The 21st Century Chief Executive

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Councillor Graham Chapman

It’s not only clothes and pop music which are subject to the vacillations of fashion. They affect the more mundane world of local government too. Elected mayors for example are a fashion of the ‘naughties’, when larger-than-life bankers, entrepreneurs, football managers, celebrities of all types were supposed to provide solutions to a whole range of problems by dint of pure charisma and personality.  Even the staid role of the chief executive is subject to fashion.

The traditional function of the chief executive with a legal background overseeing due process and formal decision making, gave way in the 80s to the more managerial approach, and perhaps was the heyday for the role. In the 90s and early 2000s it took another turn. Under the cover of the CPA and star ratings, where the chief executive was given a far more important role by the inspectors than the leader, and encouraged by SOLACE and the Blair Government, the ‘personality’ Chief Executive emerged. It was thankfully not totally pervasive but frequent enough to create conflict with the role of the elected members, and to increase chief executive remuneration in some cases to a point of embarrassment.  We are now going through a counter-revolution, partly because a minority of chief executives overplayed their hands, partly because of the recent antagonism whipped up against the public sector and because chief executives, as some of the most highly paid public servants, are an easy target. The counter-revolution now questions the need for the role at all and a number of authorities have abolished it, or are in the process of doing so.

My view is that chief executives are essential. A good chief executive provides continuity and integrity to the local government system, and a healthy counterpoint to political decision making. The system is part of a British tradition of local government which, being British, we do not appreciate sufficiently.  But if the role is to be accepted, de facto it does need to rid itself of some of the fashions it has been subject to and it needs to establish a set of core principles. The best, perhaps the only, set available has been devised by Roger Taylor, former chief executive of Manchester and Birmingham.  The principles should be of particular interest to the more buccaneering breed of chief executives who see themselves as more important than their members.

So here they are in précis in Roger Taylor’s own words.

1. However powerful a chief executive may seem, his/her success is always dependent upon gaining and maintaining high levels of political confidence and approval.

2. Chief executives need to develop a clear sense of the corporate  which is informed by, and contributes to, the politics of place

3. However difficult it may be for the political leadership at the time, it is vital that chief executives can demonstrate a clear moral and ethical compass and foundation to their work.

4. Chief executives are at the nexus between the democratically elected council and it’s paid servants. While they will be the leaders to the paid service, they can never allow themselves to become partisan.

5. Chief Executives must always avoid being “the story”. Some of the best chief executives are those who eschew the limelight and concentrate on the affairs of the council.

6. How well chief executives are likely to ‘gel’ with officer colleagues will always be less important than their intellectual capacity and ability to explain complex things clearly.

7. Chief executives need to have, and to demonstrate, the political skills to manage effectively in the spaces between leadership and opposition councillors.

8. Competent chief executives never need fear the working communications between their colleagues and the political leadership.

9. Chief executives need to have some empathy with the complexities and the arduous nature of leadership in the Council.

10. Chief executives who work with a political faction and against the leadership should never be trusted, especially by the political faction they work with.

11. Chief executives need always to bear in mind that neither the conferences nor the special roles pay the salary.  Chief executives constantly need to bear in mind what their day job is.

12. The heart of any relationship between leader and chief executive has to be trust, truth and tolerance.  It should never be an intimate friendship but it should always have with it an informality and an appreciation of each other’s company.

13. Leaders should have a clear idea about what they want chief executives to achieve and they should be able to rely on objective and independent support for the negotiation of these objectives and subsequent review of the chief executive’s performance.

To summarise: I have little doubt that the move to abolish the role of chief executive will turn out to be the most ephemeral of the fads and that those authorities trying to survive without one will return to the fold. However, it does not mean that the role does not need shoring up and insulating from the sum of the political and, often self-induced, managerial opportunism to which is has been subject. Roger Taylor’s list of dos and don’ts is a good start.

