71. Mini Mayors

Mini mayors are local councillors with added status and recognition.  More than simply the community’s representative on the Council they are the focus for community governance.  Many councillors already act informally as mini mayors – the idea here is that this role could be formalised and given legal weight.

Mini mayor wins award for services to community governance

I was at a Welsh Government seminar this week on Reforming Local Government.  One of the questions was around the role local councillors and how it might develop. A couple of issues came out of this:

• Many back bench councillors are disillusioned and feel they cannot make a difference.  Young councillors in particular have come into local government full of expectation but find that they are excluded from council wide decision making.
• Sub local governance, in other words the patchwork of community and town councils, community regeneration partnerships, voluntary groups, school governing bodies etc etc, is, democratically speaking, a mess.  There is nothing that formally links everything.
• Councillors are in a great position to tie all this together. They are already on many of these bodies, as school governors, on management committees of community centres and involved with voluntary groups.  Many councillors already wear two hats – they serve on local authorities and on their community and town councils.

As well as their traditional councillor role this means they would automatically:

• Have a seat on the community or town council (no need to be elected)
• Be a governor on all the schools in their patch
• Sit on the management committee or board of any community initiatives in their areas

This would ensure that the local councillor not only had influence in all of these bodies but was able to join things up locally.  The presence of an elected councillor on all of these bodies would also ensure added democratic legitimacy for them.  At the same time the mini mayor would be a stronger position to represent the views of the community to the Council and there would also be more scope for mini mayors to facilitate public engagement in their areas through area forums or similar initiatives.

When people vote for their councillor now, they are electing someone to represent them on the Council and various committees.  Would it make a difference to turnout if people knew that the councillor they were electing would also be automatically be involved in a number of other community bodies?  Would it improve the accountability of those bodies if the mini mayor for the area gave them all a public and accessible face?

Couple of issues.  The first is, to make this work, there would probably need to be only single councillor wards.  Second, and most important there would need to be enough councillors to ensure that mini mayors are not spread too thin.  One the plus side, supporting a network of mini mayors could be an important counter balance to the increasing remoteness of our increasingly large local councils.

UPDATE:  A reality check from Councillor Simon Cooke and plenty more food for thought in this post.  In it Simon says:

Much though I see merit in the mini-mayor idea, it is a reminder that the 2000 Local Government Act emasculated local councillors and created the situation where many ended up flapping around wondering what their role and purpose might be.... What we need to do is give those councillors the support, access and capacity to actually do that vital job of kicking down the doors of bureaucrats to ensure that the people's voice echoes round those offices as loudly as possible.

Photo: https://flic.kr/p/eYuxeZ

9. People Swarms

People swarms is a phrase used by Alan Finlayson and James Martin in their contribution to the Localopolis pamphlet. They describe:

...a 21st Century participatory politics taking place in unpredictable forms as people "swarm" together to deal with a cause or problem and then dissipate or move on to the next one.

The idea seems both simple and strange. To really understand it you have to get to grips with the working assumptions that sit beneath it. These assumptions (which come from the poststructural end of social theory) include the following ideas: 

• The world of local governance is a very complex and shifting place
• 'Power' is not something that can be found in any particular place, instead it exists in the relationships between people and organisations (an idea very much associated with the work of Foucault)
• Sovereignty does not reside in any one place, and is not the property of any specific locality or identity

All of this means that we are working in a very weird environment. According to Finlayson and Martin: 

In reality local government is just one nodal point in a complex network of interrelating elements each of different intensities and moving at different speeds. Governance is not structured, it is not static and it has no fixed or orderly lines through which power is transmitted.

Also, governance is both 'local' and 'international' and people are interested in both. Modern communications make it possible for people to belong to communities at all levels. Add to this the idea that power can be found in many different places, and we have a very difficult challenge for 'local' government if it sees its role as one of control.

The natural conclusion from all of this is that local democracy needs to be as fluid as the world it exists in.

Finlayson and Martin also reflect on the role of the local authority worker in the world of people swarms:

As initiators or managers of unpredictable forms of political organisation and action we might call them "political entrepreneurs" or "community partners". Then again we could just call them "citizens".

I was reminded of this idea when reading this post from Carl Haggerty this week. He comes to a similar place although from an different angle.

 

Haggerty argues that technological change, financial pressures and a push for more citizen involvement will drive us in any case towards this fluid form of local governance. Local government itself will itself be more of a concept than a real institution. He says: 

So we could get to a situation ...where the only aspect of local government which is truly local is the actual service delivery and decision making. The organisation behind it all could well be a mix of local, regional, national and cloud based services all supporting an individual worker (who may not actually be employed by the council) to deliver a service to someone in a community.

Like Finlayson and Martin, Haggerty's vision has only one constant - the people at the heart of local governance. People that will be able to swarm around the policy issues that interest and inspire them.  People served by a fluid mix of local, national and international support systems.