Examination of Witnesses (Questions 61
- 79)
TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 1999
VIVIEN LOWNDES,
STEPHEN LEACH
and LAWRENCE PRATCHETT.
Chairman
61. We have not had quite the effortless start
to this session that we had hoped to have and I am sorry that
it seems that this projection facility, splendid though it is,
and it is here to be admired, does not work because we have not
got the bits for it at the moment, despite assurances that we
would have them, so I am sorry about that, but I gather you can
give us pieces of paper that we can refer to as we go along. That
is my way of saying welcome to all of you. Vivien Lowndes, we
have met already, but it is nice to see you formally again. Steve
Leach, welcome, and Lawrence Pratchett, welcome. I do not know
how you are going to do this, but we are in your hands and you
are going to teach us something.
(Vivien Lowndes) Do Members of the Committee
have copies of the document?
62. Yes.
(Vivien Lowndes) Well, thank you very
much. I am Vivien Lowndes from De Montfort University and with
me I have Steve Leach and Lawrence Pratchett. We are going to
talk this afternoon about the research we undertook for the Department
of the Environment, Transport and the Regions on public participation
in local government and we hope to be able to draw some lessons
that will be transferable beyond that context too. We have an
agenda for our presentation which is that I am going briefly to
introduce the objectives to that research project and Lawrence
will then speak about the survey findings for ten or 15 minutes,
and then if there are any questions on the survey, we would be
happy to take them. Steve will speak about local authority perspectives
on participation in practice, what works and what does not, the
conditions for vibrant participation initiatives and otherwise.
I am going to say something then about citizen perspectives and
then wind up and lead into a general discussion. Does that sound
okay?
63. That sounds perfect.
(Vivien Lowndes) The first thing to say
is that we are not here to sell you an approach; we are not advocates
of any particular method, although we engage in advising local
authorities on occasion. What we are here to talk about today
is a unique study of the extent of participation methods in local
government. We undertook for the DETR a postal survey of local
authorities to find out what they were doing, using a broad definition
of "participation", not just the deliberative innovations
discussed this morning, but to try and set those in the context
of more traditional and also customer-oriented approaches. We
had an 85 per cent response rate to that survey and the population
of respondents did represent the distribution of types of authority,
political control and so on, so this is a very authoritative data
set. We asked authorities about activities they had undertaken
in 1997 and their plans for 1998, so the data are now in need
of updating and we are hopeful that the DETR will fund us to do
that, so that we can develop a longitudinal study to see how participation
activity is changing in response both to the Government's agenda,
but also in relation to the experience of learning within local
authorities. The first part of our research was to provide this
up-to-date picture of the nature and scope of public participation
and our second objective was to investigate the views of local
authorities, their members and officers, and also crucially of
citizens within localities on participation initiatives. We did
that via case study work and we were very particular not just
to go to the innovative and well-known local authorities, but
to work with, shall we say, the less active local authorities
in order to probe the reasons why certain initiatives were being
developed, the difficulties and achievements and the outcomes,
where those could be established. We undertook around 100 interviews
with local authority members and officers and around 30 focus
groups with members of the public. The last of our three objectives
was to develop guidance for local authorities and we have provided
a summary for you of that guidance which was actually written
by our colleague, Professor Gerry Stoker, who is not actually
here today. It, like the other guidance which was mentioned this
morning, is developed for a local authority context, but reflects
what is becoming a fairly well-established set of general principles,
and we will try and show you how we have come to those through
our research. So that is by way of an introduction, and I shall
now ask Lawrence to speak to us about the survey results which
should help to set this morning's discussion in context.
(Lawrence Pratchett) In the absence of
an OHP, I will hold up the charts which were included in the written
evidence. You should have copies of each of these. Mine are in
colour which makes them a bit more readable than yours which are
in black and white, but hopefully it will work anyway. My part
of this presentation is going to be fairly brief and all I want
to do is to concentrate on the survey findings, so I simply want
to give you some numbers really against different types of initiatives
and some of the problems that local authorities have said they
were experiencing as well as the imbalances which they have said
they were experiencing from experimenting with these different
forms of participation. Each chart has a number on it, so you
should be able to identify which chart I am talking about and
I will of course talk about them in order anyway. The first chart,
chart 1, really is there to give you an overall picture of the
level of public participation initiatives going on in local authorities.
