Dr Marina Pera from Autonomous University of Barcelona is presenting a critical analysis of the asset transfer policies in Barcelona at our next INLOGOV seminar, which starts at noon on Thursday 30th November at our Edgbaston campus.
Marina will examine opportunities and risks raised by citizen management of municipal assets, taking a community empowerment perspective.
Barcelona is a city with a long tradition of neighbourhood associations, community and cultural centres run by citizens. Since the 1970s, in response to citizens’ demands, a number of municipal assets have been transferred to local non-profit organisations with economic support from the City Council.
The transfer of these assets was decentralised to the administrative districts, which in some cases led to practices of co-option and clientelism. In 2015, the Bases de gestió cívica (civic management legal basis) was collaboratively designed and approved: a local regulation that standardises the allotment of assets, increasing transparency on asset transfers. However, the Bases of gestió cívica did not solve some of the challenges that had emerged from the collaboration between the local state and community actors. One of the main challenges was the insufficient adaptation of regulations and administrative procedures to the idiosyncrasies of grassroots organisations with low levels of professionalisation. These place a huge burden on these community groups, who had to invest time and resources in bureaucratic procedures, hindering their original mission and accelerating their de-politicisation.
In 2016, with the rise of a progressive government in the city of Barcelona, an ambitious policy was approved, the Citizen Assets Programme (CAP). This policy aimed to recognise, support, and consolidate urban commons: spaces and facilities rooted in the community that were apt to be transferred to non-profit organisations in order to be managed democratically. The CAP thus aimed to empower the community and promote citizen participation. This policy entailed greater transparency and legitimacy surrounding the process of asset transfer and the accountability of grassroots and non-profit groups. However, the Citizen Assets Programme has been facing a number of challenges in terms of legal issues, resistance by public officials and scepticism by non-profit organisations.
Despite the difficulties involved in the implementation of the Citizen Assets Programme, it has presented an opportunity for collaboration between the City Council and the commons. The efforts to create an environment of trust and mutual learning among public officials and community groups has allowed the development of innovative administrative instruments that recognise the transformative work of the commons, through innovative public-commons partnerships. This seminar therefore aims to analyse alternative forms of asset management beyond public direct and outsourcing management, engaging in current debates on collaborative culture in public administration, the dismantling of the welfare state and community empowerment.
Seminar details
The re-arranged seminar will run 4-5pm on Thursday 7th December at the University of Birmingham Edgbaston campus in Muirhead room G15.
Further information, link to attend and registration can be found at the eventbrite.
Relations between first and second cities are often strained, especially when those who live in the Second City elect leaders from a political party that is not running the national government – as has been the case with Birmingham for much of its life.
After the Second World War, Birmingham was prosperous. It had avoided most of the bombing that destroyed the centre of Coventry, and its factories had produced aircraft, lorries, and other vehicles and equipment for the military and were now available to meet the post-war demand for cars and lorries. Wages for semi-skilled labour were some of the highest in the country. There were shortages of labour, and to meet them employers welcomed bus drivers, conductors and nurses. These were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by workers mainly from Pakistan and Kashmir.
From the perspective of the London government, Birmingham did not need more employment, so companies who wished to invest in the motor industry were directed to Liverpool and elsewhere. But academic commentators, and the more thoughtful employers, could see that all was not well. Britain was becoming increasingly dependent on service industries, which were far from strong in the Midlands. In that context, in the mid-1970s, Birmingham Council proposed to build a National Exhibition Centre, on land near the airport. It would be owned by a company which was a partnership with Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. The government wanted it in London; the council carried on regardless, and eventually the London government allowed it to do so.
Its structure was innovative – the company had just two shares, one owned by the city council, the other by the chamber. Each could nominate four directors. The chair would always be one of the chamber nominees – for a long time the leading industrialist Sir Adrian Cadbury. But if voting on the board was tied, the chair did not have a casting vote, and what was proposed would not go ahead. The company, underwritten by the council, borrowed money and built the NEC.
A few years later, in 1987, the NEC company started building the International Convention Centre and Symphony Hall, on land off Broad Street. This was to make Birmingham a centre for conferences and business meetings. The decline in manufacturing and rising unemployment was by then so evident that Birmingham was granted Assisted Area Status by the European Union, so a fraction of the cost was met from Europe. The London government was not involved.
