Cllr Sir Merrick Cockell is Leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Chairman of the Local Government Association.
I’m going to refer to two examples, one from my days at London Councils and one in Kensington and Chelsea. I think what I’ve seen and heard, particularly the three slides around language and image, practice and accessibility, are explanations of why people are turned off, why they don’t want to become involved in local democratic process. I think as an active local politician these are ones that are familiar, but perhaps not brought together so persuasively, but also with the implications of what we need to do, those of us who are involved in local democracy, to make ourselves more open and accessible and for people to participate.
I’m particularly interested in – wearing my national local government hat (if that makes sense) – how do we attract, how do we actually show the positive side of local democracy, that people will actively want to be part of, that won’t be put off by the cogent and perfectly understandable reasons why people wouldn’t want to go that step, or those succession of steps further, to actually become a person who other people would then choose to put their trust in and vote for, or indeed not vote for, as active parts of that democratic process. There’s lots of reasons here given why, but you can understand why people would be put off, would be saying I don’t want to be attacked, I don’t want to be held up as something I’m not or ridiculed or seen to be a bizarre personality – something wrong with you that you might want to actively want to be a politician.
So how do you counter that? There are two examples I want to refer to. One of the problems in local government is there are actually lots of people who want to stand for councils but local government needs a mixture. You need community activists, you need people who are great in their area, in their ward, their district. But you also, because of the executive cabinet thing, you need some skills as well. And you need some quite specific skills if you’re not going to end up with the Icelandic banks repetition. You need people that can ask the officials the right questions. You don’t need to be more of an expert, but you need to know the right questions, and if you bring some expertise in an area. Finance is one of those areas.
When I was chairing London Councils – I’ll talk about the ‘Be a councillor’ campaign that we started there – but it was how do you identify some of those skills? If you come from a business background, if you’re a business and you don’t have those skills, or you want those skills on your board, you go and you find a non-executive director with those skills. That’s an obvious way of doing it. I was sitting with some colleagues having a cup of coffee in Westminster and we were talking about it and said, why don’t we go and look (in local government), why don’t we seek out people with those particular skills that are absolutely essential if we’re going to run and lead and innovate public services. Nobody wanted to do this, we tried to do it in London – I think we did get one council in each different political control, and we found these head-hunter companies who would do it pro bono and so we tried.
No one in the Conservative group in London would do it, so my stupid idea, so Kensington and Chelsea did it. Tribal were the people who were are partner in it and they operated this in a very proactive way. They talked to, I think, 225 people from 167 organisations, some of which were absolutely local community organisations, some of which were local businesses, some of which were wider businesses, people in the city who might live in Kensington and Chelsea. And actually, many of the answers they got were some of the things here, like “I’m not political”, “Politics? I’m not really political, I’m not sure which party I am”, “I don’t want to get into that world” was a very live one, “what does local government do?” “Why would I waste my time doing something like that?” That’s explaining what happens at a local level, and actually quite how much not only influence but direct change you can bring about was one of the constants that came out. But actually we did go through that process from 225, then you ended up with a final group of 20, and then the headhunters had to say, “well do you actually live in the area?” And then they went “oh no, didn’t I tell you, I actually live in Shepherd Bush,” and so we actually ended up with a handful of people, and then they were introduced to the political process – and happily one came through that process. So it’s not something you could replicate very widely, but I think it did highlight amongst people who you would think should be thinking about this at some time in their lives of actually being a real participant in the democratic process that frankly it was the last thing that they would have considered as being a sensible thing to do. But they would have considered taking their professional skills into the voluntary sector or into a business as a non executive director.
That came from something when we were in London, I think in about 2008, we’d seen all of the data, we knew, as indeed the LGA latest data show, local government politicians are getting – and it’s everything that I am – they’re getting whiter, they’re getting older, they’re getting maler. In fact, I know however old I get I’m still at the young end of active participants in local government. And those are bad signals, we would hope to have been pushing back the other way, but the most recent evidence is that that is not the case. So how do we break down those barriers so that local government is not – which it isn’t – something that you pop into town hall on a Friday afternoon sometime between the golf course and wherever, and you sign a few things.
That’s not local government at all, but how do you communicate, how do you get that message out there? So in London, all the councils participated in this, and I think almost all of us had a-political town hall meetings, we invited people in, using all of the community groups and networks that we had and of course you inevitably miss a lot of people in that, but still, even in Kensington and Chelsea, we got about a hundred people coming to an open evening. We did a poll, 40 of them had been into the town hall before but that was to pay a parking fine or pay their council tax or something sort of negative. The rest knew nothing about it, had just come because they’d heard about it and wanted to know more. And we talked, and we had a sort of fair thing outside so they could see the things we did, and they could also talk to the local political parties, and in the public part of the meeting we made sure we had all of the parties represented. We imported an independent from Somerset and most people in the audience wanted to be an independent, because that reflected that they were different from other people, that they weren’t part of a political process, they didn’t like the idea of a whip and all those sorts of things, until of course you pointed out – and of course in some places independents do hold control by working together and forming affectively political groupings – but we had to explain that if you want to achieve something you have to decide if you can work with others, and probably that means that the system is – unless you think you can break the whole system, you have to work within political parties or certainly as we are at the moment.
That was an interesting process and actually directly from that in the Conservative party in Kensington and Chelsea we have people standing in our elections who would never had stood as a Conservative a few years before. Young men and women from the local mosque, for instance, were standing as Conservative candidates and that was happening throughout London. I think we wouldn’t overclaim the results but by opening our town halls up, by talking to people, by bringing them in, by explaining what their role would be, how whatever their background, whatever their finances, whatever their circumstances they could be local councillors, they could be candidates, that I think is the way that we need to – at least at the active participation level – we need to change things. In the Local Government Association we’re going to be revitilising the ‘Be a councillor’ project, we have an annual parliamentary reception, I hope Stella you will be there, and we’re going to have ‘Be a councillor’ as the theme, so that we actually connect particularly to newer members of Parliament and we actually get their validation for the fact that we want local people to be involved in the local democratic process.
