parish council

Cinderella has been at the ball for more than a century and no one has noticed her!

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Ian Briggs

Local government has struggled with the concept of localism for far longer than most of us might think. It has not just been the clarion call of localism from the Coalition Government since 2010 and the subsequence Localism Act that posed some pretty serious questions about the structure of our local democratic processes. The issue of connectivity between the citizen and the ‘agent of the state’ has been under academic scrutiny for a long time.

It might come as a surprise that for many town and parish councils, 2014 marks a century or more of continuous (very) local government but this seems to be passing many by. Quite a few are in fact older and came into being after the fondly remembered 1894 Local Government Act. For many town and parish councils this was a formality that was based on the feudal system from as early as the 8th century, creating local administrative units that, it could be argued, present one of the longest histories of a system of local administration to be found anywhere in the world.

So Cinderella has been amongst us for a while now, quietly getting on with the allotments, rubbish bins and dog poo; but as she has been kept so far below stairs, few of us have ever really noticed her presence.

Indeed, today it is not what we know about town and parish councils that is interesting but (with respect to Donald Rumsfeld and his known unknowns) it is perhaps what we don’t know that is interesting and might be a matter of some concern to those of us who take our local democracy seriously.

So can anyone out there answer the following questions?

  1. How many town and parish councils are there and how many are active?

There is data which suggests that we have quite a few in England and Wales – only a few in Wales. Looking at the data from the National Audit Office we can see that the gross precept levied by town and parish councils is around £400m, not an inconsiderable sum. These data are aggregated from what higher tier billing councils levy on communities, but this total hides the fact that a proportion of local councils below the higher tier are moribund and some act in a somewhat unofficial capacity. We also don’t know the range of budgets across local council size and scope. Rather worrying as no real research has been undertaken in this area since 1981!

  1. How many town and parish councillors do we have?

Again, it is near impossible to arrive at anything like an accurate figure. We know that in some cases we have data from where elections take place but many town and parish councillors enter office without facing an election. Uncontested elections are often a feature of government at this level and it is worth reflecting that even though those who do sit on such councils are exposed to the same level of legal responsibility as those who are elected to principal councils, many sneak through without facing the ballot box.

There is also some slightly worrying anecdotal evidence that some well-meaning local citizens sit alongside parish and town councillors as they have local knowledge and enthusiasm for local issues, seemingly all but formal parish and town councillors. But it might be best not to dwell too much on this. To complicate matters further we might be surprised to find that sitting on our local town or parish council are formally elected councillors from higher tier councils and indeed in some parts of the country ‘triple hatted’ councillors can be found – sitting on the county, district and paris council. Great if you have the energy and commitment to do so, but there are instances where they could be representing different political parties or more usually be politically aligned and supported at one level and by independent at another.

  1. How do town and parish councils set, agree and monitor priorities for spending?

Good question – as successive approaches to monitoring and controlling the spending mechanisms for local government have come and gone in recent years, Cinderella has managed to escape much in the way of control mechanisms for her role as the most local form of democratic unit. Thankfully most town and parish councils are working to some kind of plan and although the purse strings are tighter than perhaps they have ever been, most town and parish councils are keeping the wolf from the door – just.

A key responsibility of all town and parish councils is to hold an annual parish meeting. The intention here is to engage the local community in such a way as to set the agenda for the forthcoming financial year and help the parish council to focus on the priorities that local communities wish to see addressed. In some case this clearly works well, but again we have no global data or broad understanding of how this works. In some places where higher tier or principal councils are well engaged with this process it does have some meaning and purpose, but many parish councils often find that only a handful of people turn up, sometimes out of a sense of duty or even as an opportunity to tell the parish council how poorly the NHS is run or their objection to some foreign policy activity that central government is undertaking (and don’t laugh, as the anecdotal evidence strongly supports this).

  1. What do higher tier and principal councils actually think about town and parish councils?

Another question that is near impossible to answer beyond the clear frustration that many seem to feel about their mere existence. In fairness, a growing number of county and district councils are coming around to thinking that better connectivity with parish councils is an essential way forward. As councils are rethinking where their assets lie they find that where parishes has worked hard to maintain local open spaces, play areas and other facilities they can play a really significant role in supporting policies in healthy lifestyles, wellbeing and even education.