As Vivien said, we asked local authorities what they did in 1997
and we identified a whole range of different forms of initiatives
which they might have undertaken and asked them to tell us which
ones of those they did. Chart 1 gives you a fairly good profile
of that insofar as you can see a whole range1. Over
90 per cent of authorities, for example, operated some form of
complaints and suggestion scheme right the way down to referenda
where only 4 per cent of authorities actually held a referendum
in 1997. The reason that that is in the way is because I wanted
to emphasise a number of important points to do with that. The
first is that we see participation not simply in terms of the
innovative types of method which you heard about this morning
in terms of citizens' juries and so on, but a whole range of different
participation initiatives which local authorities have traditionally
engaged in as well as the innovative mechanisms which they are
now using. If you look at the chart there, you get a fairly strong
picture of what is going on. On the left are the fairly traditional,
consumer-oriented types of methods, such as complaints and suggestion
schemes, service satisfaction surveys, public meetings, consultation
documents. Most authorities engaged in those sorts of things in
1997. Down at the far end are what would be considered radical
or highly innovative methods, things like citizens' juries, citizens'
panels and so on, where only a few local authorities really experimented
with them at that point, although anecdotal rather than survey
evidence suggests that certainly the rate of citizens' panels
has grown quite considerably in the last year or so. In the middle
we have got a whole range of things which have been going on for
a while, but are still fairly innovative, things like forums,
for example, and various local authorities experimented with forums,
and also focus groups have become more and more popular in recent
years. The thing I want to emphasise really though out of this
chart is that there is a whole range of different initiatives
and local authorities do use them extensively. They are not associated
with one form of participation, but there is a cross-section of
different participation initiatives in use in most local authorities.
If you turn to chart 2-
64. Can I just interrupt you for a second in
case people have got questions. This does not tell us how many
authorities are using how many techniques, does it?
(Lawrence Pratchett) That is right, no.
It would have been nice to have asked local authorities how many
public meetings did you have, how many questions did you ask of
the citizens' panels. When we piloted our research we rapidly
found the chief executives, who were the respondents in this particular
survey, were unable to give us that sort of information. They
said: "Sorry, we're a large authority. We've got a lot of
initiatives going on. I can tell you what we are doing but not
the quantity of them."
65. When you got the data back you could have
seen for yourselves the authorities that were doing multiple things.
(Lawrence Pratchett) That is to do with
chart 2.
Mr Browne
66. I do not know this basic fact. How many local
authorities are there?
(Lawrence Pratchett) It has changed since
we did our survey, but we are talking of around about 450.
(Vivien Lowndes) We surveyed 390 authorities
and we had responses from 332.
Chairman
67. And nearly 10 per cent of authorities do
not even have the complaints machinery.
(Lawrence Pratchett) Yes, according to
the responses we had.
68. I am not sure whether that makes them upstream
or downstream.
(Lawrence Pratchett) That is not to suggest
they do not have other means of consulting the public, it means
they do not have a complaints scheme. Chart 2 really answers the
Chairman's question, which is how many in each individual authority.
Local authorities are using round about 11 different forms of
public participation in a given year. That does not mean to say
that they only consult 11 times, it means that they use 11 different
methods to consult and they might consult lots of times through
one method and only once through another method. The important
thing to learn from chart 2 is that we are talking about a large
range of initiatives in any individual authority. The other interesting
point is that the largely urban authorities, the unitary authorities,
London boroughs, Metropolitan districts, tend to be slightly better
at formal public participation than the more rural authorities,
the counties and the districts. I know you can start to draw distinctions
between those and say they are not quite urban or rural splits
and so on. The fact that urban areas seem to be better than rural
areas did come out in the case study work to an extent as well.
The authorities tend to use more consultation in urban areas than
in rural areas and use different forms of consultation and participation
as well and I am sure that Steve will say something about that
later. Chart 3 is where you really would have benefited from the
colour slides I have brought with me, but I will try and indicate
the important things that come out of this. We were particularly
interested not simply in what local authorities were doing in
1997 but how they got to that position in that we tried to map
some sort of growth in the rate of public participation generally.