The ICC became a preferred location for large gatherings of professional bodies, such as the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, which grew till it hosted more than 8,000 delegates. It met in Birmingham every year for more than 25 years. A boom in the construction of hotels met the demand for accommodation for this kind of event. Also of offices, many taken by national or international companies. No longer is Birmingham lagging in its provision of services. On the contrary it is a leader – almost entirely because of these initiatives. Symphony Hall was built to meet the specification of Simon Rattle, then a very young but highly promising conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It was part of a city-council strategy to support the arts, of which another strand was the attraction of what became the Birmingham Royal Ballet to the Hippodrome theatre – with its charismatic directors, Peter Wright, David Bintley and now the Cuban star Carlos Acosta. Another initiative required investors in large buildings to put a small extra amount aside for public art.
The arrival of a national Conservative government in 2010 meant that the council started losing the extra grant it had long enjoyed to meet its high levels of deprivation, and put it under huge financial pressure. Whole levels of staffing in departments of the council were removed. Many senior officers did not stay long. Some posts were not filled. Others are filled by ‘interim’ staff, who are supplied by agencies, do not expect to stay in the city and are very unlikely to live in it.
The refuse collection service was traditionally headed by an assistant director who had worked in the service for many years. For a period before the 2017 strike, this post was not filled, and the service was for a time run by the director of leisure. The strike was about reducing the number of operatives on each vehicle when wheelie bins were introduced. It was resolved by giving the workers improved pay.
It appears that it was only later that the implications of this for ‘single status’ were recognised, meaning that other categories of workers – in particular in social care – could claim equal pay for work assessed as equivalent. To meet the huge resulting costs, the city sold the NEC company for £300m. It was resold for £800 million three years later – a warning to the current commissioners not to sell this kind of asset on the cheap. Since then, the bin workers have managed to complete their shifts in less time than expected – partly assisted by some residents not putting their bins out every week – and been permitted to sign off early when their round was completed. Again, it has only recently been realised that this opens the city to another round of ‘single status’ claims. Hence the near bankruptcy, Section 114 Notice, and appointment, by Michael Gove in London, of commissioners.
To resolve challenges such as this, when Birmingham is facing extreme pressures on all its services, will not be easy for the commissioners.
The worst thing they could do would be to split Birmingham into perhaps three smaller councils. This would increase the overhead costs – three directors of each service instead of one, three separate offices – and lose major economies of scale. It would also threaten the leadership and finance which is part of being the Second City – in the arts, in the representative institutions of local government, and in creating and implementing an economic strategy which responds to the local opportunities and needs which are most clear to people living in the city.
Andrew Coulson is a retired lecturer from INLOGOV and a former Birmingham City Councillor. A longer version of this article was published in The Birmingham Post. Andrew writes in a personal capacity.
Promising Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, most recently the likes of ChatGPT, have created an atmosphere of imminent disruptive change. News outlets bombard us with novel tools and applications that are poised to become the ‘new game in town’, revolutionising various sectors, jobs and ultimately the entire global economy. However, such sensationalist predictions often overlook the complexity of moving from where we are today to working effectively with novel, AI-powered tools in specific, concrete contexts and situations.
AI in the built environment: Digital twins
One such example of a recent hype are digital twins (DTs). Digital twins (virtual replicas) of physical objects or systems have been used for over two decades, most prominently in product engineering and manufacturing. Applications of the technology in the built environment are more recent, and in the UK in particular, the development of digital twins for built environment assets, systems and processes has been triggered by the National Infrastructure Commission’s Data for the Public Good (2017) report. Despite this relatively short history, technology promoters (often suppliers themselves) nowadays pitch the ‘digital twin’ as a ready-made, off-the-shelf data product to city authorities. Further contributing to the hype are various cities who market themselves on the global stage as leaders in digital innovation, and their digital twin projects, including the likes of Helsinki, Singapore, Barcelona, Xiong’an or Herrenberg. In the UK, cities such as Cambridge, Birmingham, Bristol and London have been experimenting with digital twins.
Are urban digital twins better characterised as ‘technology’ or ‘socio-technical innovation’ and why does it matter?
