Locked Away in a Cabinet

Those with narrow or slanted views of politics are just as susceptible to reaching incorrect conclusions as anyone else making the same kind of error.

Take this look at Medway Council's democracy, which is probably well-intentioned but reaches the wrong conclusion and indeed falls into the trap that was set  almost fifteen years ago for those who have issues with the way the majority of councils are run nowadays. This is to blame the make-up of the elected Council for any perceived lack of local democracy, thereby missing the actual cause and maintaining the status quo.

The real culprit for any lack of local democracy is the Cabinet-and-scrutiny political system that was introduced and indeed enforced onto the majority of Councils by the then Labour government back in 2001. I know: I was there...

I have said it before, and have known it all along: although it was easy enough to 'sell' to a compliant Labour government (a Conservative one would probably have seen through the ruse and not implemented it), the real – and only – purpose of the Cabinet system was to give Whitehall 'mandarins' more-or-less complete control over the local agenda.

The first thing the change did was to take voting rights on most policy matters away from all Council members who were not in the Cabinet – even the mayor lost those rights. In Medway Council, with (in those days) eighty members and a ten-strong Cabinet – the maximum number allowed, by the way – this meant that seven-eighths of councillors lost those voting rights overnight, on 1 October 2001. I was one of those seventy.

Even items of business that had to be ratified by the Full Council had by then already been discussed, debated and effectively decided by the Cabinet – and it is very difficult to come along after the event and try to oppose them. Indeed, the 'call-in to Council' facility for any Cabinet decision was very rarely applied by the opposition. We kept a record, which I have on file here...

Now, in the only model of the (limited) options offered, this meant the Council Leader chose his own Cabinet. This made sense, because in those days the ruling group had only 38 members, and the opposition – who had nearly always ganged-up to oppose them – had 42. Therefore, had they been given the opportunity to choose the rest of the Cabinet, they'd have stuffed it with their own members and nothing would ever have been approved – everything the Leader proposed would have been opposed. The council would simply have stopped and nothing new would have gone ahead.

If there were any doubt of that having happened given the chance, I witnessed that motivation in operation in every situation where the opposition members could gain their own political advantage from doing so. For example, they voted all the Scrutiny and other committee chairmanships (and the vice-chairmen) for their members, with none at all from the ruling group.

As if that wasn't bad enough in terms of local democracy (although I had no serious issues with it personally, adapting to suit), those opposition chairmen abused their positions in several ways – too long to go into here, though I have covered them in the past, including on my old Councillor website – manipulating as much as they could to suit their own party's ends.

It is to be noted that, when the Scrutiny Committee chairing changed hands to the ruling group, ALL those bad practices ended. The Labour spokesmen boycotted their invitations to pre-meeting briefings and the like, in a sulk, whereas others (Lib Dems and Independents) were at least more concerned with doing their elected jobs than everything having to be geared to their party's own interests.

This of course all helps to show that it is not the specific party that is the problem: it makes little if any difference – with the possible exception of Labour, but that is just in their nature. It is the way the system is designed that allows and (I often think) encourages such practices.

The result is the intended (by the mandarins) centrally-dictated Cabinet agendas, which if you look have only token localism and are essentially the same nationwide. Even the format and content of what goes into all those Plans and Strategies is dictated by Whitehall, while contract letting hardly requires the full Cabinet to decide.

What is the point in paying Portfolio Holders five-figure salaries if they can't even make such decisions themselves, and have to hide behind 'we work as a team' style excuses? There is nothing in a typical Cabinet agenda that is truly from and for the people of the area, only time-wasting dross!

Eric Pickles has offered councils the opportunity to scrap the Cabinet-and-Scrutiny structure, allowing councils to keep any of the benefits (such as summoning and questioning rights of various officials from the likes of the emergency services and health bodies) in the process.

Before this was passed in Parliament, I – and I alone – asked the question at a meeting of the full Medway Council whether they would be taking up this offer. The response I received was not only non-committal, it was sufficiently hostile in tone to tell me that they were not interested in pursuing this – and indeed they haven't done so.

Those in charge are far too comfortable to change now: another trap that was planned from the outset, but that only a few of us realised right from the start. They won't change unless this optional reversal becomes a legal requirement – but, unlike Labour, Conservatives aren't naturally inclined toward imposition unless it is genuinely necessary, so that is unlikely ever to happen.