There were obvious questions which the DETR were asking us, for
example, in terms of is this a response to the New Labour agenda
or does it come from somewhere else. We asked local authorities
when they had first started using various techniques. I have summarised
that because I did not want to put the 21 different techniques
all on one chart. I have given you the key ones which summarise
the various arguments. We split the different types of participation
technique up into four main types: traditional mechanisms, which
are things such as consultation documents and public meetings;
consumer-led initiatives, things like complaints schemes, polling
on the use of particular services and so on, which led mainly
from the consumer agenda of the 1980s and early 1990s in local
authorities; and then two sets of innovative methods, one set
being largely consultative in their mechanisms, eg citizens' panels
which ask citizens to respond specifically to specific questions
like do you think there should be more or less of this and so
on. So it is very much consultative and not deliberative in its
approach. Then there were deliberative mechanisms, things like
citizens' juries which ask citizens to sit down for a period and
discuss initiatives as opposed to simply giving a reaction to
them. So we have got four different types. Chart 3 tries to summarise
elements of those four different types. The line at the top indicated
by the triangles is complaints and suggestion schemes and it shows
very strong and steady growth over the early 1990s as more and
more authorities became aware they had to have these sorts of
consumer-type forms of consultation in place. The line beneath
that with the diamonds on it is public meetings. Public meetings
have been around for a long time and that line shows there has
been growth in the number of the public using public meetings
despite the fact that they have been a traditional form of participation.
Of more interest are the things down at the bottom, such as focus
groups, which are the ones marked with the crosses. That shows
quite dramatic growth over the last few years. Then there are
various other forms of initiatives which have a slightly flatter
line. The interesting thing that comes out of that for the team
is that all forms of participation have shown growth, not just
some of them. Some are growing stronger than others. There is
a general awareness amongst local authorities which predates the
last General Election in terms of actually using participation
mechanisms and it would appear that 1993-94 is the start of this
growth, that is when various local authorities and the local community
generally became aware of various techniques. Since then there
has been this fairly dramatic growth, especially if you chart
these on their own without some of the bigger ones in terms of
the number of authorities picking up on these things and starting
to use them. So there is general awareness within local government
of the need to engage in public participation across the board.
Mr White
69. How much of that was down to the local government
commissioning work which started around that time in terms of
the unitary authorities and the scrapping of county councils?
(Lawrence Pratchett) I am going to defer
most of that answer to Steve in a bit because he has got something
to say about this. Some of the case study evidence does suggest
that the county councils, in particular, became aware that participation
would be a way of avoiding the abolition of county councils.
Mr Browne
70. If chart 1 shows 90 per cent of 392 of the
complaints and suggestions schemes should your graph not go up
to 300?
(Lawrence Pratchett) Yes. I would suggest
that error is probably due to the package I am using as opposed
to the data.
(Vivien Lowndes) Also, among the 332
there were some who responded by not filling in their questionnaires.
It was not a large number, I think it was around ten authorities,
but it is always difficult when you start breaking down the headline
figures.
Mr Browne: I know that chart 3 is designed to
show trends, but it just occurred to me that that was not right.
Chairman
71. That is just to show you that we are completely
awake.
(Lawrence Pratchett) That is encouraging.
Let us turn to chart 4. I have shown how the trends predate the
last election. We were interested to see if this was a response
to a party political agenda, some sort of ideological predisposition
towards certain types of mechanisms and so on. I think chart 4
shows quite effectively that it is not, that all of the major
political parties have taken this up and have engaged with it
quite strongly.2 The other point that comes out of
that chart is that the absence of strong political leadership
of whichever party does seem to have an effect on public participation
initiatives in that there tend to be fewer initiatives. The case
study evidence as well provides evidence of that. Party political
control is important but not in the sense that one party is more
important than the other.
Helen Jones
72. Does that lack of initiatives in independent
councils relate more strongly to the fact that they tend to be
rural?
(Lawrence Pratchett) Yes. It is difficult
to disaggregate the fact that rural and independent go together.
Mr White
73. Have you done an analysis of which councils
switched control, and has that led to initiatives happening when
a council switches control?
(Lawrence Pratchett) No, we have not
because ours was really a census of what was happening in 1997
and we did not want then to get engaged in going back too far
in the history because the danger is that there are only so many
questions you can ask on a questionnaire before people start not
sending it back because it is taking so long to fill in.
