Power in Place: what this moment is asking of larger town councils

Keynote speech

Members of the Society of Local Council Clerks gathered in Harrogate for their annual conference, closing two days of discussion with a keynote from Mel Stevens, Chief Executive of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS). Drawing on conversations from across the sector about devolution, neighbourhood governance and the new duties on local authorities, Mel set out why larger town councils are becoming more central to local democracy, not less — and challenged the room to think beyond powers and structures towards the deeper question of what kind of local democratic actor a town council can be.

More central than the system realises

Good afternoon everyone. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

I am Mel, and I’ve spent many years working in a number of fields that support good decision making. I’ve been at CfGS for three years, which is a real privilege — not least because governance and scrutiny are actually quite important.

So thank you for inviting me to close the conference. I want to start with something simple.

You are in a more important position than I think some of the wider system fully realises. And that importance comes with some hard questions.

Because as local government gets bigger, more stretched, more strategic, and in some places more remote, people like you — and organisations like yours — matter more, not less.

Not because larger town councils are perfect. Not because they are always as visible, representative or ambitious as they could be. Not because the wider sector always understands them well.

But because rooted, recognisable, human-scale local democratic bodies are becoming more valuable at precisely the moment the rest of the system is scaling up.

And that is why I wanted to use this session to ask: what does this moment now require of larger town councils — and of the people leading them?

I know this room does not need another person arriving with a long list of things you ought to be doing. You are already leading complex organisations in a demanding context. So I do not start from a deficit view. I start from the view that this sector already carries serious responsibility.

But I do think this moment requires something slightly different. Not just more effort, more resilience, more delivery. But more strategic clarity about what your council is for, what value it holds, and how that value gets seen and used in a changing governance landscape.

Not a simple moment

This is not a simple moment. It’s not just exciting; it’s not just difficult. It’s both. And that combination is really the point — it is why how town councils show up right now really matters.

Because it is not just about structures. It is about the relational, democratic, place-based side of your story: trust, participation, legitimacy, community voice and belonging. And it is also about the governance part of your story — the ability to manage bigger responsibilities, with a grip on finance, risk, resilience and increasingly delivery.

As councils grow in size, the nature of the risk changes. A larger town council is not just a smaller council with a longer to-do list. It is a more complex organisation, carrying more public money, more expectations, more operational risk, more reputational risk, and more responsibility for the confidence people place in it.

So when I talk about power in place, I don’t just mean voice and visibility. I mean the capability to hold responsibility well: making good decisions, understanding the money, scrutinising delivery, and being honest about what is working and what is not.

I have done a lot of work with councils that have gone into intervention, and residents do not experience poor governance as a technical failure. They experience it as services that don’t work, money that doesn’t stretch, promises that are not kept, and decisions that don’t feel trustworthy.

This is a conversation about local democracy, which is also about assurance, resilience and grip. Holding these together is one of the marks of a well-run local democratic body.

Why this matters now

Neighbourhood governance is no longer just an interesting conversation, or something that happens at the margins.

The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act now places a duty on local authorities in England to make appropriate arrangements for the effective governance of neighbourhood areas. The detail will come through regulations and guidance, but the direction of travel is clear: neighbourhood governance is moving into the formal architecture of the system. And importantly for this room, where town and parish councils exist, local authorities must engage with them about their representation in those arrangements.

Whatever the frustrations in the detail, the signal matters: legally and practically, you are now in the frame. You are no longer on the edge of the conversation; you are inside it, full stop.

That means this is not just a moment to say “we matter too.” It is a moment to ask, much more seriously: what kind of role are we ready to play?

Because perception matters — not in a superficial branding sense, in a practical one. If your council is perceived mainly as a useful local delivery body, that shapes the conversations you are invited into. If it is perceived as a serious civic actor with democratic legitimacy, local intelligence, practical capability and community reach, that changes things.

Perceptions: two lenses

My sense is that larger town councils are seen in contradictory ways.

On a good day, they are seen as rooted, practical, visible, trusted, close to reality — the part of local public life that still feels human-sized. You know your communities, and you can turn priorities into visible action.

On another day, they can also be seen as constrained, inward-looking, underused, underimagined, not taken seriously enough. I have more than once heard the slightly flippant — but also quite serious — line: “well, at least they can raise their precept.” The ability to raise a precept is not a substitute for a serious conversation about financial stewardship.

The uncomfortable truth is that some of those perceptions are myths or lazy stereotypes, but some reflect real challenges that cannot just be brushed away — real questions about participation, turnout, representativeness and visibility beyond the usual people, questions that apply across all levels of government.

The sweet spot is not to rush to a defensive response, but to take a highly ambitious one. The objective is not to romanticise town councils, or to diminish them — it is to be honest about both the strengths and the stretch. Because if this layer of governance is now being looked at more closely, and it is, then the question is no longer simply whether it matters, but what kind of value it brings to people’s lived experience.

That matters today, when reform is being driven strongly by scale, efficiency and financial resilience. Those things are real and valuable. But scale and efficiency on their own do not answer the question of legitimacy and the question of belonging.

The problem is not only authority

I heard the phrase “England is not a spreadsheet” recently, and it reminded me of a conversation I was in with a unitary authority where the starting point was quite limited — almost a “well, perhaps we can hive off a bit of service delivery to them” mindset. But over time, because trust built and capability was shown, the tone changed. It became less about offloading bits and pieces, and more about recognising that more could be held locally, and held well.

