Philip Parkin

So what’s the process by which Birmingham might get an elected mayor then? Because however many times I read through the snappily titled ‘Draft Communities and Local Government Structural Reform Plan’ I still can’t quite figure out how it’s going to work and the usually helpful people at CLDG are not answering my emails.

Power, according to the Plan, will be taken away from Whitehall and put into the hands of people and communities. And the Localism Bill, the mechanism for this huge transfer of power, will pave the way for 12 cities to have elected mayors from May 2012. So, Birmingham could get a (political) mayor in less than two years time.

But what about the referendum? Well that, it appears, is to come afterwards, perhaps a year or two after the first mayors are elected. It will be a ‘confirmatory’ referendum and contrary to what I’m sure most people are expecting, the ’in favour’ threshold could very well be set much lower than 50%. The government, it appears, is keen to avoid the embarrassment of Labour‘s Regional Assembly referenda, an exercise in the transfer of power which spectacularly failed to ignite public interest.

My guess is that the current leaders in these 12 cities will be renamed mayors in 2012, and that an election won’t take place for a good few years afterwards, certainly not until after a referendum regarding the new posts. All should become clearer in November, when the groundwork for the Bill is done and ’options’ are developed for the transition to mayors. It’s starting to look more and more, though, that Birmingham will get an elected mayor regardless of whether we actually want one or not. Which is not quite the localism that many of us would have had in mind.

The Big Society may well come to mean government ‘on the cheap’ – after all, it’s probably the only type of government we can afford at the moment. It may also turn out to just be ‘volunteers doing stuff for nothing’ as one perceptive member of the public put it on the six o’clock news last night. Or Cameron could end up ditching the idea, overwhelmed by great waves of public apathy and indifference.

But it could turn out to be a turning point, a great big libertarian stick in the ground, the (big) opportunity we’ve all been waiting for. In the face of tough economic times, and harder ones ahead, perhaps this is just what some of us need: the chance to measure ourselves against the ‘good’ that we do, rather than the money we make. Maybe there is more to life than just paid work (important, of course, though that is – volunteering won‘t pay the bills, after all… that‘s kind of the point). Life could, in fact, also be about mucking in, helping out, improving your immediate surroundings, your ‘neighbourhood’. Less: petitions, letter writing and criticism, then, more: DIY, direct action and ‘doing stuff for nothing’.

Whether it works or not will probably come down to the detail – principally, will people really get the chance to make a contribution, or is this the kind of devolved power that comes with a huge number of bureaucratic, and financial, strings attached? And, convinced as I am, by the argument that power should rest, as far as possible, with the individual, Edmund Burke’s line about paying undue attention to a vocal minority should give us some pause for thought. After all, one man’s Community Organiser is another man’s opportunistic political adversary. But for all that, if the Big Society is to mean anything then it does, ultimately, have to be about decentralising power – if it doesn’t then all that talk about letting people take more control over their lives will just end up sounding like the kind of stuff politicians always tell us when they‘re scrabbling around for the next Big Idea.

Birmingham spent £46m of Working Neighbourhood Fund money over the last two years trying to help people get into work. Even by the standards of the largest local authority in the country – and in a city with 14% unemployment – that’s a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money. That it only actually helped 170 people get a job shouldn’t surprise any of us, nor the fact that there’s little to show for the £500m that’s spent on the same problem since 1997. Even the Labour peer, Lord Myners, a recent convert to common sense now his party‘s not in government, knows that throwing money at ‘job creation’ doesn’t work:

“The government can’t create jobs” he said last month. “The government can create the environment which is conducive to the creation of jobs but it cannot create jobs and we mislead ourselves if we believe it can.”

The council’s targets for this largest tranche of money – getting 4,000 people into work, and advising a further 15,000 – were clearly hugely over optimistic. That’s not to say the money has necessarily been wasted, but it’s clearly symptomatic of much wider problems that the fund has been used instead to either plug the gaps of a failing educational system that sees so many young people leave work without the basic skills needed for a job, or has been spent on smoothing over the deficiencies of a benefit system that makes it financially prohibitive for so many people to come off benefits and into work.

And the bigger issue here is Lord Myner’s second point – that what governments can do is create the environment that is conducive to the creation of jobs. And businesses – whether already settled in the city or looking to locate from elsewhere – tend to be in broad agreement on what constitutes that type of ’conducive’ environment. It’s one with a good transport infrastructure, low crime rate, cultural and entertainment amenities on tap as well as access to the basics such as affordable housing and quality education. This is what councils need to remain focused on, not the impossible task of creating private sector jobs in the midst of a severe recession.

