Public institutions and governance

Are deferred local elections the real threat to UK democracy?

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Jason Lowther

With dozens of English councils and hundreds of councillors facing delays to this year’s May elections, opponents claim the move could undermine public trust in democracy.  History shows deferral of elections in similar circumstances is rare but not exceptional.  There are however far bigger threats to the UK’s democracy.

Media reports today are suggesting that more than a third of eligible English councils have requested to delay their planned May 2026 local elections, potentially requiring around 600 councillors to serve an additional year.  These councils state that the Government’s ongoing local government restructure makes it difficult to run the polls effectively at the planned dates, and central government claims holding elections for councils that are soon to be abolished would waste time and money.  

But the delays have sparked criticism, and even led to unrest at this week’s Redditch council meeting. Opponents argue the move weakens democratic accountability.  Reform UK leader Nigel Farage denounced the proposal as “monstrous”, claiming that “denying elections is the behaviour of a banana republic” and threatening a judicial review.  Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs have also criticised the move.  The Electoral Commission’s chief executive said: “As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections. Extending existing mandates risks affecting the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence.”

Delays to local elections in England have occurred previously.  During the Second World War, all local elections were suspended between 1939 and 1944, making this the most extensive postponement in modern history.  In peacetime, delays have largely been tied to local government reorganisation, most notably in the 1990s, when Parliament approved major structural reforms that abolished counties such as Avon, Cleveland, and Humberside and created 46 new unitary authorities.  These reforms led to altered or cancelled election dates to align with the establishment of new councils and avoid electing councillors to authorities that were about to be dissolved.  In 2025, nine councils had their elections delayed by one year to support transitions to new unitary structures.

But even though there are clear precedents for the current electoral postponements, there are other longer-term, more significant and worrying trends which risk seriously undermining our democracy.  Academic commentary shows growing concern among constitutional scholars that the UK’s democratic safeguards have weakened in recent years.  

Scholars at the UCL Constitution Unit  warned in 2022 that the UK faced a real risk of “democratic backsliding,” defined as a gradual erosion of checks and balances, growing executive dominance, attacks on civil liberties and the weakening of political norms that traditionally safeguarded constitutional stability.  Their analysis emphasised that democratic decline can occur incrementally through the actions of elected leaders, especially in systems like the UK’s where constitutional rules are flexible and can be rapidly altered.  

Further alarm was raised by Professor Alison Young at the University of Cambridge, who described the UK as standing on a “constitutional cliff‑edge.”  In her 2023 book, she argued that a series of constitutional changes and executive‑centric reforms have strengthened government power while weakening the political and legal checks that previously constrained it.  Young warned that without reforms to reinforce accountability, transparency, and oversight, the UK risks drifting towards “unchecked power,” eroding the democratic norms that underpin good governance.  

Last year, Dr Sean Kippin of the University of Stirling argued that recent Conservative governments engaged in “democratic backsliding” by deploying what he calls an “illiberal playbook,” using both lawful and legally dubious tools to weaken institutional checks, restrict protest rights, and compromise the independence of the Electoral Commission. His research concludes that “between 2016 and 2024, the Conservatives used power to diminish, weaken, and compromise Britain’s already imperfect democracy”.

There have been some positive moves by the ‘new’ Labour government to improve the functioning of our democratic system, such as the widening of voter ID criteria and promises to lower the voting age to16. However, overall there hasn’t yet been commitment to fundamental reforms to address the issues identified in the above reports, such as the impact of donations on political impartiality, and there have been some worrying developments, for example around civil liberties and the right to protest. 

A year’s deferral of elections to a disappearing council doesn’t fundamentally undermine our democracy, but failing to address the longer term and serious issues of democratic backsliding could prepare the way for those who will.

Dr Jason Lowther is director of INLOGOV (the Institute of Local Government Studies) at the University of Birmingham.  

References

Kippin, S., 2025. Democratic backsliding and public administration: the experience of the UK. Policy Studies, pp.1-20.

Russell, M., Renwick, A. and James, L., 2022. What is democratic backsliding, and is the UK at risk. The Constitutional Unit Briefing.

Young, A.L., 2023. Unchecked power?: How recent constitutional reforms are threatening UK democracy. Policy Press.

Picture credit: https://www.facebook.com/events/898249983102646/

Just how ‘burdensome’ is our tax system?

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Chris Game

One of the almost unavoidable consequences of being comprehensively retired and with any kind of interest in politics is that you find yourself watching more of the Government’s annual, or biannual, Budget drama than you’d ever felt necessary during your working career. There are everyone’s speculations, the experts’ attempted explanations/simplifications, plus this time the botched premature release of the whole thing by the unfortunately titled (and now former) Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) some 40 minutes before Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves even took to her feet.

