In locking horns with the chairman of the Local Government Boundary Commission the members of Birmingham City Council may have bitten off more than they can chew.
Ever since the boundary review was announced in the fallout from the Kerslake report there have been grumbles coming from Birmingham Council House.
Sir Bob Kerslake not only decided something needed to change, he rather helpfully suggested they move to all-out elections every four years – to strengthen continuity and leadership – and have 100 councillors representing 100 single-member wards.
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As a statement of intent it attracted the ire of councillors who, to be fair, are hardly likely to argue they have enough slack in the system to do the same work with 20 fewer of them.
This has now formed the starting point for the review. The all-out election in 2018 is already guaranteed by Parliament so it is essentially a review of numbers and geography.
Local Government Boundary Commission chairman Max Caller has decades of experience in local government – he rose to the job of executive of Barnet council, before, in 2000, being sent to turn round the basket case authority of Hackney – which he duly did. He performed a similar role in equally troubled Haringay before winding up at the Local Government Boundary Commission eight years ago.
His other job at the moment is as part of a Government team which has recently intervened in troubled Tower Hamlets – sent into hostile waters by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles to take over certain financial affairs of the borough, following claims of mismanagement and cronyism by the controversial administration of mayor Lutfur Rahman.
He is well used to town hall politics, bluster and bureaucracy.
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A polite but firm man, he described meetings with the three party leaders, Sir Albert Bore, Robert Alden and Paul Tilsely and chief executive Mark Rogers as ‘courteous’. We know they told him the council needed the full 120 members to be effective.
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“One well-defined piece of evidence will outweigh any number of resolutions of the council or petitions which just say ‘no’,” he said.
He rightly added that the simple arithmetic of councillors per head of population is not a measure of effectiveness nor efficiency. That argument only leads to bloated institutions.
Instead the question is put as how many are needed to run the council – the Cabinet executive, the regulatory roles of planning and licensing, the civic functions of the Lord Mayor and the scrutiny function.
Word is the number of city wide scrutiny committees, the council’s official watchdog bodies, are likely to be cut from nine down to five under the ongoing constitutional review set up following Kerslake.
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Mr Caller said a key consideration is the effective running of the main decision-making body – the monthly meeting of the full council. Councillors had better hope he did not tune in to this month’s protracted budget meeting – where the insults were flying and everything was everyone else’s fault.
And it is difficult to see how this would be any more or less effective with 20 fewer councillors filling the benches.
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may provide some sense of focus for politicians in our city.
Councillors and politicians will instantly have more time as they won’t be canvassing and campaigning three years out of every four. It will also mean less of the annual selection squabbling and smearing which blight the city’s safer seats. (A favourite theory is that given the lack of credible opposition in safe seats, the main party turns on itself out of boredom). And while it would not automatically end the prospect of annual leadership challenges for Sir Albert Bore and the opposition group leaders, the lack of churn among councillors would lessen that prospect – this is the continuity of leadership that Sir Bob Kerslake wanted.
But crucially, it will make the council election one of the most important in the country during 2018. Two years into a new Government, the honeymoon period over, the prize of taking control of Britain’s largest local authority, or stopping the dominant party keeping it, will be irresistible. The area will be flooded with political big hitters and may well be billed as a mid-term referendum on the new Government.
So when councillors meet after the May elections they will likely be asked to consider who they see leading them into that vital election – and will any of the current crop pass muster?