(Vivien Lowndes) Certainly on the case
study analysis, when we were asking about what triggered particular
bursts of enthusiasm for public participation initiatives, leadership
was identified very importantly and that was a mixture of political
leadership, often a new leader, but also either in tandem with
or alternatively the role of a new chief executive. In fact I
think the next slide shows the importance of those internal factors.
So change of political control is certainly significant, but more
the effect of there being change in the role of leadership, rather
than one set of political values to another.
(Lawrence Pratchett) If I can move on
to chart 5, we asked a series of questions about the benefits
and problems which local authorities found from participation
initiatives. The first question we did ask them was: "What
were the main purposes of public participation initiatives?"
I should emphasise that this is a ranking in that we asked local
authorities to rank things, so the fact that some things are highlighted
more than others is a problem to an extent in using rankings because
people do not always conform specifically to those preferences
and have to make difficult choices in actually reaching those
decisions. However, the two things that stand out on chart 5,
as you can see, are actually "to gain citizens' views"
and "to improve services". The service agenda seems
to be very high in terms of the way in which local authorities
perceive participation; they see it as a way of actually finding
out more about how citizens perceive their services and how they
can, therefore, improve services, and a lot of people did actually
link this to the "best value" agenda in one way or another
in their responses and so on.
74. Can I just probe you on that because, having
been involved in this innovation at that time, I used the service
argument to justify it rather than the empowerment action which
is the real reason, so do you not think that it is what is actually
perceived to be said as opposed to the real reasons for it?
(Lawrence Pratchett) I am going to sound
very bad and say that I am going to hand that one over again.
You are asking the sort of questions to which our survey instrument
does not enable us to get those sorts of answers.
Chairman
75. This chart is actually very soft data, is
it not, because people are not going to say: "We are doing
this because we were told to do it," which was your last
category, but they are going to say: "We are doing this because
we want to find out what citizens think and we want to improve
services," and they want something ennobling like that.
(Vivien Lowndes) But it is the relative
importance attached to different objectives that is of interest
and, certainly in the case study work, it was clear that there
were these types of processes going on largely to do with trying
to defuse member hostility around the more overtly political objectives.
I think this is a message that is very important for all of us
in central government or local government or thinking about the
regional issue to consider when exhorting further participation.
(Lawrence Pratchett) The other thing
is that in asking people to make these hard choices, it is interesting,
for example, that local authorities did rate generally "increasing
public awareness" as being more important than actually "empowering
the community" and so on, which given that empowerment would
sound nice, taking your perspective, I think if I was a chief
executive, I would probably tick empowerment as being the top
one if I really wanted to impress the DETR or the De Montfort
University researchers even if I did not really mean it.
76. That is why you are not a chief executive
though!
(Lawrence Pratchett) Yes. If I can move
on to chart 6, we also asked about the factors stimulating participation
initiatives and clearly we were interested in the extent to which
local authorities perceived internal agendas as opposed to something
going on externally. Again I do defer to the fact that it is soft
data and you are likely to say that it is members that drive strategy,
not officers and that it is internal rather than external, but
the interesting thing to me here is that local government networks
were not deemed to be particularly important and there is a sense
of ownership here of these initiatives and that is something,
I think, which is a message I would want to give a bit stronger
than just this chart. A sense of ownership of these initiatives
is important if local authorities or other agencies that are going
to take these things up are going to make them work; they have
to feel as though they are theirs and that they have tailored
them to meet their own requirements rather than borrowed a model
from somewhere else and applied it. That came out strongly both
in the survey, in the written responses in the survey, and in
the case study work, that those local authorities that felt they
owned them were those that were successful with initiatives. I
need to move on fairly quickly, so I will go straight to chart
7 because we also asked about factors which inhibited participation
initiatives. Not surprisingly, most local authorities mentioned
time and resources and said: "We need lots more time and
the Government need to give us much more money to do this,"
and that does not come as a shock or a surprise. It does, however,
indicate the lesson which is that local authorities became more
and more awareand I think the case study evidence also
supported thisof just how much time it took to really make
these things work and how much resources were needed to dedicate
to it and the necessity, therefore, to justify dedicating resources
to public participation is important. The other important thing
here, I think, is the lack of public interest which many local
authorities experienced when they started trying to develop public
participation initiatives and that is something which I think
local authorities have started to grapple with, about how to build
up this demand for public participation in a democratic way and
to match it with the initiatives which they can offer, and there
is a matching process going on there again which needs to be talked
about strategically. Interestingly enough as well, the other point
I wanted to make on that is that, generally speaking, local authorities
did not deem a lack of officer or councillor support to be important
and they felt that, generally speaking, there was an acceptance
of this within both the officer corps and the member corps, although
there are some problems with that as well. I now move on to chart
8 and this is possibly one of the most important ones insofar
as it did not give us the data we expected. We asked local authorities,
and this was a very open question: "What impact do you feel
your participation initiative has had so far on policy, et
cetera?" We expected them to say: "Oh, lots,"
and again it is the sort of response you would expect to get from
them flippantly, but we got very thoughtful and detailed answers
which in effect showed that only about 20 per cent of authorities
believed them to have had a strong influence on the final decision
which the local authority took. At the other end, about 20 per
cent said that they had very little impact on final decisions,
but there was a whole sort of grey area in between where local
authorities made statements about: "Well, they did help us
confirm that we were going down the right track," "They
did help us with decisions," and so on, and "They actually
made sure that our decisions were better informed," and the
chart hopefully gives you an idea of where those fall in relation
to each other.
