examples of departments admitting patients near to the time limit at the expense of others more in need of urgent care, a few examples of blatant misrepresentation of figures, and some bizarre holding of patients in ambulances and redefinition of corridors as wards.
Key lessons from these examples include the importance of having a clear focus for the LGOF and the adoption of a broad ‘exploratory’ approach to presenting the performance measures. As the Institute for Government argued for OFLOG, a key contribution could be making data more consistently available, comparable and usable – and hence supporting evidence-based policy making through the deliberative use of robust evidence.
The LGOF data needs to be presented in ways that enable and encourage exploration and questioning, rather than simplistic league tables which ignore the inherent differences between different councils in terms of population, geography, deprivation, funding, etc. It therefore needs exhibit what I call the three Cs: to be comparable across councils, contextualised to reflect local circumstances, and citizen-focussed (accessible to lay people).
There are many positive features of the new framework, including its attempt to look at missions and outcomes (rather than just council outputs). Interested parties had until 12 September 2025 to respond to the Government’s consultation, so we now await the government’s response to that. Councils can easily see how the proposed LGOF measures look for them using the excellent new LG Inform LGOF report.
Dr Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham. This article was initially published in the Local Area Research and Intelligence Association (LARIA) newsletter.Email [email protected]
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.
Literally minutes before I was going to email this already over-lengthy blog, I had my attention drawn to Birmingham’s rather paltry 5.4 score and 4th-from-bottom ranking on the HAYPP vape retailers’ ‘smell score’ scale – pretty well what it sounds like: UK cities ranked on perceived cleanliness. It seemed so obviously distorted by the lengthy bin collection strike and consequently not a lot better than Leeds’ 4.2, rather than up with at least, say, Newcastle (7.4) or even Liverpool (8.2). But, apart from those few lines, I let it pass.
So, on to my initial topic, which, as it happens, kicks off with some equally basic stats. Someone asked me recently – albeit after I’d slightly steered the conversation – if I knew whether (m)any of the several hundred new Reform UK councillors elected in the recent local elections (that I’d written about in a recent INLOGOV blog) had already left the party.
I had to waffle a bit – after all, the 677 ‘new’ ones had taken Nigel Farage’s party’s national total to just over 850, and some/many undoubtedly shocked themselves. But I did happen to know that the number of recent resignations/suspensions/expulsions was already into double figures. To which I was able gratuitously to add that the party had also ‘lost’, at least for the time being, two of its six MPs.
Which might seem to suggest either that I have a particular academic interest in Farage’s indisputably fascinating party or that I’m some kind of political nerd – to neither of which I’ll readily admit.
No, the explanation for my having acquired this arcane knowledge is that for at least 30 years now I’ve known/known of (nowadays Baron) Mark Pack, his captivation with all things electoral, and his enthusiasm for sharing that captivation – dating back to when he was at the University of Exeter, just up the A38 from the University of Plymouth, original home of ‘(Colin) Rallings & (Michael) Thrasher’ (definitely local government statistical junkies), and now itself home of their internationally renowned Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, and its/their matchless annual Local Election Handbooks.
Naturally, R&T’s interests and path-breaking publications focus primarily on local government elections. Those of (nowadays) Lord Pack of Crouch Hill (but Mark hereafter) include the Liberal Democrat Party, of which he’s currently an extremely active President; the House of Lords, and, as ever, political opinion polls, about all of which he writes invariably fascinating weekly newsletters; in addition to reporting on almost anything electoral. This and more he shares on his exceedingly lively website, the recommendation of which (to any readers unfamiliar with it) is the main purpose of this blog.
And so, belatedly, back to those disappearing Reform UK councillors. It’s the sort of phenomenon that Mark Pack revels in – the numbers, the reasons/circumstances, it’s all perfect material for a near-daily political diarist. He naturally keeps a running list of councillors “shed by Reform UK” since the May elections, the most recent updating of which at the time of typing this paragraph being, I think, on July 7th, when the departee figure had reached a quite striking 11.
They comprised five straight resignations as councillors, two expulsions by Reform, three suspensions by the party, one of whom subsequently quit, and one who’d decided they’d prefer to be an Independent.
As for the (female) Reform UK councillor charged with assault and criminal damage, for instance – well, it was covered, naturally, in Mark Pack’s diary on June 30th, and she’ll shortly be “appearing before magistrates”. And, as the Crown Prosecution Service publicly emphasised, it’s “extremely important that there be no reporting or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice ongoing proceedings.”
Which brings us to the two of the all-time total of just six Reform MPs who already are no longer. First was Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, who back in March was suspended and reported to the police over alleged threats of physical violence towards the party’s Chairman, Zia Yusuf. And second, more recently, was James McMurdock, who “surrendered the party whip” a few weeks ago over, as The Guardian delicately put it, “questions of loans totaling tens of thousands of pounds.”
The key, albeit belated, point of this blog, however, is the multifaceted contribution to our political world of Mark Park himself, rather than ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ MPs. Yes, he’s a copious diarist, but so much more. In particular, there’s his arguably greatest single contribution to our academic political world: the phenomenon that is what I still think of as his ‘PollBase’, but which comparatively recently has acquired the handle PollBasePro.
If you’re writing anything at all concerning our political world in the 90-plus years since 1938/39 – yes, before the start of World War II – and you need to know or even get a sense of the state of UK public opinion on a virtually month-by-month, and latterly week-by-week, basis, just Google either title, and it’s there, instantly accessible and downloadable. Yes, completely free – all Mark asks is that you point out any mistakes (!) and have the decency to acknowledge the source.
It’s a fabulous resource, easily worth – pretty obviously – a blog on its own, but all it’s going to get on this occasion is this abbreviated reference, kind of explaining why I’ve structured this blog in the way I have. That reference comes from p.2 of the dozens of pages, when the only pollster was Gallup and the only poll publisher the News Chronicle (1930-60, when it was “absorbed into the Daily Mail”).
From the start, in 1938, the sole question asked consistently was “Conservatives Good or Bad”, and, probably not surprisingly, throughout most of World War II, the Conservatives were overwhelmingly (75-90%) ‘Good’. Only from 1943 were questions asked about the other parties, and from the start Labour, polling consistently in the 40s, had a double-figure lead over the Conservatives, suggesting that voters were already clearly differentiating between the conduct of the war and the conduct of peace.
This came to a head in January 1946, when Labour, with 52.5%, outpolled the Conservatives by a massive 20.5%, a lead they’d never previously even approached and would do so just once again in the coming decades. Oh yes, and I was born at the very end of December 1945 – and, if only we’d known, my committed Tory-voting parents would have been deeply unhappy, and I’d have gurgled contentedly. Sorry about the length, but I had to squeeze that last bit in.
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.
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