This is the first in a series of five blogs on political culture and scrutiny. Over the course of the next couple of months we will explore what political culture is, what its practical implications are and how members and officers at a local level can work together to identify deficiencies in how people act and behave to promote a more positive and productive approach to politics and local democracy at a local level. Some of this work intersects closely with work that the LGA has been doing on civility in public and political life – and it also links ...
What do you do if not enough councillors turn up to a meeting for it to be quorate? Until recently this was perhaps a rather arcane point of procedure. Inquoracy in ordinary council meetings is really very unusual. But the advent of scrutiny at combined authority level has thrown the issue into the spotlight. This is because quoracy requirements for combined authority scrutiny are set out in legislation. They place the bar significantly higher than the “minimum numbers” usually used in local authorities. This is for good reason – when it happens scrutiny across a whole area probably ought to ...
A #notwestminster and CfGS initiativeWhat is this?#notwestminster brings (or bring, if you consider them to be a plural) people together to create and share new ideas for doing local democracy. You can find out more about it, or them, here .The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny is a charity which does work on public sector governance, mainly in local government. We get an annual grant from the Local Government Association for providing advice, guidance and support to local councils. This year, following discussion from the LGA, we are focusing our efforts on helping to promote and deliver on the ...
Sometimes it’s tempting to think that the phrase “local democracy” is an oxymoron. Lots of it isn’t especially local in nature – so much of what local government can and can’t do being prescribed by government, even with the onset of English devolution.And lots of it doesn’t feel especially democratic either. Most people’s interaction with local government is limited to voting (and, in fact, a majority don’t even do that) or transactional issues – booking a bulky waste collection, organising the admission to school of a child or paying rent to a local authority landlord. Particularly assiduous or civic-minded ...
In a couple of Saturdays’ time an event called #notwestminster is happening. A group of people who are interested in local democracy will be getting together to talk about how it might be made more local and more democratic.I didn’t attend the inaugural #notwestminster last year, but I heard jolly good things about it so not only do I have a ticket booked, I’ve also ended up volunteering to run a workshop. This blogpost is in part an attempt to rationalise in my own mind what I might cover (taking the lead from Nick Booth).I want my workshop ...
Last Friday I was a local democracy maker.The Local Democracy Maker Day is a fringe event held the day before the ever popular, and never-not-unhashtagged #localgovcamp (which is a sort of self-assembly conference and meetup for local government types). The purpose of the maker day is to chew over some big challenges in local democracy and to work towards some relatively straightforward solutions.The emphasis was on technology as a means to enhance local democracy but there was more to the day than just this. I participated in a group looking at the third challenge, on “digestible democracy” - ...