What struck me was not just the outcome, but the slight surprise around the room that it had worked. Sometimes the barrier is not just capacity. It is imagination — whether the wider system can picture town councils as true and equal partners.

Too much of the conversation about larger town councils is about what powers they have, what services they can take on, what they can afford, what can be handed over. Those are not unimportant questions. But they are too small on their own, because they reduce larger town councils to either a constitutional category or a delivery mechanism.

Whereas I think the bigger question is this: what kind of local democratic actor could this council be in the life of this place?

Five forms of strategic value

I think you hold at least five important forms of strategic value — five things the wider system is going to need more of over the next few years.

1. The first is legitimacy rooted in place

Not perfect or uncomplicated legitimacy, but legitimacy that is there: democratic in form, rooted in a recognisable geography, part of the civic fabric. Legitimacy is not an adjective, something you either have or don’t have — it is a verb, something living that needs maintaining, widening and renewing. The value of being rooted in place is not simply that you are there. It is what you do with that rootedness.

2. The second is practical capability and governance grip

You are bodies that can hold real responsibility close to place. In a system that often separates strategy from delivery, and decision-making from lived experience, larger town councils can sit much closer in the join between the two. The wider system does not only need local voice — it needs local competence, bodies that can manage money, assets, services, staff, expectations and risk in ways that are visible and grounded. You are not waiting to become real institutions. You are real institutions. And as scale grows, the grip has to grow too: finance, audit, scrutiny and risk are not boring back-office disciplines, they are part of what makes local power credible.

3. The third is place intelligence

You often know things about place that larger institutions struggle to know — not just the headline data, but the texture, the rhythm, the undercurrents and the local relationships. The tensions before they become formal disputes. The needs before they arrive in a report. The opportunities before they become a programme. That is not soft intelligence. That is strategic intelligence, and understanding place deeply is a serious public asset.

4. The fourth is convening power

The ability to bring people together not because you command them, but because you sit in the middle of a place in a way others do not. Residents, community groups, businesses, public agencies, principal authorities. You can create the spaces where local relationships are formed, tested and repaired — not just formal meetings or consultation exercises, but the everyday civic work of bringing people into contact with one another, and making it easier for decisions to be shaped with some sense of shared place.

5. The fifth is relational reach

You occupy a space between communities and systems, between the everyday and the strategic. That is hard, but it is also powerful, because some of the bodies that will matter most over the next few years will be the ones that can move across those boundaries well — able to work with complexity without losing human connection, able to speak both the language of community and the language of systems, able to make larger reforms real in the grain of local life.

When you put those five things together, you start to see the possibility of town councils not just as service bodies, or consultees, or local delivery partners, but as part of the relational constitution of a place. A formal constitution tells you where powers sit, what the rules are, how decisions are made. But it doesn’t tell you the whole story of how a place is governed — because the real life of governance is also shaped by relationships, behaviours, habits, trust, expectations and unwritten understandings. Who speaks to whom. Who gets heard early. How challenge is handled. How power is shared, explained and made accountable in practice.

Larger town councils can play a really important role in that relational constitution — by helping create the conditions in which communities, councillors, officers and institutions can work through disagreement, share power more honestly, and build decisions that are not only formally sound, but more trusted and more grounded in the lived realities of the place.

The building blocks of neighbourhood governance

Neighbourhood governance will not be made real by warm words, and it cannot be solved just by putting “community” and “partnership” in a diagram. It needs design. It needs legitimacy. It needs capacity. It needs accountability. It needs relationships that can survive disagreement. And it needs enough grip to carry money, risk and responsibility.

That is the shift: from neighbourhood governance as a nice idea, to neighbourhood governance as something that can actually hold weight.

For me, there are three tests.

1. The power test — is anything real being decided locally?
2. The capacity test — do people have the time, skills and support to make it work?
3. The assurance test — can the model carry money, risk, scrutiny and accountability?

Those are the tests that matter. Because if the answer is no, then what we have is not neighbourhood governance. It is neighbourhood engagement with better branding. If we want this to be meaningful, we have to be honest about where it could break — where accountability blurs, where capacity runs out, where voice is heard but does not influence, where risk sits with people who have not been supported to carry it. That is not pessimism. That is how you build something resilient.

What this moment invites

So what does this moment invite?

• Tell a sharper story. Not “we matter too,” but “this is the value we bring.”
• Widen the circle. Rootedness is not a comfort blanket. It is a responsibility.
• Use your local position with intent. You see things larger systems miss. That is not incidental. That is strategic.
• Get in earlier. Do not wait until the model has already been designed. Be in the room while the questions are still being formed.
• Bring imagination and grip in equal measure. This is not just about preserving what exists. It is about shaping what comes next.

This moment is about stepping more fully into what you already are — a vital part of how power becomes visible, trusted and meaningful in place. Because the system is changing. It is getting bigger and more complex. And that makes your role more important, not less.

So my challenge to you is whether you help shape what comes next. Because you are not just running organisations. You are helping define what local democratic leadership looks like in practice.

Go home ambitious. Go home more confident about your value. Go home clearer about the part you can play. Because if power in place is to mean anything, it has to be felt in communities, seen in decisions, and built through relationships.