Research by The Standards Board has found that the public believe local councillors to be more trustworthy than local MPs.

The Board’s Chief Exec, Glenys Stacey, is pleased that “trust in local politicians (has) held up favourably compared to people’s views about national politicians.” But the figures are really not that good, with 20% feeling that councillors ‘rarely or never’ tell the truth. And although the questions were asked at the height of the MPs expenses scandal, the results are clearly heading in the wrong direction:

Table: Percentage responses to: How often do you think the following types of people tell the truth?

It would be fascinating to see some examples behind the allegations of mendacity, though. I don’t think that a significant number of councillors ‘fiddle’ their expenses (the rules are strict and the amounts avaliable relatively low) and I don’t believe that they deliberately mislead residents, either. And, besides, non-executive councillors (the majority) don’t tend to be responsible for ‘pushing through’ controversial policies – they’re usually fighting on behalf of residents to counter the effects of ill-thought out legislation, ever mindful that this is the kind of stuff that gets remembered come polling day.

Decisions made in local government often come across as being complicated because they are complicated, and the use of technical language is the only way to adequately explain what on earth they’re about. And no amount of re-wording or attempts to simplify is ever going to change that. Often, though, what’s discussed seems complicated because bureaucrats and politicians have temporarily lost the ability to communicate effectively and have submitted to pressure to use jargon. And I’m often guilty of this, too. However, given the importance of some of the stuff that gets discussed in local government – and, also, bearing in mind that the overuse of jargon has been identified as one of the reasons why people are turned off politics – this ’overcomplication’ is not only frustrating, it also isn’t good for democracy.

Today’s Birmingham Cabinet Meeting, for example, had over 20 items on the agenda, most of their titles and reports written in the usual impenetrable council style. So the meeting began with an item titled the ‘Reconsideration of Decision Called-In – Multi Area Agreement for Employment and Skills’. And the agenda included the snappily titled item: ’Winning Resources: Local Area Agreement Working Neighbourhoods Fund Strategic Interventions’. Yet both these items – if you can get past the titles - were, and are, extremely important – dealing with the spending of huge amounts of money on trying to tackle perhaps the biggest problem this city faces at the moment – long term, mass unemployment. We should all, as far as we can, be trying to get away from this sort of convoluted language.

Today’s Cabinet Meeting was actually one of the most important for a long time, with decisions being made on the:

‘Highways Maintenance and Management Private Finance Initiative’ – the awarding of a £2.2bn, 25 year, highways’ maintenance contract (one of the biggest PFI contracts in the country).

‘Approval of Academies Process’ – significant progress on the setting up of 3 (controversial) new Academy schools.

‘BMG Birmingham History Galleries Project – Full Business Case’ – the awarding of a £2.9m contract to repair the roof works at the Council House Extension and the submission of a £4.8m bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the setting up of a History of Birmingham Gallery at the Museum and Art Gallery. It was also agreed to spend £874,000  to cover development work on the project.

Be Active – £9.3m to be spent on an 18 month project to increase participation in sport. All residents may now swim/use the gym at council run leisure centres completely free of charge.

There was much more discussed at Cabinet today, all of it important to residents in Birmingham and not much of it decipherable by those outside of local government. And that’s why we need to ensure our established local media survives this deep recession. After all, somebody needs to help explain what all this stuff means.

Interesting article in the Birmingham Post today about how the public sector led approach to tackling unemployment doesn’t actually appear to be making any difference. Even at the height of the ‘boom years’ unemployment in certain wards in the city was at 20%. ( And the figure was much higher if you included people on disability/single parent benefit).  With the unemployment claimant rate  in Aston currently running at 28.2% (and with the wider ’worklessness’ figure across the city at 37%) it’s obvious that we need a radical change in how we address this issue. The current approach just isn’t working.

July Unemployment Briefing

The Home Secretary has announced that councils ‘might in future’ face restrictions on their use of covert surveillance measures. Some councils have been misusing their powers under RIPA , apparently, to snoop on parents lying about their home address in order to get their children into a preferred school, or on residents putting their bins out on the wrong day etc.

It seems obvious to me that these powers should only be used for offences that would result in a prison sentence and that council leaders should always be the ones authorising their use. The hypocrisy of the government in blaming councils for snooping in this way is breathtaking. This is a government, after all, that has given the UK the dubious honour of being the most watched state outside of China and Russia, with over 4million CCTV cameras, one for every 14 people. And of course, given our hugely over-centralised system, councils have no choice but to do the government’s bidding. Contact Point, for example, the new ‘national children’s database’, which will include the personal details of every child in the country, is a Labour government creation and councils have no choice put to put it into place.