The urban digital twin (UDT) as a technology is often defined as a three-dimensional virtual replica of a city that makes use of a combination of technological innovation in sensors, big data and data science; building and city information modelling (BIM and CIM); and artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation. At a more fundamental level, it is underpinned by a motivation to create an all-encompassing, single-source-of-truth digital simulation of the city’s built environment which is linked to the physical city via automated bi-dimensional data flows. Whilst the objective may be seen as admirable, there remain a myriad of unanswered questions when trying to unpack the UDT concept from a more practical view, including but not limited to:
Is the large-scale investment into the digital infrastructure (sensing, data storage and processing, analytics and modelling) justifiable given the expected benefits?
Is there enough good-quality evidence to suggest that the expected benefits can in fact be delivered in a particular context?
If so, what conditions might be necessary to enable benefit realisation?
How does the UDT project affect and/or incorporate urban citizens, communities and other stakeholders?
How does the proposed UDT fit into the existing landscape of data and digital tools in use?
To local authority practitioners these questions may sound common-sense or even routine. However, taking such issues into consideration essentially represents a move away from the purely technological towards a ‘socio-technical’ understanding of UDTs. From this perspective, UDTs are not off-the-shelf data products as they do not exist independently of the contexts in which they are applied. Ultimately, any digital twin will only ever be a partial representation of a city and its built environment, and therefore there are key decisions involved in designing UDTs for different cities (or regions). Such decisions can identify diverse technology design and/or implementation requirements based on specific, pertinent local policy questions or problems, existing data availability and digital twins (e.g., of energy systems) internally or accessed from other stakeholders, citizen and community preferences or needs, currently existing digital expertise, and so on. This process of developing requirements and solutions for digital twins has been termed ‘digital twinning’ in the literature, with scholars arguing that it represents an ‘act of governance’.
This is not to say that each and every UDT will, or need to be, bespoke. However, neither do UDTs need to be uniform, holistic and all-encompassing from the start – even if this were at all possible. Instead, federated systems of digital twins representing different aspects of cities can organically develop and evolve over time and as needs arise and change.
An alternative conceptualisation of UDTs: Transcending silos
Whilst it may not be possible or desirable to develop all-encompassing, ‘single-source-of-truth digital twins, UDTs nevertheless offer the possibility of linking certain currently siloed policy and governance processes which may benefit from some degree of integration to respond to contemporary challenges. One such example could be the intersection of energy, environment, transport and land-use in support of policy goals relating to net zero transition, affordable housing, mobility and employment – a use case we explored in the context of Cambridge.
Siloed working within and between local and regional authorities led to generic policy goals and targets being translated into conflicting sectoral implementation strategies across development planning (for housing, industry and services), electric charging infrastructure and incentives, and upgrades to the electric grid. Developing solution options to this issue necessitates understanding why different people travel, how and where they travel and therefore when and where they might charge their (future) electric cars.
Addressing it did not require extensive sensor deployment for data collection, or the development of ‘single-source-of-truth’ digital twin technology – instead, we could draw on existing available data (e.g., census and employment data) and models (e.g., land-use and transport models). The research team developed a small ‘module’ which served to integrate previously unconnected models and data sources. The exercise concluded that a potentially impactful policy option would be to offer incentives for charging at home and/or disincentives for charging (and/or parking) at workplace for electric car drivers, given travel patterns, the locations of housing, services and employment centres, and electric infrastructure upgrade needs and costs.
Conclusion: Working effectively with digital twins?
So what does such a socio-technical perspective imply in terms of working with UDTs in (local) government? Working effectively with digital twins may, in fact, require more collaborative working both across and between local and regional authorities, as well as with technology and data product designers – as opposed to joining the digital (twin) hype. Collaboration can also contribute to learning and skills development, beyond technology design. Re-establishing some specialist technical competencies through extensive collaboration (which may have been lost in local government in the last few decades) can in turn help developing confidence and competence in commissioning digital (and/or AI-powered) tools, and understanding the impact and implications of their adoption.
If you have any comments or would like to discuss any of the above, please feel free to get in touch via email ([email protected]). If you would like to read more on using a socio-technical perspective to design and implement digital twins for cities, or explore other use cases, you may wish to consult our recent book on Digital Twins for Smart Cities: Conceptualisation, Challenges and Practices.
