All or Nothing – Changing the Electoral Shape of Sheffield.

On Thursday 14th April, the above was the title for my first outing in this year's Festival of Debate. Following changes to the ward boundaries in Sheffield, we will have an ‘all out’ election in May where all councillors will be up for re-election. This is the ideal time to consider the impact of ‘all out’ and whether this is a change that should become permanent. These are my own thoughts on the evening.

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The panel and audience for the debate heard a presentation from James Henderson, in charge of all things electoral as a Director in the City Council. He outlined for us the reasons behind the Boundary Commission becoming involved in our ward and electoral issues and the changes they made to our electoral geography. Essentially some of our ward demographics were out of balance. Too many people in some wards and too few in others, therefore the people are not equally represented by the elected Councillors.

The changes now give us a balanced ward structure but some of us, me included, will have to get used to a new ward name and a new set of Councillors. James also briefly outlined the difference between election by thirds, what we do now, with an election 3 years out of 4 and All Out elections, what we will do this year, 1 election every 4 years.

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The rest of the panel were; Myself as Chair & Question Master. Cllr Terry Fox (Labour, Manor Castle) Cabinet Member for Environment & Transport. Vicky Seddon, Co-ordinator of Sheffield for Democracy & Edward Molloy, Nexus Officer for the Electoral Reform Society.

At the start, I have to admit to being disappointed by the audience turnout of about 20 but they were all engaged and interested in the subject so the debate did not suffer in that regard. The panellists were allowed an initial period to state their current position on the boundary changes and the option of all out elections. We then moved straight in to the audience questions.

I don't plan to try and repeat the debate word for word but to simply leave you with my impression of the evening as a whole.

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Terry Fox was not, currently in favour of all out elections and the main reasons appeared to be that elections by thirds allowed the voters to pass comment on the performance of their councillors on an annual basis, holding them to account better. It also leads to more stable majority administrations as opposed to unstable hung or coalition councils.

Vicky Seddon was very much in favour of all out elections, the main reasons being effectiveness, with councillors able to work on the basis of a four year stable mandate to enact policy rather than constantly electioneering. Efficiency, with council being able to utilise the whole of the years in-between elections for business, rather than losing a month or more to election campaigning rather than council business. Cost savings, all out elections would save £150,000 a year, with extra savings coming from the efficiency already mentioned.

Edward Molloy, concentrated on the current crisis in democracy over voter engagement and reasoned that fewer local elections generate better turnouts and that people feel their vote counts more if an election has the potential of changing the administration, which rarely happens in elections by thirds.

So the three viewpoints seemed to come down to, the stability of the status quo, the improved effectiveness & efficiency of the Council and the fairness of the electoral process and making votes count.

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The questions from the audience led us around these opinions and into areas about devolution, the complexity of the electoral system and why people are less engaged than ever? (voter turnout in local elections is generally less than 40% and getting worse) whether with central government making so many decisions for local government, they really had any power left?

An interesting point that came out early from both Vicky and Edward was concerning the potential for further devolution enabling councils to choose not only electoral periods but also whether to adopt PR as is now the norm in Scotland for local councils. Terry was not wholly against the idea, provided it also brought in mandatory voting to ensure fair distribution of votes. There was still concern expressed about weak or coalition governance though that hasn't proved the case in Scotland with a majority national government elected on a PR basis.

It also became apparent that even some members of this engaged audience were unclear on why the city used the elections by thirds system, what the alternatives were and were in some ways confused by the complexity of elections and options currently being used. Local elections are different to general elections, PCC elections and probably different to upcoming Regional Mayor elections.

After quite a long time discussing the various matters that arose I finally called for a straw poll of the audience, asking, do you think all out elections would be better for local democracy? 10 people or 50% voted yes. Asked whether they felt it would make local democracy worse, there were no votes supporting that opinion.

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My own conclusion? This conversation needs to be had in greater depth within and without the council. The current system is broken with low turnouts and councillors being elected by around 1 in 5 of their voters.

Council operates on a permanent electioneering basis, impeding medium to long term planning and exacerbating the adversarial nature of council business meetings.

The strong leader & cabinet model means ordinary councillors can be seen as powerless and impotent (even amongst themselves) whilst stable 4 year election cycles would help those involved in committee work to better contribute to those roles.

Savings are, at the moment, never to be sniffed at and such savings could be used to improve other areas of democratic deficit around public engagement, such as webcasting and local public meetings.

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Overall therefore, I believe an All Out election cycle would improve democracy locally and the better administration of council business. Further benefits may still be identified as a result of current and future devolution but the conversation must be had now to inform future discussions on the type of devolution we want.

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My thanks to my partner organisations in this event, Opus Independents for their support in organising the Festival of Debate and to Sheffield City Council for organising and staffing what will probably be the most upmarket venue we will be using in this spring season. Thanks also to the panellists and audience for making the event so worthwhile.

21st October 2013 - Sheffield City Council, Locality Management General Briefing, by Nigel Slack

This was a meeting of invited members of the voluntary sector in order to brief them on the new arrangements for 'Locality management' that will replace the now abandoned 'Community Assembly Meetings'. I presume that I was invited, as an individual, because there is to be no public meeting as such.

The meeting was opened by Councillor Geoff Smith (Labour) who gave a welcome statement and relayed the apologies of Councillor Mazher Iqbal (Cabinet Member for Communities and Inclusion) who had lead the development of the new arrangements. He then introduced Sharon Squires (Director, Sheffield First Partnership). She helped the City Council in developing the model for the new arrangements, Local Area Partnerships. She explained that the success of LAP's would be about building strong and resilient communities that can cope with the huge changes that are being thrust upon them by the current austerity measures. She also emphasised that Locality Management was a part of the framework of the solution but not all of it.