Graham Chapman is the Deputy Leader of Nottingham City Council, and the Portfolio Holder for Economic Development, Resources and Regeneration.  He is a Councillor for Aspley Ward.

How Mayoral Recall Could, and Wouldn’t, Have Worked

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Chris Game

We’ll never know, of course, whether a well publicised mayoral recall provision could have swung some of those lost referendums. My own view is that, with a half-decently organised Government-led Yes campaign – detailing the ‘city deals’ that mayoral cities could expect, and confirming that mayors elected by voters would be recallable by voters – several additional referendums, including Birmingham’s, were comfortably winnable. 

What is surely undeniable is that Ministers’ refusal even to address the issue of recall – to which the Government had been publicly, if reticently, committed since its January 2011 mayoral impact assessment – understandably increased people’s doubts about elected mayors and ultimately cost votes.

I’ve been wondering this past week – over the final stages of arguably the second most important US election this year – whether, if those mayoral referendums had been held just a month later, the topic might have forced itself on to our electoral agenda, and, if so, with what effect?

The election in question was only the third time in US history that a state Governor faced the prospect of being voted out of office in a recall election – and the first time ever that the defending Governor had won. That’s the statistical measure of what happened on Tuesday in the state of Wisconsin; its historical importance will be seen between now and the Presidential election on November 6th.

Scott Walker – the conservative Republican politician, not the “Make It Easy on Yourself” one – was elected Governor of Wisconsin in November 2010 on a platform of tax cuts for businesses and the well-off and wage cuts for public employees.  Inheriting a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit, he almost immediately unleashed the most politically inflammatory Budget Repair Bill imaginable.

Public employees’ wage increases were capped at the rate of inflation, their pension and health insurance contributions increased and the programmes cut. Above all, though, this was an attack on the Democratic Party through the public sector unions, who saw their incomes slashed and – going beyond any campaign pledges – their collective bargaining rights virtually abolished.

There were furious protests and demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins, negotiations and some amendments, major procedural delay, judicial review, and finally reference to the state Supreme Court. Eventually, however, the Bill was passed, and opponents turned their attentions to recall. 

Recall – enabling a citizens’ vote to remove and replace a public official before the end of their term of office – is almost as long established in the US as the other way of getting rid of them, through the more judicial route of impeachment. With 150 recall elections and 75 recalls across the country in 2011 – including, incidentally, two mayors – its deployment, particularly at local level, is widespread, but it is not universal, and removal of senior state officials through recall is exceptional.

Wisconsin is one of 19 states to permit recall elections for governors and other state officials, but in the hundred years pre-Walker the impact had been limited to a couple of state senators being recalled and a couple surviving recall elections. As for state governors, there had been just two gubernatorial recall elections in all US history – both lost by the incumbent, but neither, contrary to what might be imagined, having anything to do with corruption or personal misconduct.

North Dakota’s Governor Lynn Davis was held personally responsible for the savage agricultural depression of the early 1920s. More famously and somewhat similarly, Gray Davis in 2003 was blamed for California’s electricity shortage – created partly by market manipulation by energy companies like Enron – and the budget crisis that followed the burst of the dot-com bubble, and was replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Recall procedures vary from state to state, although all involve gathering large numbers of signatures on a citizens’ petition. Wisconsin required signatures equalling 25% of the total votes cast for the office of governor at the last election – roughly 540,000 – to be collected within 60 days, which, when I first heard it, struck me as mountainous.

But what do I know? Wisconsinites, certainly when riled, and led by powerful public sector unions, can be a formidable force, and within just 30 days they were almost there, with over half a million names.  They eventually got to 900,000 – 23% of the state’s eligible voters and 46% of voters in the 2010 gubernatorial election. On the face of it, then, things looked tricky for Governor Walker – until you put the petitioners’ undoubtedly impressive organisation up against the sheer weight of the incumbent’s cash. 