  1. What capacity do town and parish councils have to deal with an expanding agenda and increasing levels of public expectation?

Now perhaps this is the killer question. Are we seeing a forced interdependence forming between principal councils and town and parish councils or is there real mileage in rethinking Cinderella and giving her a makeover? To characterise all parish councils as amateurish is really to do them a disservice and is patently wrong. NALC, the National Association of Local Councils, may not be the most prominent of bodies but in recent years it has done sterling work in supporting town and parish councils through changing times, and has done more than most appreciate in professionalising and lifting the status of the parish clerk from that of a part time administrator to one of a key professional who handles complexity and ensures that parish councillors can give their best.

Despite this, we can see that many parish councils are struggling to absorb a wide range of challenges – from playing their part in ensuring that large scale residential developments are in keeping with local needs and expectations to developing new forms of local services to fill gaps left by unavoidable reductions in services from county and district councils.

So where does this leave us? To ensure that we understand exactly what the new 21st century Cinderella will need to wear to the ball, we need to be clear about what the supporting research agenda should contain. This autumn NALC and INLOGOV, together with the University of Gloucestershire, will be inviting a number of key players together to begin to map out the gap of the last thirty years of Cinderella being locked below the stairs.

briggs

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV, and sits on a rural Parish Council in Warwickshire. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Local democracy at the sharp end: diary from a Parish Council

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Ian Briggs

It starts in the autumn of 2013. The Secretary of State knocks back the latest submission of the Core Strategy from the District Council – more homes needed please. Suddenly, the Parish Council becomes inundated with requests for meetings from developers – the story here being that this rural village has the postcode where houses change hands on the market the fastest for miles around, and for the highest possible price.

By November 2013, eight potential housing developments are highlighted and the community becomes ‘punch drunk’ with consultations for housing developments. Plans are submitted to the District Council but mysteriously they do not appear on the website.

Early January 2014, the Parish Council calls a community meeting to discuss development, the fact that HS2 Ltd are now proposing permanent road closures, and the Environmenet Agency is looking at proposals for an advanced form of ‘fracking’ – underground coal gasification for the area.

It is hardly surprising that those local residents present at the meeting are up in arms and demanding answers. Council Council member is present at meeting but rather quiet and makes sharp exit at the close. No District Ward councillor present and no apologies sent.

The following morning, the members of the Parish Council are given sight of resignation letter from District Councillor.

Week two, January 2014. District Council meets to agree new proposed core strategy. Shock – areas within the Parish Council highlighted to absorb thousands of houses – sets out case that it is at the periphery of the District so should be little trouble – wonder why ward councillor resigns?

Still no sign on the District Council website of plans submitted by developers in December 2013. Then, find they have put them on the website but believe they relate to a totally different parish – oops!

Letter sent to the Leader of the District Council requesting urgent meeting – no acknowledgment, no reply after ten working days. Leader of Council is in London for extended period according to Council staff. Wonder what on earth he is up to and who he is talking to?

All of the above is a trust story. But the important issue here is that this is set against a backdrop of ‘localism’ – if the intention is to give greater powers to local communities then we need to look closely at the decision-making mechanisms that we have to work with. There are questions arising as to how we are failing to integrate decision-making across different levels of local democracy.

A fundamental  tenant of any democracy is being clear and open as to where decisions are made. If all this sounds as though it is an attack on the District Council in question, it is not meant to be so – the Council is in the same position as most others. It has made deep and significant cuts to its operations and is now faced with making decisions that are expensive in terms of time and associated managerial costs.

In amongst all of this are the public. They are open to persuasion from a local media that is keen to jump upon any news story that could sound as though the Council is failing, and given that event well educated and sensible members of the public are poorly informed of the mechanisms of local democratic decision-making, it is no wonder that they turn to the most available and accessible form of local representation – the Parish Council.

Next diary entries to start soon…..

briggs

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV, and sits on a rural Parish Council in Warwickshire. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

The ‘Detroit question’ and Parish Councils

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Ian Briggs

The agenda on public service integration continues apace: discrete organisations working together in partnership has been the ideal in the past, but we are now in a world where the boundaries between organisations are becoming blurred and important questions are being asked again around the overall structure of our public services.

