A significant number of my colleagues presume I am mad for having a second job as a Councillor. This number has grown significantly since I announced a third job – that of prospective parliamentary candidate. By 7^th May, I may well have joined them in that opinion.

There are days, greater in number and closer together at the moment, when I wish I could just crumple into the sofa and watch Eastenders of an evening. Sadly though, there’s canvassing to be done, and my group leader won’t let me rest until I have single-handedly accomplished Nick Clegg’s Million Door Challenge. I am truly worried when I find it difficult to get to sleep without the rhythmic pounding of the leaflet folding machine to comfort me. I went to give blood the other day and they turned me away because it was 20% Focus ink.

Amongst all the contact with voters I am currently enjoying, I was reminded the other day that unfortunately not all political parties are as up for keeping in touch with voters as I know that we Lib Dems are. I thought it would be an idea to belatedly join the Twitter revolution and start commentating on Council meetings in my home borough. It made me feel less guilty for being sat in them in the first place rather than out knocking on doors or delivering leaflets. Sadly, my attempts at dragging the Council kicking and screaming towards the age of instant communications was met with stern disapproval, and my activities were promptly banned by the ruling Conservatives. If only I’d taken up fox hunting, they’d have been all in favour...

I don’t know if their response to my Twittering was because my tweets weren’t entirely complimentary to them and their non-dom-funded, tax-grabbing, service-cutting ways, or just because I thought of it before any of them did. But whatever the reason, they have made a mistake, in my view.

In the wake of the expenses scandal, this election sees voters and vote-seekers further apart and more out of touch than ever before. Twitter is a way to address that. It isn’t a panacea – in fact I think it’s a poor man’s Facebook and isn’t a patch on a blog. But it’s the only thing that gives real-time commentary on political events, and tweets are short and memorable enough to really hit home. Nobody will win an election using Twitter, but banning it made the Conservatives in Bury look childish and backward. Being the victim of that ban made me look modern and forward-thinking, and it got me into the papers! It was ironic that I got far more publicity through them banning my tweets than I got from the tweets themselves, despite the aim of tweeting being to get publicity!

All it takes is a few seconds to send a tweet, which is about as much spare time as most Councillor-PPCs have, especially if they’ve got jobs to boot. So here’s an idea – set up an account on Twitter and publicise it. Tweet from as many places as you can, get in the faces of the opposition as much as you can by doing it, and tell everyone about it. Don’t tweet anything silly, but add it to your arsenal of communications and see what happens. You never know your luck – they might ban you, and when the papers pick up on it the publicity means you get more time to go out and meet local people. Which, let’s face it, is a much better use of everyone’s time!

Cllr Richard Baum is Bury Councillor for St. Mary's Ward
richardbaum.mycouncillor.org.uk/
He also tweets (but not in council meetings) @richardbaum

In a previous article I started to discuss where local government will fit into a newly empowered Welsh Assembly, making laws within the ambit of the twenty fields of competence granted by the Government of Wales Act 2006.

I argued that there is a wider debate as to what structures we need to deliver services to a nation of 3 million people and in particular whether 22 local councils and seven health boards are appropriate vehicles to spend the bulk of the Assembly’s £15 billion budget.

My view then (and now) was that we most probably need bigger and fewer Councils but that the main debate should be around the democratisation and accountability of service delivery as much as its efficiency. In contrast, the Welsh Government’s agenda is becoming much clearer as we approach the next set of Assembly elections.

My concern is that in Labour and Plaid Cymru we have two very centralising parties whose objective is to emasculate local government.  Already, we have heard calls for social services and education to be taken off local councils, whilst the intentions of other parties towards reorganisation remain secret. Ministers are seeking or have acquired legislative competence over the governance arrangements of schools and also over many new aspects of local councils but are not saying what they will do with it.

In fact there seems to be a cross-party consensus that there will be a reorganisation of local government in Wales after the 2011 Welsh General Election, the problem is that nobody wants to talk about it until then and the chances of any coherence emerging from any of the other parties as to how they see the future structure of local government is negligible.

Motives are particularly important in this process. Everybody acknowledges that having 22 Councils means that a number are too small to achieve economies of scale and that there needs to be some reform to address this. However, there is no consensus on what the future map of Wales should look like.

My view is that this issue needs to be addressed before the 2011 Welsh General Election not just because there is a need for a debate but also because how a party plans to reform our democratic structures goes to the heart of their vision for Wales.

