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

37. Co-production Trusts

In this post I want to argue for an approach to community programmes very different to the approach I've been used to.

Specifically I want to suggest that, instead of setting up community regeneration partnerships or projects that look to fix something about a community, we should instead be looking to set up organisations that look to fix the way services are provided to that community.

We Need to Talk About Community Regeneration

When we use the term ‘community regeneration’ we are immediately implying that the problem is with ‘the community’ and that it is ‘the community’ that needs to be fixed. The term is already taking our attention away from society as whole and ‘system wide’ issues such as inequality.

As a consequence interventions will often be special activities that are only applied to that community such as partnership boards, community centres, capacity building projects etc etc. While I’m sure these things are all valuable in their own right, what the Marmot Review tells us is that, if we are serious about tackling inequality, then we need to be thinking about proportionate universalism, not interventions that focus only on the most deprived.

It is also worth pointing out that the effectiveness of community regeneration programmes is highly questionable. As Alasdair Rae argues, Governments have not been good at learning from research. If they were it might help them to locate area based programmes much more effectively in broader social programmes. As a result objectives have often not been met.

The Co-Production Deficit

For me co-production means that all public services depend on the contribution of both the service provider and on the contribution of the public. It is the relationship between provider and public which determines the extent to which the assets of both are utilised and the subsequent effectiveness of the service in question. If you start from this perspective it comes as no surprise that services ‘delivered’ equally to all can nevertheless result in an inequality of outcome. What you get is a co-production deficit because some people are able to get more out of services than others.

Hastings and Mathews have been doing some really interesting research that highlights the various ways in which the middle classes are able to reap the benefits of services more efficiently than the working classes through, for example, joining groups such as parent teacher associations, complaining effectively and interacting with bureaucrats, teachers, doctors etc who are usually middle class themselves.

On the other side of the coin I was really struck by this piece by Clare Galloway. It illustrates perfectly what happens when the relationships between providers and public break down. More than that it shows how an inflexible and judgemental service delivery culture can actively work against effective co-production by stifling attempts to make things better. There is also a well made point in this piece about people being expected to work as unpaid volunteers to sort out community ‘problems’; work that we normally expect paid professionals to do.

Co-production Trusts

My argument is that, instead of regeneration partnerships, we need co-production trusts; organisations that seek to reduce the co-production deficit by working on behalf of deprived areas so that they can see the same service benefits as middle class areas, that they can achieve equality of outcomes. Such bodies would be consistent with proportionate universalism and would contribute to system wide approaches.

I have three suggestions about what co-production trusts might do in practice.

1. Advocacy

The trust would act as a lobbying agency on behalf of the community, campaigning for equality of outcomes and higher levels of service where this is needed, ensuring that policy makers are fully aware of the community and its needs. Making sure that environmental services are targeted in the right way, getting involved in the planning process and arguing for accessible facilities. As with any advocacy, this work would be done by specialists who work to the instruction of their clients; the community.

2. Referrals

The trust would act as a ‘dating agency’ for referrals. Again, acting only with the permission of those affected, arranging appointments and even attending alongside if that is something people wanted. More generally the trust would be able to identify potentially useful services and share this with the community. This all about ensuring that services are getting to where they are needed and to where they can have the most impact.

3. Changing Relationships

The trust would act as ‘marriage guidance counsellor’, seeking to improve the overall relationship between providers and public. In part this would be about awareness raising and training for public workers (something Hastings and Mathews have suggested), in part this might be about offering advice to residents about how to get the most out of their services. This might also be a form of mediation; getting people together to explore how things might work differently.

As organisations these trusts should be democratically connected to the communities that they are working for including being properly linked to local politicians at all levels. 

The one bit of this I’m sure isn’t right is the name 'co-production trusts' - lets just call them something else when we are out in the real world...

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/artefatica/4630521467/