The Jaws of Doom – still relevant a decade on

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Chris Game

“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.

The doctor will see you now… or will they?!

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Cllr Ketan Sheth

We know our GPs are busy; and indeed, during my visits, I have seen how hard they work — my own doctor is amazing. But I also hear, too frequently, from our residents of their struggles to get an appointment, to use online systems or to see a GP in person.

As a Brent councillor, I chair two health committees — one in Brent, and the other covering the 8 NW London boroughs — and I am proud of our NHS, in this 75th anniversary year, particularly our primary care service.

So, a few days ago, I was pleased to welcome GPs from across NW London to Brent and to hear about some of the changes our local NHS is implementing to help us all get the very best from our GP surgeries.

A new campaign from NHS NW London, We Are General Practice, explains the different people who are now working in our GP surgeries. I have met with GPs from across NW London, and they have spoken about how sometimes our residents do not actually need to see a GP — they can see a specialist like, say, a diabetes nurse, a pharmacist, or a physiotherapist. In many places, these people are now working side by side with the GP in the same building which, of course, is fantastic for patients.

Not only does this ease the pressure on our GPs but it means that, as a patient, you will be seen by the best possible person in a timely manner.

Also, what is special about this campaign is how it has used input from our residents. We often hear the phrase “co-produced”.  Well, this is, perhaps, the best possible example of that phrase. The teams in NW London, who are always out and about across the boroughs listening to residents, have taken on board what they have heard and used it to shape, not just the campaign, but the improvements we are beginning to see across our general practices. 

We, in local government, of course, have a part to play. Not only are we more formally in partnership with the NHS locally now but we are all here to support the same people.  The NHS call them patients, we call them residents. And we can all support people navigating their way through services and help with the sign posting and support.

So, my thanks to all those residents who shared their experiences and views on how our health services can improve.

Our GPs, and their teams, do such a lot to keep us all well and I am pleased to see this campaign shine a light on all the people that make up a general practice team.

Cllr Ketan Sheth chairs the North West London Join Health Scrutiny Committee

Voter ID – the warning lights are flashing

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Picture credit: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-the-governments-mandatory-voter-id-plans-are-a-terrible-idea/

Jason Lowther

Previous columns 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

Back to square one: Decolonising democratic innovations must start with the normative foundation

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Dr Abena Dadze-Arthur

Originally published on the Agora blog

A slippery foundation

Without a question, decolonisation is a slippery concept already! Decolonising democratic innovations (DI) is even more slippery because of its inherently normative foundation. Here, Temidayo Eseounu’s argument in her blog, which forms part of the Political Studies Association’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group’s blog series on Decolonising Democratic Innovations, could not be more to the point: ‘Eurocentric normative values such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality are intrinsic to the theories of participatory and deliberative democracies, which underpin democratic innovations’. Indeed, the fact that a citizen jury or mini public, where groups of citizens meet to reflect on problems and assess policy proposals, is firmly rooted in a set of Eurocentric norms makes it a productive democratic innovation in a Western context, where people value above all individual rights and personal expression and are used to openly criticizing their leaders. Such an approach to public participation is in harmony with the social contracts found in Western civilizations, which typically construct mankind as free and equal by nature, and base political authority on the individual self-interests of members of society. Typically, under a Western vantage point, a well facilitated citizen jury or mini public would be praised for offering a ‘platform for exchange’, ‘giving a voice to marginalised members of the community’, ‘deepening democracy’ and ‘improving governance’.