We recently hosted an interesting roundtable for Police and Crime Commissioners here at INLOGOV where the debate somewhat expectantly turned to the potential advantages of gathering the so called ‘Blue Light’ services together. Indeed, there has been a lot of progress in this field: certain first responder paramedic services can and are delivered by fire fighters and there are other examples of this integration which make a great deal of sense. It makes sense economically and, importantly, from the public perspective it makes sense too. Little attention is paid by a citizen or service user as long as the need is met and the service adds value. So we can safely say that some useful, realistic and economically advantageous integration projects are now well underway.

However, there is one aspect of integration that is rarely discussed but appears to be gathering a bit more attention recently. It goes something like this…. “As a District Council we are a billing authority, we send out the council tax bills and residents can see proportionately where their council tax is being spent. They can see that a proportion is retained by us; they can see a fair bit goes to the county council, the Fire service and police and little bit at the end is called the precept for the Parish Council. When we look at the totality for the parish and town councils precept it adds up to a fair sum. Why is it that when we can hardly afford the electricity bill to keep the lights on in our district council, the parishes and town councils have a load of loot?”

The councillor in this conversation also goes on to say that they have invested a great deal of time and energy in reshaping services and entered into complex partnering arrangements to bring efficiency benefits for us and the county, but “we seem to have overlooked the role of parish and town councils”. Looking recently at one multi tier area in the West Midlands that is heavily and actively parished suggests that the total precept adds up to quite a few million pounds; a rough calculation also suggests that for most town and parish councils they have discretionary control over more than half of their budgets (according to CLG the total English council precept for town and parish councils is over £540m -2013/13).

Decisions on spend, often set against some reasonably realistic and thoughtful parish plans, do deliver real and appreciated benefits for local communities but those parish plans, whilst submitted for approval to the district council (the billing authority in question), are administratively accepted and gather dust just to be treated as another bit of ‘administrivia’.

Granted, some councils are working well with their parish and town councils. They go beyond mere consultation and actively engage them in priority setting and are working towards much stronger integrated working, but that is not the case in many instances. There must some mileage in extending this debate to have a near seamless integration of priorities and social outcomes that dig deep into the work that parish councils do. Why is it that when the parish council budget is set it often accounts for a myriad of small contracts that are judged upon their worthiness but are rarely bound into the higher order outcomes that higher tier councils are working towards? It is logical to think that where a parish council has responsibility for open spaces and its efficacy in the management of those places is judged upon how effectively the grass is cut that those same open spaces are a resource that can have a significant role in meeting outcomes around public health, wellbeing, youth activities and a whole host more that are sought in higher tier councils.

The problem here is twofold – firstly it is rare for local parish and town councils to be engaged with these issues and secondly it is equally rare for many higher tier councils to even try to do so. There are also the attendant issues of poor integration of expenditure and budgets.

Although I have tried to bring together neighbouring parishes to coordinate and share their basic contracts (as a kind of horizontal integration that brings an economy of scale) little has been achieved and there has been little progress in taking this debate upward too.  As we are becoming more outcomes focused it is somewhat surprising that more is not done to encourage an integrative approach to what parish councils are doing on the ground and what the higher tier councils are seeking to achieve in this respect.

There have been some recent initiatives that have sought to bring this about – Selby in North Yorkshire should be commended for their approach to grouping parish and town councils and one county in the West Midlands that we are aware of has undertaken some preliminary work to engage with parish ad town councils better. However, where there have been some attempts to bring about this vertical integration, some resistance can be found too. It centres on the lack of focus on larger more holistic outcomes to be found in some, though perhaps not all parish and town councils and the potential lack of administrative and client skills they can call upon. But there may also be a lack of will on behalf of higher tier councils to stimulate this debate – it can be a tall order to effectively engage with a varied and disparate group of organisations that quite rightly guard their independence and local connectivity and in some cases district councils can have upwards of hundreds of parishes to deal with – engaging with them can be resource intensive in the extreme.

So, as some councils are facing highly uncertain futures – there is some polemic in the media about a handful of councils pulling up the shutters soon – it might be time to open this debate up and look at where there could be useful approaches to vertical integration in local government. It might be the first step in avoiding a UK Detroit.

briggs

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.