Firstly, what is the role of the Welsh Government and of the Welsh Assembly? Following a successful referendum, their role is to set out policy, to make laws and to deliver that through guidance and funding decisions. It is not their role to directly deliver services, nor in my view should they seek to set up other arms-length bodies or add to the role of existing bodies by passing over to them functions currently delivered by Councils.

Secondly, how do we give people greater control over the decision-making process in their own areas? There are in fact many ways that this can be done but I would suggest that the starting point is to enable the democratically elected bodies that serve local communities, in this case the Welsh unitary authorities.

These councils should be more accountable, constituted on a scale that can deliver services efficiently and encompass a broader range of responsibilities so as to produce a more strategic and joined up approach to governance.

To achieve this I would envisage reforming local government so as to create eight or ten unitary councils elected by the single transferable vote system in multi member wards. There would be fewer Councillors, approximately a third less, making between 800-900 across Wales but in return they would be better remunerated so that they could devote a substantial amount of time to delivering and scrutinising services and acting in a more strategic way. Each Council would be run by a full time Cabinet with no more than ten Councillors in each executive body and have a number of strategic directors.

I would disband the heath boards and pass their functions to the democratically elected Councils, thus creating a single health and social care function that would eliminate duplication and waste and be accountable to local electors not the centre.

I would transfer all of post 16 education back to Councils so that they could deliver the 14 to 19 agenda as a seamless whole and incorporate the very important vocational education delivered by FE colleges into their service provision.

I would also give Councils greater strategic control of transport within their area including the power to deliver cross-modal transport solutions and a wider economic development remit. As part of this I would suggest that it should be these bigger unitary authorities who should be delivering regeneration initiatives such as Communities First on behalf of the Welsh Government, not the Government micro-managing it from the centre.

There are many other central government functions that might be better delivered by such a strategic locally elected body. That is a matter for further discussion. My purpose here is to start a debate and to get people thinking about a way forward.

I am an instinctive democrat. That means that I believe in empowering local people and giving them a chance to influence the direction of services in their own area. Democracy may have its flaws and at a local level I am sure that everybody can come up with a horror story that involves their local Council but ultimately it is for the electorate to cast the final verdict and with proportional voting that becomes much easier.

Instead of national politicians treating local government as scapegoats and indulging in playing blame games, let us find a way to work together as equals and in a way that for once delivers the sort of transparency and accountability that was promised when devolution was first voted on in 1997.

Welsh Liberal Democrat Local Government Spokesperson
peterblack.blogspot.com

I went to a recent LGIU conference where the three party local government spokespeople were parading their commitment to localism.

Ok - I'm more than a little biased and felt that the Lib Dem proposal for decentralisation, as evidenced by our record in office around the country, was the most believeable.

I asked John Denham why, after 13 years of Labour centralisation, we should start to believe his promises of more power for local councils now? All would be different if Labour get re-elected, he promised.

But what of the Conservatives? Caroline Spelman certainly talks the right way. But I fear that the Conservatives in office make her promises little more than empty words.

Here in Cornwall the Conservatives campaigned last year with a ton of leaflets pledging to freeze council tax for two years. Last week they voted to raise it by 2.9% and they have set provisional figures of 2.5% and 2.25% for the next two years.

The Conservatives in Cornwall also pledged a culture of transparency and openness. But once again their record has been fairly much the opposite. We have found out that they have a secret list of 80 primary schools which are under threat of closure (although at first they denied it existed and still refuse to let anyone see it). They also at first denied (and have now been forced to admit) that there is a list of council buildings they want to sell off. And when it came to the budget, they cut off debate after just an hour and a half with more than 15 councillors from all sides wanting to speak or ask questions.

But it is the threat to localism which really shows that Ms Spelman's words mean nothing.

A new unitary authority brought the danger of centralism with all meetings and decisions taken at County Hall in Cornwall. We were promised that this would not be the case and that local community networks would flourish and One Stop Shops in every town would open into the evening and at weekends to provide full access to all council services. But the comunity networks were put on hold for 6 months and the One Stop Shops are seeing opening hours cut and services centralised.

And ask for meetings taking place close to the people they affect... Residents of Launceston who want to attend the planning meeting that will decide on a waste transfer station in the town will face a 100 mile round trip to Truro - despite there being nothing else on the agenda.

The lessons seem clear. Whatever the Conservatives may promise on local government (and their promises do sound good), on taxation, openness and localism you simply cannot believe a word they say.

Local newspapers in western Hertfordshire exploded on Friday evening with news that the county council had lost a court case. It was chasing an invoice for £335 in a dispute with a water company over a broken manhole cover. The county council had had to put up a couple of cones to warn passing motorists and apparently cones are expensive things to handle.