Anyway, unlike, I imagine, most of you lot, I actually sat through the whole Budget speech and at least the first bit of ensuing analysis by the ‘experts’. And, having done so, I almost immediately wished I’d counted the number of ‘tax burdens’ I’d heard – rather than, say, ‘tax rates’, which was the term I feel I grew up with, or tax levels, both of which are obviously more neutral and, you might think, more appropriate for a Chancellor of the Exchequer and at least some of her own party supporters.

I’ve no way of proving this, but it’s my strong impression that for most of my life the term ‘tax burden’ is one that would be used not in a Chancellor’s budget speech, but predominantly by slightly disgruntled taxpayers themselves or by Opposition parties and politicians, as a criticism of some specific tax or tax increase that the Government or Chancellor might be contemplating or had actually just imposed.

Gratuitous piece of information: we know that the public’s attitudes towards taxation and spending do fluctuate over time – partly but not entirely in relation/response to actual levels of taxation. Indeed, there’s an actual name for the study of such fluctuations: thermostatic theory, which, when I first learnt of it, I thought was something to do with people being happier when the sun’s out.

Anyway, the two words – tax and burden – are nowadays so closely linked, in the minds apparently of both payers and imposers, that they might as well be hyphenated. Quite early on in Reeves’ speech, therefore, and having acknowledged that freezing tax thresholds would hurt working people, she assured us that her plans were fair and that “the biggest burden would fall on those with the broadest shoulders”.

Not ‘fiscal impact’, ‘tax obligation’, or even ‘tax liability’, emphasising variously the effect on government finances or the legal duty to pay taxes, but that b-word from the outset and for any public expenditure. Nowadays, it seems, any tax increase, indeed any tax at all, is not just attacked as, but presented as, burdensome – a questioning of which, as I hope you’ll be gathering, was this blog’s main prompt. 

For it strikes me as odd, wrong and regrettable in several different ways. For a start, it’s almost certainly not how most of us were first taught about and introduced to taxes and their function. My guess is that explicit links would have been made between the public services with which as young people we would have been becoming familiar and benefitting from – education, healthcare, public safety, transport, waste management, emergency services – and their providers, and how our parents contributed in various ways to their funding, even those of which they weren’t necessarily regular or direct consumers.

No doubt we learned too, maybe indirectly, about their rising costs and the tax increases required to pay for them, but, if ‘burdens’ were mentioned at all, it would have been to explain that that was part of the deal in our advanced society. And, if our teachers were particularly keen, there might be some attempts to compare our levels/burdens with those of at least other European countries.

At which point – following a weekend wondering if I should email Jason and sound him out on whether he felt it would be worth my trying to turn these frankly rather meandering thoughts into an INLOGOV blog – at 10.00 a.m. precisely on Monday morning, there arrived a ResearchGate email announcing that our colleague Catherine Durose had just co-published an article asking “How should policy actors respond to buzzwords? Three ways to deal with policy ambiguity”[1].

It’s obviously impossible to summarise a 16-page article in a single blog paragraph, but the following desperate two sentences convey at least something of Durose and her three co-authors’ concerns. By using the lens of ‘buzzwords’, they “explain how actors in real-world policymaking contexts face ambiguity, then prompt debate on how to respond” (p.4). They focus our attention on “the temporality or the cyclical nature of ideas about better policymaking” … highlighting “the ambiguity that often accompanies these cycles”, and encapsulate “what these dynamics can feel like to policy actors …” (p.5).

Which brings me to my closing paragraphs and my concern about the seemingly incessant use of the ‘tax burden’ phrase – which could easily, it seems to me, make any comparative newcomer or innocent suppose that this ‘burden’ would surely reflect the UK’s position near the top of at least the European overall tax level list.

However, as anyone who has ever spent more than a few minutes ‘researching’ this tax burden question knows well, if anything, the reverse is the case. True, UK tax as a proportion of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is currently close to its highest since 1945, but for a single worker on an average wage, we have one of the lowest ‘tax burdens’ among both G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) and OECD countries.

Other data sets are, of course available, but if, as would seem most likely, our newcomer/innocent were thinking of personal income tax levels, they’d be pretty comprehensively wrong. In the December 2025 table of ‘Top Statutory Personal Income Tax Rates in 35 Major European Countries’ the UK’s precisely 45% personal income tax rate puts us in 16th place – yes, above halfway, but not by much, and way behind the eight 50% pluses: headed by Finland (57%), Denmark (56%), and France (55%).