‘Equality’ or ‘inclusion’ are not universal concepts

Such normative framing, which indeed constitutes the very foundation of the concept of democratic innovation, disregards the vastly different realities of most non-Western societies, their underpinning Weltanschauung, core values, beliefs, ethics, and their historical social contracts that help to structure the relationship between the people and their government. In many societies, the universalism of normative values and motivations, such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality, is fallacious – they are inherently Eurocentric! Irrespective of how expertly designed a citizen panel or mini public might be, it would not work well in many collectivist societies in non-Western contexts, where people do not prioritise values such as equality, individualism and personal freedom. For example, participatory activities in non-Western governance settings, such as the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, are not aiming to tackle a democratic deficit, accomplish egalitarian objectives or wholly enhance governmental accountability. In those contexts, while the purpose of a mini public might very well be public service improvements for all, however they are not intended to provide a platform for collectively debating political questions behind services and policies, nor to strengthen inclusion, equality or equity beyond particular segments of the population – as it might be in the West.

Different strokes for different folks

Being clear about the normative foundation of participatory and deliberative events in non-Western settings requires a holistic understanding of the respective local context, or life world, which is a state of affairs in which the everyday world is experienced by the people, who simultaneously create social reality while being constrained by it. For instance, the Balinese life world is based on viewing the cosmos as a grand hierarchy, wherein animals and demons are at the bottom, gods and god-kings are at the top, and ordinary mortals are distributed throughout an elaborate assortment of fixed status ranks in between. The often cantankerous nature of Western-type citizen panels that assume every human being is equal and has a right to pursue his or her self-interest could be viewed as an incomprehensible and disrespectful exercise that causes more damage than good to the community and established hierarchies. Similarly, the press in Arabic Bedouin societies often portrays Western-style democratic innovations with their explicit advocacy and public naming and shaming as ‘uncivilized’. The Bedouin culture of ‘saving face’, loyalty to the leader and respect for his ‘God-given’ mandate, safeguarding family honour and tribal traditions is not compatible with the reform-seeking debates and critical tirades that can typify Western-style citizen juries. Under the vantage point of bedoucrats (those who believe in Bedoucracy, which proffers a model of Arab public management that originates in the Bedouin tribal culture and joins traditional bureaucratic design with tribal power culture), many Western-type democratic innovations amount to little more than a ‘narcissist circus’. However, the Bedouin culture of mediating by means of patience and forgiveness and seeking compromise, which signifies some synergy with Western-style citizen juries, has ensured that there are a number of age-old traditional institutions in Arab Bedouin societies that can be built upon for the purpose of engaging members of the public in participatory and deliberative exercises.

This was done in a Taiwan Buddhist village. Aware of the foreign (Eurocentric) norms that underpin the theory and design of democratic innovations, a team of facilitators who were tasked with conceiving and facilitating a citizen assembly to explore public service challenges and policy solutions in a Taiwanese Buddhist village, had no other choice but to construct and formulate from scratch not a democratic but a culturally appropriate innovation by building on traditional institutions. Given that the citizens’ life world was particularly characterised by a collective emphasis on ‘belonging to one large family’ and ‘respecting social hierarchy’, the facilitators knew that those agreeing to participate in the citizen assembly would not be willing to raise problems for fear of being seen as disrespecting the family and its established hierarchy. Hence, the facilitators framed the act of problem exploration as a co-operative endeavour along Buddhist concepts, such as the ‘eightfold noble path’ and ‘cause-condition-effect’ and developed a buddhicratic approach to delivering and facilitating a citizen assembly with a normative foundation that was in harmony with local worldviews, values, ethics and social contracts.

What now?

Having unmasked the Eurocentricity of DI’s normative foundation, how do we then begin the process of radical renewal with a view to construct a new, broader, postcolonial normative foundation that allows for an increasingly pluralistic approach? Is it even possible to reconsider the legitimacy and comprehensiveness of the established knowledge on democratic innovations by applying the hermeneutic resources and referencing the precepts of the very theories we criticise? As with all wicked and intractable issues, we may have to accept that there is no one panacea. Instead, theorists and practitioners will need to undergo a paradigm shift and prepare themselves to accept and engage with a rich variety of truths, and their underpinning values, social contracts and hierarchies of power. Given the current dearth of non-Western theories and practical templates on public participation and deliberation, we will need to work on a case-by-case basis in constructing locally sensitive and culturally appropriate innovations that are not necessarily and inevitably aspiring to be democratic, but depending on the case perhaps buddhicratic, bedoucratic or othercratic. Importantly, by capturing the empirical observations from each case and theorising the insights gained on platforms such as this blog, or in special issues such as the one on ‘Decolonising the Public Administration Curriculum’ (link to Call for Abstracts here), or in journals that explicitly focus on promoting knowledge exchange across vastly different contexts and episteme such as Public Administration & Development, in time, we might be able to consolidate empirical regularities and develop new, postcolonial theoretical models.

Abena Dadze-Arthur is Assistant Professor at the School of Government (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham, and Associate Editor of the Wiley journal Public Administration & Development. Combining the experience of an international policy practitioner with the robust theoretical approach of an academic, Abena’s research and teaching focus on decolonizing and transforming approaches to public management and governance, and contributing to the development of indigenous solutions and sustainable change.

Navigating between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’: how urban professionals facilitate citizen participation in marginalised neighbourhoods.

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Simone van de Wetering

Residents of marginalised neighbourhoods have long been governed as a vulnerable group in need of help. Today, they are increasingly expected to be active citizens and (co-)creators in improving their neighbourhood. In the Netherlands, like in other European countries, local and participatory approaches are now central in urban policy for marginalised neighbourhoods. But what does this shift in governance approach look like in the work practice of urban professionals who give shape to citizen participation?

Urban professionals are known to play a key role in realising citizen participation: municipal and non-municipal professionals, ranging from civil servants to professionals working for welfare organisations and other social partners linked to the neighbourhood. What their role exactly entails is, however, not really clear. Especially in terms of the (dis)empowerment of urban residents and in marginalised neighbourhoods. 

On the one hand, urban professionals are seen to empower citizens. They can navigate between different roles and mediate between ‘the state’ and ‘the people’ due to their unique position in between. On the other hand, they can undermine residents’ power. This can happen when, despite emancipatory aims, decision-making authority remains in the hands of public officials or is shared only with a small group of already privileged residents.

I explored how urban professionals gave shape to citizen participation in my ethnographic study of a participatory governance approach in a Dutch marginalised neighbourhood. Here, I found that the work of these urban professionals cannot be classified simply as either empowerment or disempowerment.

While the participatory approach was discursively positioned as embodying active citizenship, in the work practice of urban professionals the idea of vulnerable places and people in need of help was not so easily replaced. Residents were viewed as having problems and simultaneously as having talents and capabilities; they were assumed to be in need of help from the government and from professionals, while also being able to come up with and execute initiatives to improve the neighbourhood.

As urban professionals translated the broader shift in the governance of urban marginality to their work practice, they navigated between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’ and employed, what I call ‘selective empowerment’. This is a differentiated approach towards citizen participation in which professionals ascribe a significant role to themselves as a continuous support system for citizens. In the words of one urban professional: “Participation needs to be supported. . . . We [professionals] need to create a canvas on which participation can go nuts. But you can’t expect a painting to arise without bringing the brushes.” Moreover, they facilitate participation within a normative framework of ‘appropriate’ or more traditional expressions of active citizenship. For instance, youths who violently protested in response to the COVID-19 evening-curfew were redirected to a youth council.

By employing selective empowerment, urban professionals reproduced existing categories of vulnerability while reworking the meaning of ‘active citizenship’ or ‘citizen participation’ with marginalised groups. Acknowledging vulnerability is then not (only) a reproduction of existing inequalities. It is also an embedded approach employed by urban professionals to facilitate context-specific citizen participation against the background of urban marginalisation. A discursive shift in governance approach is not automatically synchronised with the work practice of urban professionals. Based on my research, I propose a more nuanced understanding of the work of urban professionals beyond mere empowerment or disempowerment. These insights may provide a starting point for urban professionals’, and, more generally, local governments’, reflexivity: to challenge not only their perceptions of residents as ‘vulnerable’, but also the storyline of residents as ‘active citizens’. Such reflexivity could imply a move beyond discursive ideals of ‘active citizenship’ towards context-specific practices of participation in local neighbourhood policy.

Simone van de Wetering is a PhD candidate at the Department of Public Law and Governance of Tilburg University. Her research focuses on identity and inequality in the city. In her PhD project, she studies citizen participation in marginalised urban neighborhoods in the Netherlands and France. Taking an ethnographic approach, she zooms in on the strategies of citizens and the state to make urban change.

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Photo credit: opensource.com

Oops!  We lost two Mayors – let’s overthrow a sensible system

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Chris Game

I assume it was the 2021 mayoral election results that finally clinched it. With the Conservatives winning just two of that year’s 13 mayoralties to Labour’s 11, it was time to enact the party’s 2019 manifesto pledge – “to continue to support the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system of voting, as it allows voters to kick out politicians who don’t deliver, both locally and nationally”.  Specifically, the Supplementary Vote (SV) system – despite also, like electoral systems generally, featuring the kicking-out of politicians – had to be replaced for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections asap.

True, the counting of electors’ supplementary – second preference – votes had just enabled West Midlands Conservative Mayor, Andy Street, to be re-elected with the useful perk of a narrow overall majority of votes cast, along with the party’s rising star, Tees Valley’s Ben Houchen, who’d swept in with nearly 73% of first preference votes.

No supplementary second round necessary there, but nor should there have been, reformers reckoned, in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, where the established Conservative Mayor, James Palmer, had been a victim of the dastardly SV ‘system’. He’d comfortably led Labour’s Nik Johnson after the count of first preference votes – by nearly 18,000 votes or 8%. Yet, by some foul trickery, or possibly because he simply wasn’t as broadly appealing his opponent, after the counting of relevant second preference votes, he’d fallen behind: 48.7% to new Mayor Johnson’s 51.3%.  Despite Government Ministers repeatedly claiming that “the candidate with the most votes” lost, he hadn’t. He’d won – he just wasn’t Conservative.

Anyway, Palmer threw what looked like a wobbly, promptly retired from politics, and SV elections for Mayors and PCCs would be retired with him, though not in time for last May’s Mayorals, which very nearly produced a Croydon re-run of that Cambs & Peterborough result. First count: Jason Perry (Con) 34.8%, Val Shawcross (Lab) 32.7%. Second count: Perry 50.4%, Shawcross 49.6% – the candidate with the leadership-resonant first name just edged it.

By then, though, the FPTP legislation was well under way. The next Mayoral elections – this May – would use FPTP, as will next May’s PCC elections. It seemed a good time for a review of the whole SV lifespan, facilitated by the invaluable statistical records of my polling specialist friend, David Cowling.

Quickish review: the Supplementary Vote is obviously not a proportional system, which would be tricky when electing single Mayors, Police & Crime Commissioners, etc.  Rather, it’s a simplified majoritarian system, enabling voters to rank their two most favoured candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference.

If no candidate gets over 50% of first preference votes on the first count, just the top two candidates continue to a run-off, thereby encouraging candidates from the outset to seek support beyond their core supporter base. The winner may still get less than half the total vote, but will need significantly wider support than under FPTP, and especially under FPTP with a lowish turnout.

Both, however – ultra-topical insert – are more democratic than this past weekend’s Spanish ‘mayoral’ elections, in which Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, almost certainly the nation’s best-known mayor both at home and abroad, is seeking a third term of office … but as Leader of a two-party socialist coalition – for Spanish mayors aren’t even elected by ‘the people’, but indirectly by fellow councillors.

The name – Supplementary Vote – may have been new when it was ‘invented’ by an early 1990s Labour Working Party, but essentially similar ‘preferential’ systems had been quite widely used internationally for ages. France’s Presidential ‘double-ballot run-off’ was one example, but most obviously there was the Alternative Vote – the actual subject of Winston Churchill’s senseless but oft-recycled quote, about it rewarding “the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates” – although today’s Conservative critics have no difficulty unearthing and redirecting it to SV.

I’m old enough to recall lecturing about the SV’s UK ‘invention’ by a Labour Party working party in the early 1990s and the even then revered ‘psephologist’, the late Sir David Butler, getting uncharacteristically incensed about it – calling it “silly”!  But his sphere of matchless expertise was parliamentary elections, with turnouts at the time of consistently over 70%. Even they, though, have slipped a bit since, and well over a third of today’s MPs won less than 50% of their constituency vote, and that’s an awful lot of voters left feeling unrepresented.

Local (including mayoral) election turnouts, however, are proverbially in another ballpark – and this is probably the blog’s key point. Except when they coincide with parliamentary elections, they average around 40%, and that’s on good days. PCC turnouts, unsurprisingly, are significantly lower still – not one of the 39 areas in England and Wales managing even 51% in May 2021, and Durham and Wiltshire not quite achieving 17%.  All of which, under FPTP, will mean large percentages of the votes of the most civically conscientious and politically committed citizens being ‘wasted’ and, arguably even more importantly, the mandates of the elected mayors and PCCs correspondingly diminished.

And then there’s the loss of the visual aids – for SV also produces what I only recently discovered are called ‘Sankey charts’, illustrating how the second-round count both produces a winner able to claim a statistical majority of positive votes and a dramatic reduction in the proportion of ‘wasted votes’ – on the part of voters choosing not to make use of their possible second choice. Good, isn’t it!

The Supplementary Vote, then, still favours the two main parties, but, returning to recent history and as shown in the following table, one in three of the 67 SV Mayoral elections going to second counts were won by Lib Dems, Independents and other parties. Labour won by far the most mayoral contests, but they also lost most in second counts. All of which contributes to SV hovering around mid-table in global democratic rankings of electoral systems – nothing to shout home about, except when compared with FPTP’s ranking as ‘least democratic’, apart from maybe Djibouti’s ‘Party Block Voting’.

SV’s statistical merits apply in principle to any elections, but particularly to a set in which two-thirds of turnouts were under 50% and nearly a third under 40% (see table). First, it hugely reduces the number and proportion of so-called ‘wasted votes’ – those cast for neither of the leading two candidates – and secondly it ensures that the winning candidate can claim the majority backing not necessarily of all voters, but at least of those the system counted.

My presumptuous guess would be that West Midlands PCC Simon Foster likes knowing, and possibly even mentioning now and then, that he was elected with 53.7% of the vote, rather than 45.5%. And, while I don’t know any of these people, that Surrey PCC Lisa Townsend (one of 12 women PCCs, if you were wondering) definitely prefers her 58% to 33.5%.

Time to start closing, by checking out the arguments Ministers sought to make to justify their replacement of SV with FPTP – or, rather, plundering the critique the Constitution Unit’s Alan Renwick and Alejandro Castillo-Powell made at the time.

  1. That SV increases the number of spoilt ballots – possibly, very fractionally; but, if so, why not work on improving ballot paper design?
  2. It allows ‘loser candidates’ to win – stupid argument (see above); they won the election they were required to contest.
  3. It reduces the accountability voters have in expressing a clear choice – but increases it by saving them from calculating how best to cast their single vote ‘tactically’ to elect or defeat a particular candidate.
  4. “FPTP is the world’s most widely used electoral system.”  Tricky – needs its own separate blog; also a bit silly. Depends a bit on whether you mean number of countries or number of voters. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the US give FPTP a head start. More to the point, a 650-Member legislature isn’t the same as a single elected mayor or PCC.
  5. SV is an “anomaly … out of step’ with other elections in England.” True, it was decisively rejected in the 2011 referendum for the election of MPs, but these are the country’s only public elections to executive offices. In short, they’re completely different.  

None of which, of course, stands the remotest chance of influencing, never mind changing, anything … but it was quite enjoyable to ‘research’ and write!

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.

Picture credit: Theresa Thompson at www.flickr.com/photos/theresasthompson/