Thus we end up with an ongoing fairly rigid structure that inevitably (seemingly unavoidably) produces the effects the linked piece points out in its simplistic analysis, with potential agitators wasting their efforts pointing at the wrong culprits. Meanwhile, Sir Humphrey dines with Sir Arnold to report that everything is still going according to plan, and their own positions remain unassailable.

Note that the moral of this story is that only those of us with the insight and maturity to at least tackle the underlying problems that now exist within local democracy have managed to get something concrete on the public record that could prove valuable in what might lie ahead. The Sir Humphrey types continue to dismiss the others as gullible sheep...

Dr Caligari's Council Cabinet

Very few people – especially those with any truly valid reason for disliking how their local council is run politically (apart from mere party preferences) – seem to have any idea why the 'Cabinet-plus-Scrutiny' model was imposed on councils above a certain size a dozen or so years ago.

The clues were there from the outset (as they usually are, to the more perceptive among us), though I waited for events to play out in order to have solid evidence rather than supposition and logical deduction alone.

The single biggest clue was that it was devised by Whitehall 'mandarins' and implemented ('sold') through a Labour government. Immediately this should get anyone's mental alarm bells ringing. Secondly, the Cabinet agenda everywhere was required to include a number of strategies and plans that were fevised by, and tightly constrained in format and content by – yes, you probably guessed it: Whitehall.

We probably all realise that Civil Service Mandarins' greatest ambition in life is to expand their empires and extend their control over our country, and the only way left by then was to take over local democracy, by proxy in order to preserve the appearance of what is called 'localism'.

Thus a scheme was devised by senior Civil Servants that would be easy to get a Labour government to implement, via the right 'sales pitch', but which in reality meant that a huge amount of the local policy agenda would be dictated far more closely by themselves. That's why, if you look down any Cabinet agenda for any council in the country, this fact will shout out to you after just a few such scans. It is glaringly obvious.
In practice, what all this has meant was that most (all but nine or ten) of a council's elected members immediately lost their policy voting rights on most topics, these now falling under the direct and exclusive control of the Cabinet. Some matters have to go to the Full Council to finally decide, but only after the Cabinet has already had first dibs at debate (a one-party debate at that) and it is their documentation that goes to Council... although the entirely powerless Scrutiny Committees (made up of the non-cabinet councillors) can also make 'recommendations'.

Here in Medway, the only 'local' agenda items for Cabinet are the long-standing Recruitment Freeze (a nod-through every time) and contract awards – which do not need to come to Cabinet. If you're paying a portfolio holder that much, and with a huge officer corps behind that person as well, there is really no need to make those decisions as 'Cabinet acting collectively'. A competent portfolio holder will almost always be able to handle that directly. It's not as if there is even any public interest in those agenda items...

Just like the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the elected members that form local council cabinets are, in reality, under the control of another: in this case, Whitehall – though I suspect that many of them haven't even now, after all these years, cottoned onto this fact. If they have, they are complicit in the deceit and are not serving their electorate, however much they might try to deceive themselves that they are, because of, er, this and that (I'm sure they could pluck such things out of the air if challenged). Those ones are not fit to hold public office, ever. The others are too gullible to be entrusted with such office either – but all of that is for the electorate to decide, of course, when they come up for re-election.

Thus is was refreshing when the change of national government resulted in Eric Pickles offering councils the opportunity to revert to the former Service Committee structure instead of Cabinet-plus-Scrutiny, but without having to scrap any genuine benefits that the new system had brought (there have been a few, though more minor than they were trumpeted at the time they were introduced).

I asked a 'public question' at our local council (Medway) at the time this was being prepared at national level, asking if Medway would take up this offer once it was made. As I had expected, I received an evasive and (frankly) arrogant response – and the proof of the pudding is that (surprise, surprise!) they have not done so.

This has singularly resulted in an unstoppable trend that I had noticed over the years since the system was introduced in October 2001, continuing and worsening further. That is the disconnect between the public and their elected representatives, as it is portfolio holders who are invariably addressed by public questions, and they really don't handle it very well.