Particularly since the Supreme Court’s historic ‘Citizens United’ decision in 2008, holding that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, effective controls over campaign fund-raising in non-federal elections have been almost non-existent.

The two sides in the Wisconsin recall election are estimated to have raised $63 million, with Walker outspending his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor, Tom Barrett, by 7 to 1. In these quantities, money talks loud. As election day approached, the gap between the candidates grew and the final result saw Walker create history with an increased vote share of 53% to 46%.

But, if it was unfortunate for Barrett, also the defeated candidate in 2010, it’s potentially dire for President Obama, his economic policy, and re-election prospects. The public sector unions are vital both financially and organisationally to the Democrats in general and Obama in particular. In a state that voted Democrat in the last six presidential elections, Scott Walker took the unions and their members on, scythed them down, and survived. There are 28 other Republican governors out there, many just waiting for this sign.

As for the influence, if any, these extraordinary events might have had on UK public opinion and the mayoral referendums, I really have no idea. They’d have made it harder for Ministers to maintain their almost Trappist silence on the recall issue, but at the same time would presumably have encouraged the idea that elected mayors would Americanise our politics, which is neither accurate nor, judging from this instance, an altogether edifying prospect. The one certainty is that this is definitely not the last we’ll hear on the subject. Whether in relation to MPs, mayors or police commissioners, recall ain’t going to go away.

Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Managed Difference, Local Solutions, Market Forces – Anything but Postcode Lotteries!

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Chris Game

It was over six years ago that Sir Michael Lyons launched his campaign to abolish ‘postcode lotteries’ from the local government lexicon.  As he wrote in his 2007 report, “I would hope to see debate about postcode lotteries being replaced, over time, by discussion of ‘managed difference’ – recognising the right and ability of local communities to make their own choices, confident in their own competence, and in the knowledge of their own preferences.”

Others, doubting perhaps the rallying appeal of ‘managed difference’, proposed alternatives – local difference, local solutions, postcode preferences – but to nil avail. The campaign made no more headway than most of the Lyons Report’s substantive recommendations, as was painfully apparent last week – during which the populist media brought us what seemed like a new PL each day, each of course with its accompanying outrage and public alarm. 

First was the Diabetes Treatment Postcode Lottery. A National Audit Office (NAO) report showed “significant variation in quality of care received by people with diabetes across the NHS”. Quality of care was defined here solely in terms of the 9-process care regime advised – yes, only advised – by the Department of Health (DH) and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), and the most recent data were from 2009-10.

Still, I mean, the results were, like, just incredible. The 151 English PCTS and 34,000 GPs clearly weren’t all following fully and identically the DH’s recommended care package.

Next came the seasonal Holiday Cash Postcode Lottery. Which? magazine sent mystery shoppers to a range of different currency exchange providers across the UK on the same day and – surprise! – found they weren’t all offered exactly the same number of euros for their £500s. In fact, there were regional variations, with London and Glasgow shoppers getting more euros than those in Birmingham, Sheffield and, yes, Haverfordwest – except that there weren’t really, since over a two-month period the Post Office and Thomas Cook offered the best deals, irrespective of region. 

Then lgcplus ended the week with the Child Care Postcode Lottery, choosing to lead its news round-up on 25th May with a Times story: “‘Postcode lottery’ in child care proceedings”.  A Cafcass (Children and Family Court Support and Advisory Service) report found that, in the three years since the Baby Peter Connelly case, there has been an increase of over 60% in local authority care applications – but, again amazingly, not spread absolutely equally across all 152 relevant local authorities.

Let’s start with the child care case. First, I’m fairly certain the Cafcass report itself contains no mention whatever of a ‘postcode lottery’. The cheap and misleading headline was chosen by The Times – presumably to rubbish local government in general and certain councils in particular – and then, regrettably, recycled by LGC.

Second, the report’s main findings constituted a generally highly positive local government news story – though you’d never know it from The Times’ version, since the very term ‘lottery’ has deliberately negative connotations.  

To quote directly from the report: “as a result of intensive work on behalf of children, court applications to protect vulnerable children are being made in a more timely way than in 2008 and at an earlier stage of local authority involvement with a family. In particular, neglect cases are being acted on more quickly … and local authorities are more fully prepared coming into court”.

Third, the whole point of a lottery is that there are unmistakeable winners and losers, good and bad outcomes. For the media, the good guys here are, no question, those councils heading the league table of public law applications per 10,000 children. That’s not, however, the Cafcass view.

Cafcass CE, Anthony Douglas, stressed that it’s impossible from the statistics alone to know whether high appliers are being diligently active or defensively over-reactive, and whether low appliers are being slow or perhaps have much better family support services.

The authors warn that their study “does not provide evidence about what the ‘proper’ level of care applications should be”, and admit they were hesitant about publishing statistics in this form, given the likelihood of their prompting comparison of authorities’ levels of intervention. Perhaps they should have hesitated longer.

The diabetes treatment case is not dissimilar. Again ‘postcode lottery’ comes not from the NAO report, but is a media tag to justify the pillorying of, in this instance, Primary Care Trusts. Again too the lottery headline obscured an at least partly positive story: that the proportion of diabetes patients receiving the full recommended care package had increased significantly since the previous audit.

This time, however, the report’s authors were quite certain who the lottery losers were: diabetes patients in PCTs in which only relatively small numbers – say, under 40% – received all nine DH-recommended care processes in 2009-10, regardless of any other treatment they may have received.

Almost as striking, though, is that in not one of the 151 PCTs were more than 69% of diagnosed diabetics receiving all nine processes. Which, to an outsider, suggests either that there are no even moderately high performing PCTs in this field – which seems unlikely – or that many, including the best, are employing other tests and other forms of care, in which the NAO were not apparently interested.

They, it seemed, were more into the blame game – the problem being to decide whether it was the recalcitrant PCTs themselves at fault or the DH’s sloppy monitoring.

By contrast, my problem – indeed, my profound irritation – is that none of these three cases is at all accurately or usefully labelled a ‘postcode lottery’. The cheap point here, of course, is that postcodes were designed for the purposes of delivering mail – the clue’s in the name – and therefore have little to do with council, PCT, or any other political or administrative boundaries.

I’ll tell you what a postcode lottery is. It’s if you happen to live in the Galashiels postcode area in TD9, 12 or 15, and may be either in Scotland or England; or in the Newport postcode area in NP7, 16 or 25, and not know which side of Offa’s Dyke you are.

No, the postcode bit is just silly. It’s the lottery bit that’s serious. Variations in policy and practice across local authorities or PCTs aren’t products of chance. They result from people exercising their right to make decisions in what they judge to be the best interests of those to whom they are answerable – for example, to follow official guidance or try an alternative that is or might be better or more locally appropriate, or from which they and others might learn.

In both the diabetes and child care cases, the ‘postcode lottery’ presentation of the story was not only misleading, and possibly unnecessarily alarming, but militated against our understanding of what the reported variations actually do represent. As for the exchange rate differences, they result from straightforward high street competition, that Which? magazine must surely have come across before.

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

The Barnet Graph of Doom – not new or classified, but definitely sensitive

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Chris Game

A recent SocietyGuardian article on the impact of demographic change on local authority service provision by David Brindle, the paper’s Public Services Editor, produced considerable social media comment, but not apparently any actual sighting of the item that kicked the article off: the so-called Barnet Graph of Doom. Time, therefore, for an unveiling, and some demystification.

 Brindle introduced the BGoD as:

 “a PowerPoint slide, showing that within 20 years, unless things change dramatically, [Barnet Council] will be unable to provide any services except adult social care and children’s services. No libraries, no parks, no leisure centres – not even bin collections.”

Dramatic enough in itself, you’d have thought, but Brindle ratchets up the drama by seeming to imply that the Doom Graph is both new and so sensitive as to be virtually classified:

“The slide … now features regularly in presentations by Sir Bob Kerslake, permanent secretary at the [DCLG] … Whether he has dared to show it to communities secretary Eric Pickles, defender of the Englishman’s inalienable right to a weekly bin round, is unknown.”

In fact, speculation is unnecessary, as the slide in question has been in the public domain for nearly eight months now. It comes from a three minute video presented by Councillor Dan Thomas, Cabinet Member for Resources, as part of one of Barnet Council’s regular budget consultation exercises. The presentation is on both the Council’s website and YouTube, and therefore as available to the minister as it is to Barnet residents, you and me. 

Whether Sir Bob makes use of more than the single slide Brindle doesn’t say. But, unable to break a lecturer’s lifelong weakness for promising visual aids, I certainly would have done – in fact, will do so here – because I reckon the video, though brief, provides a better introduction to the causes and scale of the challenges facing all major local authorities over the coming few years than many have managed.

The video starts from the Government’s October 2010 Spending Review plans to cut total public spending by £81 billion by 2014-15, but not equally across the board. With the NHS budget (nearly 13% of the total) protected and Overseas Aid, though small, increased, the hit taken by the unprotected DCLG, and as a result by local government, would be over 28%.

The video starts from the Government’s October 2010 Spending Review plans to cut total public spending by £81 billion by 2014-15, but not equally across the board. With the NHS budget (nearly 13% of the total) protected and Overseas Aid, though small, increased, the hit taken by the unprotected DCLG, and as a result by local government, would be over 28%.

For Barnet, other things too will change.  With a population of 350,000, the borough is already the largest in London and faces further growth at both ends of the age spectrum – 17% more 5-to-9s and 25% more over-90s by 2016. There is substantial development in the west of the borough, currently requiring more reception places and in future more secondary school places. Which brings us to the Graph of Doom.

Barnet Council estimates that over the four-year Spending Review period it will lose roughly 30% of its income, requiring matching reductions in spending. The bar chart plots the predicted spending on adult social care and on children’s and family services over the coming decade – showing that, without significant changes in the way these services are provided and/or in councils’ funding, the increasing numbers it will be supporting mean that by 2022-23 it would be providing only social services, there being no money left for anything else.  Not classified information, then, but definitely sensitive.

The graph’s original purpose, it should be remembered, was to prompt Barnet residents to think about what their spending priorities would be for the immediate and medium-term future – and, no doubt, to concentrate the minds of members and officers. It was not the product of a sophisticated modelling exercise and, as its authors would surely acknowledge, it has obvious limitations.

It takes no account, for example, of future economies and efficiency savings or of increased income stemming from planned regeneration, particularly of the Cricklewood/West Hendon/Brent Cross area. On the other hand, though, it seems to assume a more or less neutral 2013 Spending Review, rather than another round of austerity measures, as currently looks more likely. In short, though not all-inclusive, its depiction of a calculably approaching funding crisis is more than ‘real’ enough to warrant serious attention from all who should be concerned.

The new Coalition Government seemed concerned – when one of its first actions was to ask Andrew Dilnot, a former Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to chair a three-person Commission on the funding of elderly care and report back, with recommendations, within the year.

The Commissioners were emphatically concerned. They found the current funding system barely comprehensible, frequently unfair, and urgently in need of reform. Their key recommendations proposed:

•   capping individuals’ lifetime contributions towards their social care costs – at around   £35,000 – after which they should be eligible for full state support;

•   increasing the means-tested threshold, above which people are liable for their full care costs, from £23,250 to £100,000;

•   limiting liability for the costs of accommodation and food paid by people in a care home to £10,000 p.a.

The Commission’s full set of proposals, it estimated, would increased public spending by £1.7 billion p.a., rising to £3.6 billion by 2025 – equivalent to 0.25% of the total: “a price well worth paying” to remove people’s fear of having to sell their homes and spend almost all their wealth on care.

Ministers, particularly those in the vicinity of the Treasury, then became concerned to the point of agitation – at the capping proposal and the overall price tag. Dilnot was welcomed, but, as Health Secretary Andrew Lansley put it, as “a basis for engagement” – to be followed by more consultation, a delayed White Paper, and legislation “at the earliest opportunity thereafter”.

Whereupon the LGA became volubly concerned, with good reason. In an unusual cross-party initiative, Chairman Sir Merrick Cockell wrote to the three main party leaders on behalf of all LGA political groups, pointing out that social care already takes up more than 40% of council budgets, that demographic pressures alone will add £2 billion p.a. to these costs by 2015, and calling on Ministers to work urgently with local government in introducing radical Dilnot-type reforms.

Since then, the White Paper has been further postponed and will not address the funding issue anyway, the Queen’s Speech contained no relevant legislation whatever … and Doom gets ever closer.

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Why the No-Vote was Right for Birmingham

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Dr. Andrew Coulson

What a relief to wake up on Friday morning, 4 May 2012, and know that Birmingham will not have a directly elected mayor.  It was a most ill-informed referendum. The media, the business community (both Birmingham-based and national) and the government campaigned in favour. But the case against was hardly made at all until very close to the referendum, so there was little real discussion of what the new post would actually involve, or its advantages and disadvantages.

If it had gone ahead, it would have been the most divisive administrative change ever to hit the West Midlands. For London advocates of an elected mayor, it was presented as a new leader, able to speak for the whole West Midlands. That is not how it would have been seen in Dudley or Wolverhampton. The new mayor would also, probably sooner rather than later, have fallen out with the councillors elected to represent Birmingham wards, whose democratic mandate would be at least as strong as his or hers. If the council was controlled by a political party different from that of the mayor, that would have been a given from the start. But even within one party, sooner or later there would have been disagreements.

The job was impossible – to take over everything that Birmingham City Council and to influence every other organisation or group in the city. So every parent who could not get a child into a school of choice would have come to the mayor. So would the relatives of every patient that could not be discharged from hospital because suitable care arrangements were not in place.  Or every young family with a housing problem. There is no way one person could respond to that level of pressure. It is hard enough to understand the different cultures of the city – North and South, inner city and suburban, the highly complex racial geography.  There is nothing to be gained from trying to run everything that happens in Birmingham through one person, since however much he or she tries to delegate the buck will stop there and people will know it and soon get disappointed and frustrated.

Some of those arguing in favour of a mayor have no faith in councillors, and conclude that the biggest challenges would face chief officers. They should look carefully at what they wrote: do they really believe in a democratic process in which all the politics runs through one person?  or is their agenda to try and take politics and choice out of local government altogether?

A mayor of Birmingham was presented as the same as or similar to the Mayor of London. But Boris Johnson has virtually no powers, and only one major service to run. That is why mayors of London get so involved in public transport, and have time to promote economic development, regeneration and the Olympics. The services that affect people day by day are mainly the responsibility of the London boroughs.  The proposal for a mayor of Birmingham should have been presented as comparable to the Mayor of Newham – and there could then have been a realistic discussion as to whether having one would make a difference and how a mayor of Birmingham would relate to the Black Country or neighbouring counties.

There were no safety valves. At least a Leader can be voted down by a vote of no confidence in the Council meeting, or at the AGM. The city could have been stuck with a disastrous mayor for four years – becoming the laughing stock of the whole country, and an object of pity, and with no way out.

So now the newly empowered Labour administration in Birmingham will have to demonstrate that it is more effective than a mayor can be. Not an easy task given the general lack of discussion of the difficulties a mayor would have faced, and when the previous administration has partly lived off balances, and run the head office capacity of its departments down to the bare minimum or less. There are bound to be crises and failures, and some very difficult decisions to be made. The good property is that Labour’s showing in Birmingham was so strong that the party is almost guaranteed office for four years.

The sad reflection is that a case can be made for a directly elected mayor, not of Birmingham, but of the West Midlands, either as the city-region defined by the seven metropolitan districts, or as the whole standard region including the four adjacent county areas. That would have made the West Midlands like Boris’ London, and the resulting mayor might have had sufficient clout in London to bring jobs and training opportunities to the region, deliver the investment needed in public transport and deliver the coordination between the regional arms and agencies of central government and local agencies and trusts.

Dr. Andrew Coulson is Lead Consultant on Overview and Scrutiny at INLOGOV,University of Birmingham, with wide experience of Overview and Scrutiny.  He has recently launched one of the first assessed qualifications on the subject.  His further research interests include partnerships and governance, economic and environmental strategies, and local government in Central and Eastern Europe.

The councillors of 2012 face a challenge, yet they have also been presented with an opportunity

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Ian Briggs and Karin Bottom

Given last week’s frantic media interest in the local elections and the Mayoral referenda,  some will find it quite remarkable as to how quickly the events have become old news.  Rose Garden 2 has come and gone and even the Queen’s Speech outlining the forthcoming legislative agenda has quickly gravitated to the inside pages; yet, for many of the newly elected councillors – over 500 in total –  the real work has just started.  Most will now be  sworn in, horse trading for positions of prominence will be at fever pitch and senior officers and managers will be thinking of ways to develop new working relationships with fresh councillors and new administrations.

128 councils went to the polls last week and the current climate demands that the councillors which were elected must hit the ground running; however, let’s think for one moment about  the position these new councillors have been put in.  Indeed, they, like their more seasoned contemporaries are adamant in their desire to do something about improving living standards as they seek to establish local mechanisms that will facilitate greater economic and life chances; however, a quick reality check is in order: to many, Westminster has well and truly tied local government down in recent years; jacking up council tax to increase spending is no longer a possibility and  many service delivery systems are part of complex and long-duration contracted arrangements with highly expensive termination clauses.  Furthermore,  partnership working practices are so well and truly embedded as mechanisms for  the delivery of local services, no one can hope to disassemble them and start again.

This means that options for responsive, innovative and creative policy making will be limited in the months to come.  It also means that citizens who have hitherto felt able to exert a level of democratic influence on local decision making may now find themselves disappointed. Yet, this is also a point in time when councillors have an opportunity to really ‘come into their own’.  Of course, times are tough and much like the rest of the population, councillors do not have access to magic wands, but they do have time to listen and sometimes this is what  matters.  As research across a range of disciplines demonstrates, people are more fearful, angry, resentful and closed to change if they perceive themselves to be ignored and marginalized; yet when they are educated and informed, deliberated and consulted with they are more likely to accept decisions that mitigate against them.  Of course this is not always the case and nor should it be, however, one would be pushed to find many – indeed any – examples of when less engagement has been preferable to more engagement in local politics.

The next few weeks will  present a number of interesting challenges to newly elected councillors; whilst they are forging new relationships and shaping new decision making mechanisms, they will be returning to those who elected them in order to offer explanations for  what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. They will also come up against sitting councillors who are finding life increasingly uncomfortable – now that they have learned that many of the greater freedoms promised in the Localism Act come only to those who ‘fit’ within the general intentions of Westminster and the coalition government.  One option is to bunker down and close the hatches, another is to use these difficult times as opportunities to re-connect with the electorate: clearly, the councillors of 2012 have their work cut out for them but if they focus on inclusion and engagement as well as interest aggregation and information sharing, they may find  that their task is slightly easier.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies.  He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

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Karin Bottom is Lecturer in British Politics and Research Methods at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham.  Her core research areas comprise parties (particularly small and the BNP), party systems and party theory.  She is particularly interested in concepts of relevance and how national level theories can be utilised at the sub-national level.