So, if 45% warrants the term ‘burden’ pretty well every time it’s mentioned, I wonder what translated nouns citizens of some of these countries use?  And might it not be time for at least our Chancellor (or Chancelloress) of the Exchequer to modify the ‘burden’ references?  Oh yes, and can Durose et al. also please work on a positive buzzword/phrase to substitute for ‘tax burden’?

[1] Richardson, L., Durose, C., Cairney, P. and Boswell, J., 2025. How should policy actors respond to buzzwords? Three ways to deal with policy ambiguity. Policy Sciences, pp.1-16.

Image of chancellor: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewjkv8jylko

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.

Local Government in the Czech Republic During Two Recent Crises

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Dr Paul Joyce

A recent book on local government in Czechia offers valuable lessons for anyone involved in local governance, emergency planning, or public sector reform. The book, edited by Balík and Špaček, explores how local government responded to two major crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and the influx of refugees following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The editors describe Czechia’s  local government as “fragmented”. By this, they do not mean fragmented in terms of lack of coordination. Instead, they use the term in a structural and territorial sense: the country has a very large number of small municipalities. In fact, there are over 6,000 municipalities in Czechia, and the median size is fewer than 500 residents.

At first glance, this sounds like a recipe for weakness. However, the book tells a very different story. During both crises, support and coordination from the national government was widely experienced as slow, inconsistent and, at times, chaotic. By contrast, local mayors often stepped forward quietly and decisively to support their communities. As Balík and Špaček put it:

“Mayors of small municipalities rarely speak of crisis management in systemic terms; instead, they focus on immediate, practical solutions to specific problems… Small local governments tackled emergencies as they came with the capacities they had… The ability of small municipalities to adapt quickly and provide personalised assistance was critical in the early stages of both crises…” (2026, p.177)

In many places, local government was really the only consistent source of stability. One of the key strengths highlighted in the book is social capital – the trust, relationships, and local knowledge embedded in communities. This proved crucial, particularly during the refugee crisis:

“The strength of small municipalities was in the individual commitment, personal ties, and local knowledge—knowing who to turn to in case of problems and how to solve specific issues” (Balík and Špaček, 2026, p.176).

Even in very small towns and villages in Czechia, local government is present and visible. Mayors and councillors are highly trusted, far more than national politicians, and citizens see them as accessible, familiar, and reliable. In crisis conditions, this trust enabled rapid mobilisation of volunteers, associations, fire brigades, community groups and informal support networks.

Interestingly, the book also notes that although inter-municipal cooperation is voluntary and not financially incentivised by national government, over 80% of Czech municipalities are involved in some form of collaboration. During the crises, some mayors consulted colleagues in neighbouring areas, shared information, and worked through voluntary municipal networks.

However, and this is an important point, the book does not show that there was a large, coordinated, systematic collaborative governance response at national scale. There is no hard data indicating how widespread or effective inter-municipal cooperation was during the crises. What the authors do state is that cooperation was informal, uneven, and dependent on existing relationships and trust.

In fact, they emphasise that local responses were often “highly individualised”. In other words, municipalities generally acted on their own initiative, using their own judgement, knowledge and resources to solve immediate problems. Horizontal networks sometimes supported this, but they did not replace largely autonomous decision-making.

What stands out most during the crises is vertical incoherence: poor communication, unclear leadership, and constant change in guidance from central government. Mayors described regulations changing “three times a day”, written in legal language that nobody understood, and official information arriving after the media had already reported it. In the early stages of both COVID-19 and the refugee crisis, national guidance was often described as vague, delayed or non-existent.

As a result, mayors relied heavily on their own judgement and “common sense”. Why? Because they had to respond to reality as it unfolded in front of them. This leads to an important conclusion: Czechia was not “saved by collaborative governance” in a formal, system-wide sense. Instead, it was held together by local leadership, strong relationships, deep community knowledge, and trust.

Implications for UK local government

For those working in or with UK local government, the Czech experience raises important questions.

For years, public sector reform has often focused on scale, efficiency, and consolidation. We tend to assume that bigger organisations are stronger, more capable, and more resilient. The Czech case challenges this assumption. It suggests that in times of crisis, small, trusted, locally embedded structures can be incredibly powerful.

This does not mean the UK should “fragment” its local government system. But it does suggest that structural reforms aimed purely at efficiency can come at a hidden cost: the loss of proximity, trust, responsiveness, and local knowledge that make rapid, context-sensitive action possible.