The forgotten last chapters of localism

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Ian Briggs

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance”, George Bernard Shaw once wrote – it seems to sum up some extraordinary lessons that the recent winter weather is offering us. What really gets people off their backsides and make representations to local councils are things that affect them immediately. Go for a peaceful evening walk and stand in some dog mess and suddenly you are aware of the all inconsiderate dog owners in your neighbourhood – it snows and you become aware that the grit bin at the end of your road is empty – hit a pot hole in your car and you are immediately aware of poor road surfaces.  You are so wound up you e mail and write letters of complaint, but it is not enough, you actually go and berate your local Town or Parish Council at the next meeting because it is closest to you.

This immediacy of awareness can be the cause of backlashes and sweeping generalisations of public service performance.  Whether the gap between public expectation and the reality of delivery can ever be reconciled is a matter of useless speculation, but when faced with the anger of a citizen for what they see as public service failure an incremental level of dissatisfaction can be the result. This seems to be the case in a number of what may appear to be small incidents but taken in the round add up to what is a serious problem. This is often most evident in the thousands of Town and Parish Councils that make up so much of the English democratic infrastructure.

This problem can be illustrated by a story told to me as part of a Masters programme some years ago, it centred around the new CEO of an airline who sought to better understand the customer experience by booking himself on a number of the airlines services in a kind of mystery shopper experience. On one flight he fell into conversation with a regular passenger (in economy) who was concerned that aircraft maintenance was being undertaken in a shoddy and potentially dangerous manner. Somewhat surprised, he enquired as to whether the passenger had professional experience in this matter only to find out he was a furniture salesperson. He had made his striking and knowledgeable conclusion from the fact that this was the third time he had recently flown on an aircraft where there were sticky messy rings left from leaky coffee cups on previous flights. If the airline could not do something as simple as clean up a coffee cup ring on a fold down table then how on earth could they effectively maintain a complex system like a jet aircraft properly?

This came to mind the other night when out doing my bit as a Parish Councillor –  I had a reflective vest on (bought by myself) used a spade (my own) and was spreading some grit over a road junction that is regularly the scene of multiple minor bumps and scrapes when there is snow and ice around. A motorist – not young – hurtled up the lane at a speed that suggests he was not taking account of the conditions and braked suddenly close to where I was doing my bit. The driver’s window opened and a veritable torrent of abuse was directed towards me – assuming that I was a council employee I was accused of wrecking the national economy, luxuriating in a huge public funded pension, ruining his children’s education and future prospects and robbing him blind of his wages through his council tax.

It is not about the factual correctness here – it is about the underpinning belief systems that pervade society. It is the drama around false knowledge – seeing me looking like a council employee, doing what he assumes a council employee does was enough to trigger connections that confirm and  reinforce the underlying belief system.  It is also about the dangerous level of ignorance we have allowed to accumulate in civil society. Most reasonable and rational people can see what goes wrong locally, and on top of this they often know stuff about putting it right but the disconnect between the two remains. If localism is about reversing the top down, parent always knows better in public service delivery do we not have to offer some seed corn to enable the person in the street to engage better with our attempts and actions to make living here better?

The sting in the tail here is that anger at perceived failure is only one aspect of the danger of false knowledge – the phenomenon of the dangers of success is out there too. Although anecdotal, we are capturing the awkward issue of what some are calling ‘need acceleration’ – this occurred to one councillor who recently was pleased to find that after some door knocking and street level engagement a number of residents were saddened by the state that some Victorian iron railings were in around an amenity area. They were rusting and in poor repair. This became the target for spending his small discretionary ward grant – within days the railings were restored to their former glory – rust removed, gleaming black paint and looking very much as they did in the days of the childhood of local residents. However, as much as a few were clearly delighted with the result more residents came forward pressurising the councillor that if they could do something as simple as put right the railings around the small park then why on earth could they not do something about the ghastly, unsightly ‘bomb site’ at the end of the street? A fine example of need acceleration and perhaps a good example of false knowledge.

High expectation coupled with innocent ignorance of the reality of how we link civil society and the state is perhaps a problem that localism will never satisfactorily resolve – the last chapter will perhaps be written on Parish and Town Council letter headed notepaper! Increasingly it seems that is where the buck stops.

briggs

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.