Timea Nochta is a Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on networks and governance in urban policy and implementation in the context of technological change, especially decarbonisation and digitalisation.
Right – we, meaning I, must start with a dilemma declaration. How to deal with a major national news item – “Birmingham City Council declares itself bankrupt” – the consequences of which, as a long-term Birmingham resident and ratepayer, will affect you personally and about which in the distant past you might well have been invited to opine seriously and professionally. Yes, carry on being retired and/or pretend you’re still on your hols.
Obviously, I’ve chosen an alternative route, emphasising background and context and stuff that might just provide some clarification, or at least updating. And, if it seems frivolous, tasteless or just indulgent, I apologise. Blame me, not the editor.
I’ll start, as it’s in the intendedly eye-catching title, with numerology – the study of the hidden, divine or mystical meaning of numbers. Even if you’re not into it, you’ll quite likely have come across ‘angel numbers’, aka ‘lucky primes’ – sequences of digits that supposedly bode well and make you feel good. Or, as the ologists put it, messages from the spiritual universe offering insight, wisdom, and directionality – three-digit ‘lucky primes’ usually including 127, 151, 163, 193, etc.
And which bunch of local government personnel, more than most, could benefit from having such character traits built into their job descriptions? Section 151 Officers, of course; aka Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) – those required by Section 151 of the 1972 Local Government Act to arrange and take responsibility for the proper administration of their local authorities’ financial affairs.
Just check out the numerologists. “The energies of number 1 combined with the vibrations of number 5 … a sign from the divine realm that you need to be strong, act as a leader, and be in control of your future life …” etc. etc.
The only problem being that, with a bit of searching, you can get similar hokum for almost any three- or four-digit number. So, somewhat to my disappointment I admit, no fiddling whatever would have been required of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel – the people who actually draft our laws – to ensure that these matters would be dealt with by Section 151 of the 1972 Act. Excepting possibly the Satanic 666, which would make the Act impossibly long anyway, almost any three-digit number would have served.
I knew this back in 2017, but I’ve habitually kept a vague look-out for any published follow-up from my INLOGOV blogs and admit that I was quite chuffed when a few years ago one was picked up and passed on by Room 151 – the “online news, opinion and resource service for local authority Section 151 and other senior officers covering treasury, pensions, strategic finance, funding, resources and risk …”.
Chuffed too to that, albeit over a lengthier time period than I was envisaging, the broad thrust of my argument of more being on the way has proved to be accurate – a somewhat nerdy argument, admittedly, that can certainly be made even nerdier, but that, for current blogging purposes, can also be tolerably summarised in a few sentences.
So here goes! If a council’s Chief Finance/Section 151 Officer (forever male, of course, in the 1988 LG Finance Act, although Birmingham’s current Interim Director of Finance happens to be Fiona Greenway) reckons his council’s expenditure is likely to exceed available resources, he issues a Section 114 Notice prohibiting any new spending apart from that funding statutory services and existing contractual obligations. OK, geeks, they’re technically ‘Reports’, not ‘Notices’, but that really, really isn’t the serious issue.
It’s a situation in which things are pretty obviously and publicly getting out of hand – current spending way over budget, reserves virtually exhausted, no imminent solution. The alternative, however, is worse: Section 24 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014, or washing your dirty linen in public – the council’s EXTERNAL auditors appending a Section 24 ‘Recommendation’ to their Annual Audit letter, “copied to the Secretary of State”.
Which may sound chummy, but, I suggested, was “the bullet-shaped chumminess of a Mafia ‘message job’”: very nasty, and rarer even than 114 Notices – historically. Yet – and this is what prompted that 2017 blog – in the space of two months two Section 24s had been issued, to councils at the very extreme ends of the council scale spectrum: the Scilly Isles and Birmingham, the latter’s then Labour Leader, Cllr Sir Albert Bore, describing it as “the most concerning audit letter” he’d seen in his 36 years as a councillor. For the record, though, and without further explanation, that’s the last you’ll read of them in this particular blog.
The distinctions between the 114/24 courses of action were interesting and debatable, but you didn’t have to be a terribly nerdy follower of local government finances to see the probable beginnings of a trend, so it was pleasing to have been reckoned insightful by the serious pros in Room 151. Especially when the trend didn’t gather pace as quickly and widely as I speculated it might.