The Czech experience also highlights the risks of poor vertical coordination. When national guidance is unclear or incoherent, the pressure falls heavily on local government. In those moments, what really matters is not the size of the organisation, but:

•           The quality of relationships

•           The level of trust

•           The strength of civic networks

•           The confidence of local leaders

•           The use of local knowledge

For the UK, the message may be this: alongside reform for efficiency and scale, we need to invest in robust governance, that is, in communication, trust, community capacity, and strong vertical relationships between central and local government.

Reference: Balík, S. and Špaček, D. (eds.) (2026) Fragmented Local Government Systems and Crises: Experiences from Czechia. Governance and Public Management Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01897-7

Paul Joyce is an Associate at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham, a Visiting Professor in Public Management at Leeds Beckett University, and Publications Director of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) which is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. He has a PhD from London School of Economics and Political Science

A Very Local Authority

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Garath Symonds

When I was asked by the Chief Executive to take over a failing project to create a
contact centre for vulnerable residents, I said yes without hesitation. It felt like an
opportunity to be of service to residents, but beneath the surface I may have acted in
service of something closer to home, my own need to succeed in the eyes of
authority figures.


In local government, authority often hides anxiety. When fear rises, the system looks
for a heroic leader, someone who can carry its tension. The more I looked confident,
the more authority I was lent, and the more anxiety I absorbed. It was an
unconscious exchange. The organisation offloaded its unease, and I absorbed it. It
was as if I had been unconsciously elected by the group to hold the system’s
anxiety.


Over time, the project began to take on a life of its own. Meetings were charged with
feeling but framed as technical debate. The numbers, the charts, the plans, all
attempts to manage the anxiety that no one wanted to name or think about. We were
defending ourselves against the fear of not knowing with Gantt charts and risk
registers. Bureaucracy had become a collective defence against thought. And so had
action, the more stuff we got done the better we felt, whether we were doing the right
stuff didn’t matter. Anxiety was running the show, but it wasn’t possible to say so.


When the contact centre finally launched, the context shifted again. It was delivered
on time and within budget, yet there was no sense of relief. We had achieved the
task but not addressed the underlying social problem, and therefore the anxiety in
the system persisted. When a new CE and corporate team arrived, the story
changed again. What had been previously praised became problematic. The project
was now the cause of the organisation’s distress, a helpful target for blame, blocking
any real strategic thinking about what might be needed.


That experience taught me that authority is never just structural it is emotional and
symbolic. It moves between people and roles, attaching itself to those who can carry
what others cannot. When we lead, we enter this unconscious network of
projections, hopes and expectations. The question is not whether this happens, but
whether we notice it.


Local government lives with a chronic tension between its wish for certainty and the
reality of uncertainty, much of its life is shaped by unspoken feeling. Inspections,
budget cuts, audits, change and political pressures all produce emotional
reverberations that are felt long before they are understood. Without reflection
systems repeat their defensive strategies without understanding them.


Developing this very local authority starts with self-leadership, the inner work of
noticing what is being projected into us, what emotions we are carrying on behalf of
the wider system. It asks for a disciplined curiosity about anxiety: what it signals,
where it belongs, and how it can be thought about rather than acted out. It is less
about providing answers and more about creating a space in which meaning can
emerge.


This kind of authority is quietly radical. It might involve naming the unspoken mood in
a meeting, holding silence when others rush to fill it, or acknowledging a tension
rather than smoothing it away. Containment is not about comfort; it is about
thoughtfulness under pressure. It is the ability to stay connected when people and
systems fragment.


The lesson I took from this experience was that leadership is always personal. The
system’s anxiety finds its way into us, connecting with our personal relationship to
authority formed in childhood. How we hold it determines whether it becomes
creative or corrosive force on our leadership. We are not separate from the
organisations we lead; we are expressions of them. Authority, in this sense, is not
only delegated but matured, a relationship between our inner world and outer role.
In this sense authority, is the internal capacity to remain reflective in the face of
collective anxiety. It is the ability to recognise projection without retaliating, to
distinguish what belongs to the self and what belongs to the system, and crucially for
leaders to help others recover their capacity to think.


As local government faces what Sarah Longlands, Chief Executive of the Centre for
Local Economic Strategies, recently described in The MJ as “change rippling through
local government … from structural reform and new combined authorities to health
integration and the push for financial sustainability,” this capacity has never been
more needed. These transitions demand not only new governance models but
leaders who can bear the anxiety of change without collapsing into a desperate need
for certainty. The future may depend less on structural reform and more on this
reflective discipline, the capacity for thought that keeps authority truly local.