The water company felt that this was excessive and the council and the utility had seen each other in court. The costs of the case were awarded largely against the council and were reportedly £110,000.

Debate has raged. The Tory Administration has told me that they find my remarks to the press ‘unhelpful’ (I would have preferred ‘outrageous’ but ‘unhelpful’ will do). Anyway: not all the costs were lawyers’ fees – some were internal to the council. Furthermore, it was a test case, although mysteriously they could not identify any council that was willing to help Hertfordshire with its costs.

It is becoming apparent that this was a process that had grown its own legs. While the politicians are accountable the system is responsible. Councils employ lawyers to sue people and sue they do. We pay for their activities.

So, how much control can politicians hope to have over a council’s operations?

In some ways we have moved a long way since (in my political lifetime) a Chief Executive tried to demand that councillors wore visitors’ badges when on council premises.

We are in charge, we are told. But, as was said famously by Dorothy Thornhill: you can get your hands on the levers of power but find the levers aren’t attached to anything.

Our current budget round has uncovered a crop of curiosities. We discovered that the county council erects lampposts and then paints them once they are vertical – much more expensive than painting them while still on the ground. When quizzed, officials told us ‘they might get scratched’ if painted the common sense way.

We discovered that the pedestrian crossings are all being converted from pelicans to puffins – a distinction without a difference for most pedestrians. And the bus stop signs are being renewed because the travel help line number has changed. Heaven forefend that the council should invest in a few sheets of stickers.

These are highways and transport examples – a service that is relatively transparent. As for opaque departments like adult care and children’s services, it is anyone’s guess how many millions are being thrown away because elected members are unable to get close enough to the front line.

True: budgets are scrutinised. But the vast majority of councils budget incrementally. They start with last year as a base and then tweak the figures up or down.

The devil is in the base budget. In the tough years ahead, we will need to be asking searching questions not about growth and savings but about the areas we don’t normally look at.

Cllr Chris White is Hertfordshire County Councillor for St. Albans Central and
St. Albans City & District Councillor for Clarence
He is also a member of the ALDC Management Committee
chriswhite.mycouncillor.org.uk

This article was first published on Liberal Democrat Voice

I got my first lap-dancing related hate mail the other day. The writer (who was not anonymous) suggested that I had nothing better to do with my time and argued that I belonged in the Stasi.

One of the hazards of politics is that you occasionally take a clear public view and someone doesn’t like it. My crime was to have issued a statement in support of the new rules on sexual encounter establishments.

Since the 2003 Licensing Act, lap-dancing clubs had been subject to the same licensing regime as pubs and restaurants – in particular, there was a presumption in favour of a licence being granted and objections could only be raised on a limited range of grounds.

Residents could not object to a lap-dancing club on principle or because it was something they didn’t want in their neighbourhood. This, with the strong support of the Local Government Association, has now changed.

There are major issues for Liberals here. Do we support people being able to object to pubs on principle? Clearly not. Do we support people who might object to a pub being opened near a school? Probably not although we would not be tolerant of a pub which was keen to sell alcohol to school children.

So: on what grounds can we object to lap-dancing? Because it involves exploitation? The evidence for this is doubtful. And if we are worried about exploitation we should deal with that rather than intervene in adult entertainment, freely entered into by both performer and consumer. Rules to protect performers are possibly overdue although many of the well-known names are meticulous.

Perhaps we could object because it objectifies women? All sorts of things do that, from top shelf magazines to channels freely available on cable and satellite. We also live in a culture that objectifies and commodifies men – a fact that marketing people around footballers and male models have not been slow to grasp. Most Liberals would balk at banning all such materials.

What about crime? There is usually a suggestion that these establishments are associated somehow with serious crime and prostitution but the evidence is again poor. The clientele tend in fact to be of little interest to the police compared with the assorted drunks and hoorays they have to cope with on a Saturday night.

So we are left with the niceness test. Some people (possibly a majority of women) find these clubs distasteful and don’t want them near their homes or children. Or possibly husbands.

This sort of objection is one ultimately of planning. As such it is arguably fair enough.

But it is a fine line and you can see why there are those who find the new rules illiberal.

Cllr Chris White is Hertfordshire County Councillor for St. Albans Central and
St. Albans City & District Councillor for Clarence
He is also a member of the ALDC Management Committee
chriswhite.mycouncillor.org.uk

This article was first published on Liberal Democrat Voice