The meeting was then presented with a slide show of the new arrangements by Martin Hughes (Locality Manager) who discussed how the VCF sector (Voluntary, Charity, Faith) could get involved. The new model has four key principles. Councillors as community leaders, Prioritise resources to areas of greatest need, Develop effective partnership working, and Enable communities to help themselves.

Each Ward will have a lead Councillor drawn from the three that represent each ward, Central Ward will be represented by Councillor Rob Murphy (Green). They will represent the ward to the LAP's who will have a small discretionary amount of money to spend on priorities that the four wards in each LAP agree on. These LAP's are lead by a Chair who is a Councillor, for Central it is Councillor Neale Gibson (Labour) but we are told that this partnership is not a decision making body and is not formally constituted.

At the end of the presentation there was an opportunity for questions. There were a number of questions on some of the ways in which the VCF sector can get it's voice heard in the larger arena, as many of them connect over the ward and area boundaries. I asked a particular question about the use of IMD (Index of Multiple Deprivation) for defining the levels of the 'Ward Pots' or discretionary funds for each ward. I referred to a recent meeting of the Sheffield Executive Board that received a presentation on Community Resilience and Wellbeing from the Young Foundation and discussed the need to reach beyond the stats of IMD in measuring the health of a community. I asked whether other measures would be used. The response was that IMD would be used for now but others would 'probably' be added as time went on.

There were then many comments and questions about the public oversight of the LAP's and the lack of formal structure for the public attendance at LAP meetings. The general response was to the effect that there is no formal structure to the meetings and they would generally not be open to to the public as it is not a formally constituted body. I therefore pushed them on the comments of the 'Fairness Commission' that fairness should not only be done but be seen to be done.

With the number of comments the organisers finally agreed that they would take back the comments and see what could be done to improve levels of trust in the structure and arrangements. We will see whether this comes to anything or whether, like so often, it was just to placate the meeting.


Cabinet Report on the replacement of Community Assemblies

11th September 2013. Sheffield Executive Board Meeting. By Nigel Slack.

Today I went to my first ever meeting of the Sheffield Executive Board.  This impressive sounding organisation was set up “…to provide leadership within the city on issues of city-wide significance, and to advocate for Sheffield collectively to Government, the European Union and other national and international forums”.

The Board consists of “..leaders from across the private, public, voluntary, community and faith sectors in Sheffield”.  This, at least, is according to their own website.

http://www.sheffieldfirst.com/the-partnership/sheffield-executive-board.html

The aim of the body is, essentially, to act first as a think tank for new ideas, policies and strategies for the city.  To then develop these potential policies into something workable, that can be supported by all the ‘partner’ organisations and finally to promote the finished product to the city as a whole and to the wider world.

Members include representatives from the City Council, Both Universities and Sheffield College, the NHS, Fire Service, Police, the Voluntary Sector, Sheffield Cathedral and Private Enterprise bodies.  Personally, I am concerned that the so called ‘faith sector’ is represented only in it’s Christian mainstream form.  No Islamic representatives, no Jewish representatives and none from the smaller Christian faiths.

This was my first visit to this meeting because, although their meetings are open to the public, they are not well promoted unless you visit the website.  Add to that the fact that the meeting had a last minute change of venue so that Leslie and I did not arrive until twenty minutes or so into the meeting.  We were, apparently the first members of the public to ever make it to a meeting and therefore caused some uncertainty but were welcomed and seated at the back of the room.

The item we arrived in the middle of was a presentation by ‘The Young Foundation’ concerning resilience and wellbeing in communities.  The research methodology looked interesting, although I didn’t catch it all, as it avoided using the Index of Multiple Deprivation statistics (IMD) in favour of drawing together evidence from a range of sources to create their picture of a community’s resilience and wellbeing. The illustrations given suggest an ability to drill down into communities and neighbourhoods better than the IMD data can.

http://www.youngfoundation.org/

The strategies for affecting a community’s resilience and wellbeing were based on the use of CBT (Conditional Behavioural Therapy) and Positive Psychology and they were delivered through community projects and volunteers.  This bothered me somewhat.  My experience of CBT is that it can work for some people some of the time for a short time.  Positive Psychology, on the other hand, whilst at the foreront of current practice, is facing a rising tide of challenges from academics and authors in the field. My concern therefore, is what happens to those for whom CBT does not work or who are not part of a community group?


Following the presentation there was some discussion in groups and then in general about the subject. Interestingly, during this, one of the NHS representatives present commented on the need for these types of strategies to have long term commitment to ensure the benefits that might accrue remained.  The result of the discussions was that the ideas were interesting and might be a way forward, helping communities become more resilient to the drastic changes being forged by the austerity measures being employed by the Government.


The second item in this ‘open’ session of the meeting was a discussion about the partnership working that would be happening with the redesign of the community assembly approach to local democracy.  This discussed the new structure somewhat and the fact emerged, from one of the newly appointed chairs of the Local Area Partnerships, as they ate currently called, that we would all have to get used to the fact that the Council is being forced to withdraw from offering many of the services they have traditionally fulfilled for citizens of the city.


This is both worrying and challenging, since many of the services from which they are withdrawing directly affect the most vulnerable in the city.  The question was left with the ‘partners’ to consider what they could offer in this new landscape to potentially fill the gap or redress the lack of services in these austerity years.


At the end of this discussion the guests that would not normally have been at the meeting left and we, as members of the public were also asked to leave.  The meeting was entering its ‘closed’ period where apparently they discuss items of ‘private business’. This, as you might imagine, does not sit well with me as someone who campaigns about transparency and openness in public business and decision-making.  I will therefore be making enquiries as to what sort of business this clearly influential organisation discusses behind closed doors.


Next meeting; Wednesday 9th October 2013, venue to be advised.