However, given the way local government finance ‘works’ in this country, particularly under Conservative administrations, it was only going to be a matter of time, and gradually the signals became unmissable – accelerating in quite a big way with (then Lab) Croydon LBC in late 2020, who issued not one but two s114 Notices in successive months, having again failed to balance its budget in the permitted 21 days of grace. Understandably, it prompted a Commons Inquiry by Clive Betts’ ever-watchful Local Government (sorry – Levelling-up, Housing & Communities) Committee.
Slough BC (Lab then, C/LD now) was next in July 2021, despite having been one of eight councils granted “exceptional support” the previous year, as Ministers became increasingly concerned at the adverse publicity generated by threats of councils ‘going broke’.
Come December and Cumbria’s Copeland BC (Lab then, since abolished and incorporated into Cumberland) was reported to be “in Section 114 territory”, but was soon overshadowed by (Lab) Nottingham City Council’s unlawfully diverting cash from what should have been a ring-fenced Housing Revenue Account to ‘General Funds’ – an ‘accounting error’ which personally I found extraordinary, since it’s one of the few bits of tekkie lg finance that even I know. And it dragged on.
2022 saw serious acceleration. In May Northumberland Council (Con)issued a s114 for unlawful expenditure, including allowances paid to the council’s Chief Executive. It was possibly the case generating least sympathy for the beleaguered council, whose elected members and officers went public with their mutual distrust – not the only such example, but probably the bitterest.
Towards the end of 2022 it became clear how desperate the situation – or at least the search for commissioners available to ’intervene’ – was becoming, as returning Local Government Secretary Michael Gove sought to launch anticipatory “turnaround programmes” short of sending in commissioners – ‘risk-mitigation directions’, in Govester jargon.
Not in time, however, to prevent Croydon LBC (NOC) issuing its third s114 in three years, and Thurrock Council (Con) having the courage/desperation to report that it would require “exceptional support” from Gove’s Department “over a number of years … to stabilise our financial position and give us time to have balanced budgets.”
At which point – after an obviously uplifting Christmas and New Year – “Whitehall officials”, in the person of Jeremy Pocklington, Permanent Secretary of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), had the confidence/nerve/effrontery to announce to a Select Committee that even at the time sounded, well, brave.
As reported in The MJ (Jan 10th), “Whitehall officials are not expecting councils to issue further Section 114 notices in the coming weeks … our assessment, looking at the sector as a whole, is that the financial position is sustainable … strengthened by the additional resources made available in the Autumn Statement.”
Apart, that is, from the nine councils within the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities (Sigoma) who warned last week that they could issue a Section 114 notice by 2025; Stoke-on-Trent City Council (Lab) that announced this week that it is on the verge of bankruptcy … oh yes, and Birmingham.
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.
“Things from the past you’ll never see again”. I came across a listing of these recently, and they were – well, moderately interesting. More so, anyway, than the accompanying “trends that have unfortunately returned” – pleated skirts, corsets, and structured vests, whatever they were.
The never-see-agains included smoking adverts, bubblegum cigarettes, and rotary push lawnmowers – to which I might easily have added “The Barnet Graph of Doom” as at least a never-expected-to-see-again.
It was a visual aid devised a dozen or so years ago primarily for the councillors of the London Borough of Barnet. It would come, however, to be associated with/appropriated by Birmingham City Council, and something with which some INLOGOV colleagues were so taken that it was discussed and illustrated in these pages not once but repeatedly – by, inter alia, me in May 2012 and January 2013 and the Institute’s then Director and this blog’s progenitor, Catherine Staite, in December 2012 and October 2013. Indeed, as Catherine notes in that second blog, it at least part-prompted an INLOGOV ‘book’ or, more accurately, Discussion Paper.
Impactful at the time, then, but at least not prominently, I presumed, over the ensuing decade. Certainly I, though at best semi-detached from these matters nowadays, was genuinely surprised to be confronted by its reappearance in a recent Financial Times (indeed, its double reappearance). Somewhat less so that it was credited entirely to Birmingham City Council, with Barnet getting, as my mother would have said, nary a mention. Which justifies at least a brief résumé, and for more senior readers a bit of reminiscence.
Some 15 years or so ago the very Conservative Barnet LBC acquired the not entirely flattering moniker of ‘easyCouncil’ – that precise orthography/spelling, though frequently ignored in the media, being arguably the policy’s most appealing attribute. With its stray upper-case C intendedly referencing the easyJet business model that inspired the council’s almost boundless outsourcing drive for no-frills efficiency, it embraced pretty well all services, from reduced-size waste bins and privatised street cleaning to limited ‘personalised’ adult social care budgets.
Improved and cheaper services were obviously the aim, but senior officers foresaw that the sheer scale of demographic change – more children, more elderly – would in any foreseeable future take up an unmanageable proportion of the Council’s increasingly constricted budget. “No libraries, no parks, no leisure centres – not even bin collections”. Hence the original Barnet Graph of Doom. The one on the left of the illustration, that is – the other, pleasing if more alarmist one, being a public ‘reminder’ tweeted a few years later, just as the social services budget was seriously taking off as forecast.
The Barnet graph, described at some length in my first blog and more summarily by the Guardian’s Public Services editor, David Brindle, started life as part of first a PowerPoint, later video, presentation used by the Council’s Chief Executive, Nick Walkley, to:
“focus the thoughts of colleagues and councillors … In five to seven years we get to the point where it starts to restrict our ability to do anything very much else. Over a 20-year period, unless there was really radical corrective action, adult social care and children’s services would need to take up the totality of our existing budget.”
The tone, as Brindle noted, was deliberately alarmist, with the policy making no provision, inter alia, for Barnet’s anticipated rise in income through regeneration schemes. As an illustrative device, though, it was hugely effective. It featured regularly in local government media, and also in presentations by the late Sir Bob Kerslake – then Permanent Secretary at the DCLG, and whose outstanding career in both central and local government was fulsomely recounted following his recent death.
Alarming, yes, but “Where are the jaws?”, I hear you ask – and, of course, there weren’t any, yet. They were Birmingham Council’s contribution when it took the idea over and “simplified/dramatised” it by, as Patrick Butler put it, again in The Guardian, projecting “a ‘budget pressures’ line rising steeply to the top right of the grid, and a ‘grant reductions’ line crashing to the bottom right.” It featured prominently as a ‘Jaws of Doom Graph’ in the council’s 2013 Budget Consultation document, and could indeed resemble, as Butler suggested, “a child’s depiction of a shark, or crocodile, about to bite its prey. Lunch, in this case, appears to be local government itself.”
In my January 2013 blog I sought to address the question of whether the ‘doom-mongering’ was entirely fair: Were “Birmingham and urban councils generally, or Labour councils, or the country’s most deprived areas, being particularly harshly treated by the government’s grant funding cuts?”
Which, you’ll be relieved to learn, I’ll not be bothering you with here – not least because, as already noted, for the vast bulk of the past decade I’ve personally given these particular ‘Jaws of Doom’ and their graph scarcely a passing thought. Now, though, I wonder whether that’s simply another consequence of a retiree’s detachment from the daily concerns and parlance of local government personnel. Could it be that this is what today’s finance officers jaw about, as it were, down the pub of an evening?
For suddenly there it was, weeks before the journalistic ‘silly season’, and in ‘The Pink Un’ – no, not Norwich City FC’s newsletter, but the albeit self-styled “worldʼs leading global business publication”: “The Jaws of Doom” graph in its original glory, and not once but twice. First, in a kind of editorial intro by Associate Editor, Stephen Bush, commending to readers William Wallis’ “excellent piece … featuring this alarming chart [shown on the right below] about the … ‘jaws of doom’ facing local authorities”. And then Wallis’ article itself.
As you’d expect, it’s a good summary presentation – that I’d certainly be recommending to students, if I still had any – the thrust of which is that:
“for more than a decade, local authorities in England have been sacrificing services and staff to what they call “the jaws of doom” – a reference to a graphic produced by Birmingham city council to show worsening budgetary pressures, that resembled a crocodile’s mouth.
Between rising demand for social care and other essential services, and the dwindling funds councils have received to provide these, discretionary spending on everything from libraries to youth clubs has already been eaten up.
Although local authorities won a better than usual financial settlement for 2023-24, 9.4% up on the year before, inflation running at 8.7% is eroding any benefits.”
And, having already well exceeded a thousand words, that’s where I’ll stop … though not before sharing the interesting and, more importantly, interactive graph of Sigoma’s English Indices of Multiple Deprivation also included in Wallis’ article – not new, so doubtless familiar to some readers, but to me unfamiliar, informative (see added results), surprising in places, and, I felt, worth sharing. It made me (almost) sad not still to be lecturing and so able to play with it in public, as they say!
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.
Previouscolumns have urged a cautious approach to the introduction of photographic voter ID in England. The May 2023 elections provided the first nationwide test of the system, and early analyses are highlighting some significant issues.
Elections took place in 230 areas in England and around 27 million people were eligible to vote. This week, the Association of Electoral Administrators (the people in councils who actually deliver elections) issued their post-match analysis, highlighting ‘the fragility of the system’ and recommending a fundamental review of the country’s electoral arrangements.
With less than four months between the enactment of the new legislation and polling day, which included new statutory duties on accessibility as well as voter ID, councils faced a huge and risky task to administer the new system effectively. They also faced significantly more paperwork, with new forms to track electors unable to vote and new data capture requirements. The AEA report significant impact on polling officials: ‘many of our members reported POs feeling overwhelmed by paperwork and the time it takes to complete throughout polling day and at the close of poll’.
The AEA report reveals that the government’s website to provide free photo ID to those needing Voter Authority Certificates (VACs) failed to work properly from its launch in January and many functions were still not available by the deadline to apply for a VAC for 4 May poll. Updates were still being issued two weeks before polling day. Almost 90,000 people applied for VACs by the deadline, well short of the Electoral Commission’s earlier estimate of 250,000 – 350,000 applications based on the proportion of local election voters who did not have suitable ID. Many didn’t know they would need one – just over half (57%) of the overall population and those who said they did not already have photo ID were aware of VACs in May, according to the Electoral Commission.
The types of photo ID acceptable under the legislation proved rather esoteric. Passports are accepted, but what about a passport from Zimbabwe or a British format immigration document? London Oyster 60+ cards are accepted, but not the Merseytravel Over 60s pass which has similar application checks. Photo IDs issued by councils themselves, such as taxi licences and gun licences, were presented but could not be accepted. Similarly police warrant cards, NHS and other emergency services photo ID were presented but unable to be accepted.
The Electoral Commission’s interim report on the election was issued on 23rd June. They found that immediately before polling day, 87% of people in England (excluding London, where there were no elections) were aware that they needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station – implying that around 3.5 m potential voters were not aware as the poll approached. Awareness was lowest amongst young people, BME communities, those who haven’t previously voted in local elections, and people who didn’t have the necessary forms of photo ID.
To avoid voters queuing for a ballot paper and being turned away, in some areas ‘greeters’ were appointed to meet electors as they arrived and check whether they had an accepted form of photo ID with them. Others provided posters and banners to explain the requirements outside polling stations. Polling stations with greeters recorded a smaller proportion of people ‘turned away’ inside the polling station compared to those without greeters. As a result of voters receiving advice outside the polling stations, and because of some other data issues, we should treat statistics on numbers of electors unable to vote with caution. Data collected inside polling stations shows that at least at least 0.7% of people (39,000 voters) who tried to vote at a polling station were initially turned away but around two-thirds of those people (63%) returned later in the day and were able to vote. In some councils more than 1 in 100 electors were turned away.
More worryingly, the Electoral Commission found that 4% of people who said they did not vote in these elections gave an unprompted reason related to the ID rules, and the proportion of non-voters giving an ID-related reason rose from 4% to 7% when survey respondents were selecting from a list of reasons.
It was not possible to capture reliable demographic data on people who were not able to vote because of the ID requirement because electoral law did not allow polling station staff to collect demographic information about individuals who were turned away. In the EC survey, disabled people and those who are unemployed were more likely than other groups to give a reason related to ID for not voting.
Voter confidence doesn’t seem to have been massively improved. In fact, the EC found 68% of people were confident that the May elections were well run, compared to 73% in 2022. For those who said they were not confident, the most common reason selected (by 46%) was that “some people were unable to vote due to the ID requirement”.
We await the Electoral Commission’s full report in the autumn.
Meanwhile, I close with an interesting comment made at the National Conservatism conference on the 15th May 2023 by former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg:
Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections. We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.
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
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