Now, a lot of what goes on is (predictably!) party political manipulation and dominance of the public questions item on the Council agenda – but even so there are glaringly obvious bad practices by most portfolio holders. I find it all acutely embarrassing – not because they are bad people, they really aren't, but because they have drifting further away from the public-at-large for so long that it has become all too easy for their opponents to label them 'out of touch' and gain a huge amount of (undeserved) political capital as a result.

The only way, in the whole of creation, that this trend can be halted and reversed is by scrapping the Cabinet system, and by having brand new committee chairmen who have never been portfolio holders. Frankly, there is no other way; and if the nettle isn't grasped soon it will mean that Whitehall will be able to strike the final few nails into the 'localism' coffin before very much longer, killing off actual local democracy Caligari-style, as has obviously been their intention all along.

Medway Council Cabinet Reshuffle

Not quite so much politics as public information, as the changes made to Medway's Cabinet at last night's Annual Council meeting are significant, especially the structure and portfolios, which are now as follows...


Leader - Rodney Chambers

• Democracy and governance
• Inward investment
• Regeneration
• Strategic Partnerships
• World Heritage Site Status 

Deputy Leader and Finance - Alan Jarrett

• Better for Less
• Communications and media
• Council Plan
• Council tax and business rates
• Finance
• Housing benefit
• Performance and service improvement
• (Council) Property
• Risk management
• Strategic procurement 

Adult Services - David Brake

• Community care
• Independent Safeguarding and Review Service
• Health
• Older people
• Public Health (Lead Member)
• Services for people with learning and physical disabilities
• Telecare/Telemedicare 

Children’s Services (Lead Member) - Mike O’Brien

• Children and Young People’s Plan
• Early years
• Further education
• Home to school transport
• Inclusion
• Primary and secondary education
• School services
• Special educational needs
• Specialist youth services
• Youth
• Adoption
• Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services
• Children with disabilities
• Children’s residential care
• Fostering
• Integrated Children’s Teams
• Leaving Care
• Looked After Children 

Educational Improvement - Kelly Tolhurst

• Educational improvement as directed by the Children’s Services Portfolio Holder 

Community Safety and Customer Contact - David Carr

• CCTV
• Community safety
• Community Officers
• Customer Contact
• Drugs and alcohol
• Enforcement (executive functions only)
• Environmental health
• ICT
• Legal
• Trading standards
• Travellers 

Front Line Services - Phil Filmer

• Parking
• Public transport
• Roads
• Street cleaning and waste collection/ recycling/waste disposal
• Traffic management
• Transport 

Housing and Community Services - Howard Doe

• Adult learning
• Bereavement Services
• Disabled adaptations to housing
• Events and Festivals
• Greenspaces
• Heritage
• Homeless and housing options
• Housing allocations for social housing
• Housing Strategy
• Leisure services
• Libraries and Community Hubs
• Private sector housing
• Registration
• Sporting Legacy
• The development and management of the council’s housing stock
• Theatres and arts
• Tourism
• Voluntary sector 

Strategic Development and Economic Growth - Jane Chitty

• Building and Development Control
• Community centres
• Economic development
• Europe
• Housing site allocations through the Local Development Framework
• Local Development Framework
• Planning
• Rural Strategy
• Social regeneration
• Sustainable Communities 

Note that this represents a reduction to nine members from ten – something that was done several years ago, but the Victoria Climbié case resulted in a dedicated portfolio holder (and director) for this area of work, so it later went up again.

The restructuring of children's services, though a little unclear at this stage the form it will take for the (new) Educational Improvement position, is timely and responds to concerns within the community and at OFSTED.

This really needed a change from the former education/children portfolio holders so as to avoid unintentional continuity rather than a fresh approach, and anyone who has been in essentially the same job for a number of years tends to go a bit stale anyway. I well recall from my own days in the Civil Service that, no matter how good I became at any one job, eventually it was always better to move on and face new challenges.

In the above cases, political opponents (and local media) will no doubt make much more of it than is really there, but such is their customary practice. I see it as good management, and I think the coming few years will show this quite clearly.

It is also good to have two female members of the Cabinet; though this is still down on the days when we had then Cllrs Janice Bamber, Jane Chitty, Angela Prodger and Wendy Purdy making a more gender-balanced Cabinet – not that it matters, as fitting the right person to each job is what really counts, but I thought I should be the first to mention it, in case others try to make something out of that as well!