Garath Symonds was a senior leader in local government for 20 years and is now
a practice tutor at INLOGOV, an executive coach, organisational consultant and author
of ‘The Anxious Leader: How to Lead in an Uncertain World’. His work helps leaders
make sense of anxiety as data for reflection, containment, and transformation.
http://www.spacetoreconnect.com

Intervention 3.0: Designing a Responsive Model for Local Government Support in England

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Jason Lowther / Paul Joyce / Philip Whiteman

The arrival of the new UK government looks set to result in a new policy on central government’s intervention powers in local authorities, the third generation of such policies this century.  This article suggests some key lessons from earlier models. 

Intervention 1.0 was facilitated by Best Value legislation that an “authority must make arrangements to secure continuous improvement in the way in which its functions are exercised, having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness” (Local Government Act 1999).  This remains the basis of statutory interventions today.  But the context could not be more different. 

The Blair government commissioned an extensive set of national performance indicators, developed independently by the Audit Commission with a common definition and quality assured through local audits.  The “District Auditor” role maintained in depth contextualised knowledge of each local council, and could identify and flag significant governance or performance issues at an early stage.  As well as diagnosing problems, the Audit Commission’s national studies provided evidence-based recommendations to help improve local services’ economy, efficiency and effectiveness.

The strengths of this model were the comprehensive nature of the evaluation, its collective and mutually supportive use of expert agencies to provide an evidence base, and the sanctions that went with it including transparent public reporting.  Inlogov produced a series of reports diagnosing and explaining the causes of poor performance, analysing recovery planning and strategies for organisational recovery, evaluating various policy instruments for recovery (such as lead officials) and identifying the key developmental mechanisms for recovery. 

Our reports clearly demonstrated that the context for poor performance determines effective mechanisms for recovery: one size definitely does not fit all.  The causes of failure are varied, such as ineffective leadership arrangements and inadequacies in the operating culture. 

Improvement mechanisms need to address issues of cognition, capability and capacity.  Cognition is the council’s awareness and understanding of their performance trajectory, which is often resilient to changes in political control.  Capability concerns the construction and institutionalisation of a change-oriented vision by council leaders.  Finally, capacity is the ability to deliver the required vision and change. The required change mechanisms are both internal (such as leadership change) and external (for example, peer mentors, expert advisors, and funding). 

Intervention 2.0

The arrival of the Coalition government in 2010 brought rapid changes to intervention.  The Audit Commission was summarily discarded, publicly justified by claimed savings of £50m.  In reality, recent research by the Audit Reform Lab at the University of Sheffield suggests that English audits have higher costs and greater delays than in Wales or Scotland (where centralised oversight arrangements were maintained). 

From 2010 to 2020, central government intervention was relatively rare with formal interventions in only four councils.  However, from 2021 this situation changed substantially with interventions in eight councils in three years (none of these councils were controlled by the ruling national party).  In the same three years, there were statutory best value notices in a further nine councils.

It’s fair to describe this phase of intervention as less structured and evidence-based, without robust national data or independent routine inspection of councils.    

There has been limited evaluation of Intervention 2.0 to date.  Our early research findings based on three case studies suggest a five-stage model of intervention: (i) crisis revelation, (ii) delegitimisation, (iii) imposed reforms, (iv) capacity building, (v) restoration or reorganisation.  We conclude that under localism interventions were not merely administrative responses to failure but were deeply political acts that reshaped the legitimacy and capacity of local governance. The Commissioners, acting as technocratic agents of central government, connected central and local government, and had the effect of buffering the political tensions of intervention, while leading a process in which managerial competence rather than local democracy steered intervention.

Where next for intervention?

The raft of interventions related to section 114 notices, the establishment of the new Local Government Outcomes Framework and local audit reform including the Local Audit Office indicate a new phase of intervention and open opportunities to develop a more systematic and evidence-based approach.  More thought is needed on how this should work in future, including the role of peer reviews and inter-council support arrangements.  The centralisation of intervention power and the dominance of technocratic intervention needs to evolve to suit devolution and to provide greater support for local democracy. This could build on the new audit arrangements through a “district auditor” type overview of governance.

The acid test of reforms should be that while central government would still be able to intervene when councils were failing, the intervention process would minimise the suspension of local democracy, do as little damage as possible to the public’s trust in their local council, and foster good local democratic political leadership.

This article first appeared in the Municipal Journal on 16 October 2025 titled “How not to damage democracy”. It is available here: https://www.themj.co.uk/damage-democracy

Dr Jason Lowther is director of INLOGOV (the Institute of Local Government Studies) at the University of Birmingham.  Prof Paul Joyce is an Associate at INLOGOV.  Dr Philip Whiteman is a lecturer on public policy and administration at INLOGOV.

Supporting councillors to thrive: the 21st Century Councillor Revisited

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Catherine Needham

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.

Click here to register: 21st Century Councillors Tickets, Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite