What’s the value of loyalty?

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Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

In a week in which Jeremy Corbyn has sacked a Shadow Cabinet member and the party spokesman on Europe for ‘disloyalty’ and David Cameron has announced he’ll allow his Cabinet to actively campaign against his desired outcome in the referendum on EU membership – I am moved to ponder the meaning and value of loyalty.

These musings have been prompted by the spectacle of the someone who has made a career of being a maverick requiring unswerving and unquestioning loyalty from his team.

Loyalty is widely perceived as a virtue. It seems to embody resilience, consistency and selflessness and to bring with it an aura of warmth derived from a sense of togetherness and mutual trust. Beneath that soft and fluffy exterior, loyalty drives and maintains very complex political and organizational machinery. That is demonstrated loyalty is withdrawn by followers which not only renders leaders powerless but also delivers a profound and negative judgment on their fitness for leadership. David Cameron’s decision not to enforce the traditional expectations of collective Cabinet responsibilities may be viewed as preemptive measure to avoid that that judgment being delivered on his leadership in relation to the EU issue. The extent to which he has been threatened into making such a move suggests that the followers, not the leader, have set the collective standards of loyalty – and that they are very low.

Leaders who inspires loyalty gain not only the warm glow of approval from their followers but also significant extensions to their power and influence. This may be through benign mechanisms such as the creation of a compelling vision but the extension of power through loyalty can have a darker side. The loyal fixer or enforcer who says and does nasty things to achieve the leader’s goals while protecting the leader from responsibility for the damage caused is part of the standard dramatis personae of both local and national politics.

Clearly, loyalty can be both a force for good or ill. Blind or unquestioning loyalty is has been a contributing factor in failures in leadership, governance and decision making in many types of organization – including governments.   If leaders surround themselves with loyal supporters, who will ask the difficult questions? Who will put principle before loyalty and argue for what they believe to be right even if it runs counter to the beliefs and wishes of the leader?

Are our expectation of loyalty in politics unreasonably high? Is loyalty to an individual leader, an idea, or a political party, based on deeply rooted, or even visceral emotions, governing the thoughts and behaviours of the loyal or is it the balance remaining when self-interest has been set off against the interests of a group, in the contested space between ideology and pragmatism?

Does this concession simply demonstrate that loyalty in politics is, of necessity, conditional on there being sufficient congruence between the leader and the followers? Is it possible, or even desirable for politicians to be unconditionally loyal to a leader, a party or an idea?

Perhaps the answer lies is not in loyalty but consistency? If Jeremy Corbyn made a career of being a principled maverick, defying the party whip on hundreds of occasions, then he can hardly demand that his followers give him the unswerving and even unquestioning loyalty he so vocally denied his leaders in the past. David Cameron set out a clear expectation of Cabinet unity on the ‘in-out’ referendum last year. This year he has relieved his Cabinet colleagues of that responsibility. Both, though their inconsistency, have devalued the currency of loyalty and both are likely to suffer negative consequences – not least in the damage to their personal reputations.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Learning by Doing in Combined Authorities

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Maximilian Lempriere

At a workshop hosted in early November by INLOGOV, City-REDI and The Public Services Academy at the University of Birmingham practitioners and academics from the world of local government came together to share experiences on the current Combined Authorities and city-region devolution agenda. In the third of a series of posts Max Lempriere, a doctoral researcher studying the formation of combined authorities, reflects on the days major talking points. 

 Policy makers may dislike ambiguity and flexibility, but devolution to Combined Authorities brings with it a fair degree of both. There are so many questions that will only be answered as the result of experience and so many variations in configuration, governance and circumstances between Combined Authorities that no progress could be made without it.  The ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ is up for negotiation on a localised basis, bringing both benefits and pitfalls. The question is, then, how can we ensure that we maximise the benefits but avoid the pitfalls?

The precise answer to that question is unknown – a pitfall in itself – but leaders in all Combined Authorities need to be willing to look, listen and learn from their own experience and that of others if they are to strike the right balance. Combined Authority leaders need to be willing and able to share and learn from best practice, whether internal or external.

When looking to other Combined Authorities they must remain sensitive to local contexts. Compare those in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, for example. The latter has historic, clearly defined and coterminous economic and political geographies that lend themselves well to the Combined Authority model, whereas the former has a less clearly defined economic geography and lacks congruence when it comes to political geography. Learning to co-ordinate, collaborate and muddle-through across Combined Authorities is no easy task when there are such differences between them, especially if the implications of actions aren’t immediately clear. Their innovative nature and the variety of contexts in which they are found means that any initial institutional design will only ever be ‘good-enough’.

As a result there will have to be a fair degree of ‘learning by doing’, where the formal and informal rules of the game emerge as decision makers tackle different  challenges and obstacles.

However, precise institutional arrangements, devolved powers and funding responsibilities differ from one Combined Authority to another, reflecting as they do local economic and political geographies. The Mayor in Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, for example, will have more powers over housing that their counterpart in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, in another example, is currently the only Combined Authority to have autonomy over its £6bn share of NHS spending. Understanding common ground for mutual learning will therefore be difficult because it doesn’t just require political and managerial leaders to think in terms of what works but – perhaps more importantly –  what doesn’t work when translated into different  contexts. The danger, as increasingly seems to be the case, is that Combined Authorities look at what the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is doing well and try emulate that.

This kind of learning doesn’t just need to occur within or between Combined Authorities themselves. Central government must be willing and able to learn from experience on the ground, whilst remaining sensitive to local contexts. Learning from past Combined Authority successes and failures should feed not just into designs for future authorities but should form the basis of continuous, on-going institutional reform – a similar process of ‘muddling through’ and respecting ‘good-enough’ design – to fine-tune existing devolution arrangements to ensure maximum public and added value. Central Government has certainly showed a willingness to look, listen and learn itself in the case of the GMCA – shown in ongoing rounds of devolution deals, the latest of which was announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Spending Review in November 2015. The challenge is to make sure it does so with other Combined Authorities in a way that respects their successes and failures on their own merits and avoids using the GMCA as a ‘yard-stick’ against which to judge.

An effective way to encourage these kind of local and multi-level learning processes is to incorporate them into the institutional design in the first instance. Formal arrangements to encourage inter and intra-institutional feedback – whether through scrutiny arrangements, joint workshops or regular meetings of officials – can play a crucial role in facilitating feedback and fostering a culture that encourages learning, experimentation and innovation.

But how to overcome the challenges of learning across differing contexts and geographies? Part of the work that INLOGOV, City-REDI and others have been doing is directed towards understanding both the successes and the difficulties experienced by Combined Authorities with a sensitivity to local contexts. Academic insight and the application of theory to practice have potentially crucial roles in cross-border learning of this kind. Situating information-providers and independent assessors within the institutional arrangement will allow decision makers to see more clearly points of mutual comparison.

Practitioners should be willing to learn, be sensitive to what is and isn’t possible in different contexts and embrace ambiguity. Combined Authorities are flexible and incomplete. How we work towards completeness depends on our willingness to learn from mistakes, appreciate best practice and recognise that it may not always be the best idea to copy Manchester.

This series of workshops is being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Local Government Association and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and is led by Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV and SOLACE’s Research Facilitator for Local Government.

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a final year PhD researcher at the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include institutional design, local government policy making, devolution, urban planning and sustainable development.

Being able to say ‘I’m sorry’ is a sign of strength – not of weakness

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Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

Yesterday was a remarkable day in many ways. We heard a passionate but thoughtful debate in the House of Commons.  There wasn’t much of the usual ‘yah boo’ and name calling. Some very good speeches, including by Margaret Becket and Hilary Benn reminded us of the power of argument.  They also reminded me that, while there is so much to criticize in the way this country is led, I am lucky to live in a democracy where a Prime Minister cannot rely on positional power but who needs to persuade MPs both of the moral and strategic arguments for the things he wants to do. In spite of the common perception of MPs as powerless lobby fodder, it was clear yesterday that many were demonstrably acting according to their consciences, led by their reason. In many ways it was a good day for democracy, respect for differing opinions and the exercise of collective leadership.

In other ways yesterday demonstrated some of the ways in which passion, conscience and reason can be subverted to justify the worst possible behaviour.  The problem of bullying, of all sorts of people, in all walks of life, has become part of our understanding of how the world works. Perhaps the word ‘bully’ has lost some of its power because we have applied it so often to such a wide range of behaviours.  Maybe we should move away from the generic to the specific and talk about the terrible psychological damage done by ‘insults’, ‘assaults’ and ‘attacks’.  The old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’ is the opposite of the truth. Sometimes words hurt because they exclude – ‘you aren’t one of us’, they vilify – ‘you are one of them’ or they threaten – damage to reputations and careers.

We often look to leaders to set standards, to model good behaviour and hold bullies to account. It’s hard for them to do that when they indulge in that sort of behaviour themselves or fail to deal with it in others.  Jeremy Corbyn seems to me to be a gentle, principled man but some of his more extremely left wing colleagues are using his popular support to justify criminal behaviour.  To what extent is this his responsibility?  He is the leader of his party so it’s absolutely his responsibility. Modelling good behaviour is a necessary but not sufficient element of effective  leadership. Action is also required.  If Jeremy Corbyn’s sins are of omission, David Cameron’s are definitely of commission. His words about ‘terrorist sympathisers’ makes him a bully because he was seeking both to exclude and to vilify.  We’d find that behaviour reprehensible in a child in the the playground and it is utterly unacceptable in the holder of the highest political office.

However, leaders are only human. Everyone makes mistakes under pressure, even leaders.  Its what they do then that indicates the extent to which they are really good leaders.  Willingness to admit mistakes and to apologise for them demonstrates self-knowledge and humility and those are very attractive attributes in a leader. If someone says they were wrong, we’ll trust them next time they tell us they really are right. If someone tells us they are sorry when they are in the wrong we’ll trust them next time they say they really are in the right.

Refusal to admit mistakes or to apologise for them undermines our trust in leaders. It also give followers a clear message ‘Look at me…I bullied and I got away with it. You can bully and get away with it too’. Nice work Mr Cameron. You won the vote but you diminished your moral authority. Moral authority is the currency of leadership and you’ve squandered yours in support of a vote you would have won anyway. Will that be remembered long after we’ve finished bombing in Syria?

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

The Cameron-Hudspeth letters: the gift that keeps on giving

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Chris Game

‘The gift that keeps on giving’ – originally a US 1920s marketing slogan for a new phonograph/gramophone, it’s since been applied to anything from magazine subscriptions to sexually transmitted diseases. And now, for the distraction and delectation of a local government world waiting anxiously for the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, we have the almost-too-good-to-be-true exchange of letters between David Cameron and Ian Hudspeth, Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council.

It’s just conceivable – though hard seriously to imagine how – that the correspondence might have remained private. Even leaked out in mid-September, when the exchange took place, it might have been lost in the mass coverage of Corbyn and the party conferences. But, thanks largely to the media’s hesitancy to touch anything even vaguely technical to do with local government finance, it’s oozed out almost day by day. Well into its second week as I write (November 15th), it’s still exuding, but is surely already established as the classic case of a PM going out of his way, and possibly beyond his remit, to demonstrate how little he comprehends about the consequences of his own government’s policies – until, of course, the next case comes along.

The sequence of events has been as follows:

September 14th – Cameron [MP for Witney, Oxfordshire] writes on Commons notepaper to Ian Hudspeth at his home address, detailing his disappointment “at the long list of suggestions floated in the [County Council’s 2016-17 Budget] briefing note to make significant cuts in frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums.” He also offers “to initiate a further dialogue with advisers in the No10 Policy Unit and yourself – please contact Sheridan Westlake [PM’s Special Adviser – No10 email address given], if you wish to take this up.”

September 22nd – Hudspeth replies with detailed 6-page refutation, and accepts the Sheridan invitation.

November 6th – Oxford Mail’s Matt Oliver writes front-page story based on the gaping divergence of views and statistics revealed in the evidently leaked letters. BBC 1’s Breakfast programme leads on the story, but without crediting the Mail, for which it later apologises.

Game

Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) publishes, as part of its budget consultation, some “more background information to help people understand our budget position” – including a funding graph, showing how (contrary to Cameron’s assertion) the council’s “overall funding is going down, and the balance between local and government funding [of local government] fundamentally changing”.

November 7th – 9th – Despite the BBC coverage, the story is largely ignored by the national media over the weekend, though picked up on the Monday by the Mirror and on subsequent days by the broadsheets.

November 11th – The Guardian’s George Monbiot writes the first really detailed and documented story – “The PM hasn’t the faintest idea how deep his cuts go. This letter proves it”.

November 12th – Labour finally realises this could be not just a ‘PM clueless’ or ‘PM’s hypocrisy’ story, but a ‘PM flouts Constitution’ one. Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, Jonathan Ashworth, writes to Cabinet Secretary asking for a ruling whether Cameron, in apparently conflating his roles as minister and constituency MP, has broken the ministerial code. The code says: “Ministers are provided with facilities at government expense to enable them to carry out their official duties. These facilities should not generally be used for party or constituency activities.”

As I said, it’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving. Stand by for a Clintonesque Lewinsky defence: “It depends what the meaning of ‘generally’ is”. This, though, is a local government blog, interested primarily in the two letters’ core contents. It’s not easy to summarise Hudseth’s long, detailed missive – explaining, as Monbiot put it, each issue gently, as if to a slow learner – but I’ll try, using the leader’s own assertion-refutation format, to convey something of both its explicit substance and (in italics) its implicit spirit. It’s also worth adding, that, according to the DCLG English Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2015, Oxfordshire is ranked 9th least deprived of 152 upper-tier local authorities (File 11).

Assertion: “Oxfordshire’s spending has actually increased in recent years …”

Refutation: Only if you believe your government’s own ‘spending power’-driven propaganda, ignore the council’s additional responsibilities – particularly public health and the new burdens related to adult social care – and forget that additional Better Care Funding for adult social care is not new money, but has been at the expense of funding for NHS services (see also https://inlogov.com/2015/01/21/the-fairness-or-otherwise-of-the-2015-16-local-government-finance-settlement/).

OCC’s employment (excluding schools) has fallen by 37.4% since April 2010; and, according to the DCLG’s own figures, grants from central government (excluding housing benefit and other service-specific grants) have been cut by 36.3% overall in real terms, and local authorities’ total revenues have fallen by 19.9%.

Assertion: OCC is not following the best practice of other Conservative councils.

Refutation: You seem to have no better understanding of the circumstances of the area you represent and of your electors than you do of local government finance. OCC’s reducing budget starts out from a low base – under £300 per capita from the UK taxpayer (excluding fire services), compared to an upper-tier/unitary average of around £500, and £900+ for authorities such as Westminster. If the Council Tax referendum threshold had permitted us to make the planned modest increase of 3 – 3.75% over the decade, we would be facing £50 million less of required savings.

As a thriving economy, growing more quickly than London since the recession, our overall population is projected to rise over 13% between 2009 and 2020. The elderly population, who generate the largest social care demand, will grow from under 15,000 to over 20,000 in the present decade and more rapidly still thereafter, generating cost pressures of £30 million in the annual budget. The other big area of cost growth has been children’s social care. We currently have 574 children in care at an average cost of £49,000 p.a., and relevant budgets have increased by 60%, from £40 million in 2009-10 to £64 million.

Assertion: The £204 million your briefing note said had been taken out of the budget since 2010 is a cumulative figure that includes efficiency savings from cutting waste.

Refutation: (No italics required) “I cannot emphasise enough that £204 million is NOT a cumulative figure. Rather, it is the amount we have saved annually by 2014/15. The cumulative savings since 2010/11 are in fact £626 million.”

Assertion: I would have hoped that Oxfordshire would be following the best practice of Conservative councils across the country in making back-office savings and protecting the frontline.

Refutation: You really don’t get it, do you! Our significant savings over recent years have included taking as much from the back-office as possible through our in-house shared service arrangements. From this July, ongoing savings in this area will be secured via our new partnership with Hampshire County Council. In addition, we have undertaken a major review of our management structures across the council since 2010, making significant cost savings through cutting 40% of our two top tiers of management and 50% of our third-tier managers.

I trust you’ll have got the gist; if not, there’s another five pages or so in much the same vein. My guess is that, while he may just keep his place on the Camerons’ Christmas card list, Mr Hudspeth probably won’t be joining them for New Year’s Eve karaoke and ‘dad-dancing’.

 

Chris Game - pic

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.

Pro-Christian, Anti-Muslim or Anti-Refugee? What is behind European politicians’ statements favouring Christian refugees?

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Vivien Lowndes and Roda Maziva

In the midst of what has come to be known as the worst refugee crisis of our generation, the wrench­ing images of a toddler lying dead on a Turk­ish beach emerged as evidence of a reality that cannot just be captured in words. This has seen many calling for the need to shift the debate away from borders and security and towards asylum, solidarity and responsibility. Yet, in the midst of this humanitarian talk, a new rhetoric is emerging which suggests that the lives of some refugees have more value than others. In particular, the anti-Muslim rhetoric by some politicians in Australia and other European countries such as France, Slovakia, Poland, the UK and many others have widely been judged as discriminatory and a perversion of liberal values especially hospitality, compassion and inclusion.

The Polish Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz was cited as saying “Christians who are being persecuted in a barbaric fashion in Syria deserve Christian countries like Poland to act fast to help them”. The former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott had reportedly been under pressure from the Coalition Members of parliament who pressed for the need to prioritize Christian refugees from the Middle East as they were perceived to be the “most persecuted in the world” and therefore “the most needy”. In France, a Member of Parliament and Mayor, Yves Nicolin, was heavily criticized for vowing to only accept refugees in his town on the condition that they were Christians and not ‘disguised terrorists’. While such sentiments may imply a welcome for Christian refugees, there seems to be a gap between rhetoric and practice in the absence of a well-defined protection plan or selection process, not least because distinguishing between Muslim and Christian refugees is not actually a clear-cut process.

Our research with Pakistani Christians suggests that processes to determine refugee status do not map onto any clear distinction between welcome Christians and unwelcome Muslims.  Indeed, Christian refugees from Muslim-majority countries face special difficulties in putting forward their asylum case, and in negotiating community relationships.  Like thousands of Christians fleeing war and Islamic State in Syria, Pakistani Christians come to the UK under fear and trauma. They are seeking to escape discrimination, persecution and harsh blasphemy penalties in the context of the Pakistani government’s limited action to prevent religiously-motivated violence. For those who have fled and managed to reach the UK for safety and protection, arrival in the UK is not the end to their traumatic experiences, as our interviews, focus groups and case reviews demonstrate.

Ironically, Pakistani Christians’ experience of seeking asylum in the UK is characterised by a putative Islamophobia.  Like Pakistani Muslims, they are frequently received with suspicion as an unwelcome population of a particular ethnic and national origin, with an ascribed Islamic religious identity. In the context of Islamaphobia,  perceptions of Muslim extremism are associated with particular bodies and nationalities. Thus, the conflation of nationality and religion has seen Pakistani Christian asylum seekers being invariably treated as suspects first and ‘welcome-Christians’ second (if at all).  The assumption seems to be that all migrants from Muslim majority countries, by virtue of their place of origin, are potentially dangerous and therefore unwanted.  The refugees we worked with were traumatised by the experience of double-discrimination, often backed up by actual or threatened violence – in Pakistan as Christians and then in the UK as presumed-Muslims.

In seeking asylum on religious grounds, our respondents reported that their testimonies often fell foul of understandings of Christianity that were ill-suited to the Pakistani context from which they had come.  In addition, our respondents alleged that Home Office translators of similar national heritage, but from the Muslim majority, were ignorant of appropriate language to describe Christian experiences, and even undermined or manipulated accounts in a discriminatory fashion.

Our research raises serious questions of whether the current Christian/Muslim binary discourse could simply be a political cover for both Islamophobia and refugee-phobia.  Such rhetoric needs to be seen in the context of a highly controversial political debate over the policy measures that Europe should adopt in order to protect the humanity of thousands of uninvited, yet desperate migrants arriving daily on its shores.  Not all refugees arriving from the Middle East are Muslims. Christian refugees arrive daily from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran.  Among Syrian refugees, there are also other religious minorities including Druze and Yazidis.

The unfolding refugee crisis has been characterized by the European Union’s struggle to get its member states on board to address what is, in reality, a shared problem.  The UK has refused to engage with the transnational project of coordinating access and settlement, yet against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly expression of sympathy for the refugees from its publics. The Home Secretary, Theresa May’s infamous speech to the Conservative conference in October 2015 stated that a ‘chosen few’ Syrian refugees would be identified in refugee camps through the UN High Commission for Refugees.  They would then be processed under conditions which spell out the point that those who benefit are the lucky recipients of a gracious favour rather than a right under international humanitarian law.

The British government, to its credit, has not proposed any religious selection criteria in its (highly restrictive) refugee policy.  But its intention to take refugees directly from camps in Syria could have serious side effects.  Due to religious discrimination in Syria, this policy may be particularly disadvantageous to refugees from non-Muslim backgrounds.  One of our research participants, with extensive experience of working with Christian asylum seekers from Muslim majority countries, explained that:

‘The way the UK government plans to get refugees from Syria is very likely to be detrimental to Christians. Because they plan to get people from the refugee camps, as Christians don’t feel safe in a refugee camp, so they tend to hide, seek for routes to escape where possible or just stay where they are no matter how hard the situation is for them. So they’re among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, but they would actually be missed by the government’s approach’

In addition, the Director of the Migrants Rights Network has pointed out that the system that the UK has put in place represents a sub-standard version of refugee protection as temporary status. The future of all Syrian refugees largely depends on ‘safe return reviews’. This in turn leaves government authorities with the power to repatriate Syrian refugees whenever it is deemed safe to do so.

Our research suggests that the term ‘Muslim’ is increasingly being used as synonym for ‘Refugees’ or ‘Migrants’ or ‘Unwanted persons’, especially in the case of the Western member states that are either unwilling to admit refugees of whatever faith or seek to minimise the numbers of refugees they can settle into their territories. We have also found that expressing a preference for Christian refugees may simply be a way of deflecting responsibility for refugees in general, rather than reflecting any serious engagement with the complex experience of Christians fleeing the Middle East. These types of policy pronouncements are actually a disservice to refugees of all religious backgrounds.  Religion should play no part in the selection of refugees (directly or indirectly), but asylum claims based upon religious persecution need to be taken seriously.

The authors Vivien Lowndes (INLOGOV, University of Birmingham) and Roda Madziva (University of Nottingham) and  are researching the experience of asylum seekers as part of a Leverhulme funded programme ‘Making Science Public: Opportunities and Challenges’, led by the University of Nottingham.

Vivien Lowndes photo

Professor Vivien Lowndes is involved in research, teaching and knowledge transfer on local governance and public services. She is particular interested in partnerships, citizen participation, and gender issues. Currently Vivien is working on the development of Combined Authorities in the context of devolution, local government responses to austerity, Police and Crime Commissioners’ gender policies, and the use of evidence in migration policy. With colleagues at INLOGOV, she is also engaged in comparative research analysing innovative governance institutions in the UK and Brazil.

roda

Roda Madziva is a Research Fellow working on the use of evidence in public policy as part of a Leverhulme funded programme, ‘Making Science Public: Opportunities and Challenges’, led by the University of Nottingham.

 

Skills? What Skills!

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Maximilian Lempriere

At a workshop hosted in early November by City-REDI, INLOGOV,The Public Services Academy at the University of Birmingham practitioners and academics from the world of local government came together to share experiences on the current Combined Authorities and city-region devolution agenda. In the second of a series of posts Max Lempriere, a doctoral researcher studying the formation of combined authorities, reflects on the days major talking points.  This blog is also posted on  www.lgnk.org.

One recurring theme that stood out in our discussions on potential problems with establishing effective systems of leadership and governance for Combined Authorities and mayors was the integral role that the mayor needs to play to develop and maintain collective and collaborative models of leadership. Previously in this series of posts we saw that the mayor needs to tread carefully to neuter clashes of identity, but their skill-set needs to extend far wider.

First, they need diplomatic skills. They will need to tread a careful path between council Leaders and Chief Executives. Leaders in particular are used to having the last say over key policy and political decisions affecting their areas. It isn’t overly cynical therefore to expect that the arrival of a new (directly elected) kid on the block is bound to cause additional tensions. Many of the mayors will be ‘independents’ free of the constraints and pressures resulting from the need to balance conflicting views within the group and the council. Even if mayor and combined authority leaders represent the same political party this isn’t enough to guarantee congruence of visions and policies. If the mayor has a different vision to the existing Leaders members it is unclear how this tension will be reconciled.  Importantly, he or she will need to rely on the support of constituent council Leaders for approval of the budget, meaning that unless internal unity can be achieved the mayor may prove to be somewhat of a lame duck.

Second, they need a thick skin. Osborne’s idea is that mayors act as a single point of accountability for both local citizens and central government officials. The logic behind this is commendable, but it may leave the mayor between a rock and a hard place. Central government (and in particular the Treasury) has made it clear in the various devo-agreements that central oversight is built into the governance arrangements, so there may well be pressures for arms-length control of combined authorities through the mayor. Yet their allegiances lie with the combined authority; can they please both at once? Unlikely. Will this leave them open to criticism from either side? Probably.

Third, they need to be electable. Ultimately it is down to voters to decide whether or not to keep the mayor in a job, so they need to work hard to keep the public on board. Will this be possible? One danger is an expectations gap amongst voters, who misunderstand what falls inside and outside the mayor’s legislative remit. What’s more, the mayor as an institution doesn’t yet garner widespread public support, meaning that any attempted power-grabs are likely to be fiercely resisted. Similarly, it is likely that whenever the combined authority is seen to falter the mayor will be in the firing line, regardless of whether it was central government, Combined Authority members or the mayor themselves that are strictly to blame. The mayor is designed to be the accountable figurehead of the authority, but they should be careful not to oversell themselves or raise voter expectations. Without public support they lack legitimacy, without legitimacy the mayor cannot lead the combined authority and without effective leadership the combined authority is weakened.

The list goes on, but the point is simple: the mayor will have to foster internal political coherence, legitimize both themselves and the authority and be accountable both downwards and upwards. Quite how difficult these tasks will be to achieve depends on the particular power arrangements in place across different Combined Authorities and how much power has been given to elected-mayors. Nevertheless, if done right they can act as a strong figurehead for the new authorities, bringing together constituent members and powers to create something bigger than the sum of its parts and that is both resilient and durable over time. If done badly we could have a combined authority lacking in legitimacy, a vilified public figure that further disengages people away from politics and a prolonged exercise in blame shifting.

Because of the novelty of the metro-mayor and combined authority arrangements no one really knows what to expect. This could be perceived as a risk. Indeed in some areas, notably Yorkshire, disagreements at the outset over power sharing between the Combined Authority and Mayor have derailed plans.

However, it should also be seen as an opportunity. We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

This series of workshops is being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Local Government Association and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and is led by Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV and SOLACE’s Research Facilitator for Local Government.

 

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a final year PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include flexible institutional design, local government policy making, the politics of sustainable planning and construction and ecological modernisation.