Mr White
77. Did you look at the impact on the decision-making
processes of individual authorities?
(Lawrence Pratchett) Can I address that
in the next bit I want to say because I think that is an important
point actually. There is a series of some very brief OHPs which
I will run through very quickly which just talked about the negative
effects, the point here being that most local authorities that
responded to this were those which had engaged quite effectively
with public participation. They were largely enthusiastic about
it, but, nevertheless, recognised that there were problems with
engaging in public participation and again they gave us some very
realistic answers there. About one-third, 32 per cent, just under
a third of authorities said that there was a danger of public
participation raising unrealistic expectations among the public,
and said: "You invite people in to a citizens' jury to ask
them what they think and then you ignore them and go in a completely
different direction, so how do you justify that? You are raising
expectations that they will have an influence on outcomes and
then do not follow that advice," and that is a problem that
many local authorities encountered. About a quarter of authorities,
or exactly a quarter, 25 per cent, said that decision-making became
slower as a result of having public participation. They were not
necessarily saying that they, therefore, did not want public participation,
but they said that it is a problem you have to recognise if you
are introducing it into the process, and it has obviously been
a problem with the planning process in the past and it is becoming
a problem elsewhere in the process if you introduce public participation.
Then there is a whole list of smaller problems to do with additional
costs associated with it. If I can just highlight one, that is
parochialism. In some areas local authorities found that by asking
particular groups of citizens either in geographical areas or
certain communities what they thought of things, they found that
people tended to go beneath the area of the local authority and
think purely in terms of their own self interest and there was
one example we had within the work, the siting of a refuse collection
site where once you start consulting on where to site a refuse
collection site, nobody wants it near them, and they accept that
it is needed within the county, but "not in our part of the
county" or "in our part of the district", and so
on, so you can see how it does encourage parochialism. The other
one which I think is becoming potentially more important is consultation
overload. I was reading in the paper this morning that the Transport
Bill is going to require local authorities, if they want to introduce
road charging, to hold a referendum, and these will be the same
cities presumably which also have to hold a referendum if they
want to elect a mayor and so on, so you can see how citizens could
become almost bored with the opportunity to participate if it
is not structured in the right way. So the small number of authorities
that were identified in consultation overload were those that
were most active and most concerned with getting it right.
78. Was it particular groups that were suffering
from consultation overload, in other words the same voluntary
groups that were being asked to participate representing their
communities or was it generally in the public where it was causing
the problem?
(Lawrence Pratchett) The answers from
this came from a few high profile authorities in this area who
were having problems getting enough people in. So the same suspects
were being rounded up.
(Vivien Lowndes) I think both issues
are important. Our focus groups with voluntary organisations identified
just the point you have made there, which is that it can be incredibly
frustrating and difficult for voluntary organisations to be required
to represent often a much larger constituency than their own members,
and to do so with great frequency and small resources to draw
upon; they themselves had concerns about their own legitimacy
to act as this stakeholder voice. I think the other issue about
the population in general was also identified in those authorities
where there was a lot of media coverage about initiatives and
a sense that this was feeding into a cynicism that it was PR or
a "paper chase", legitimising political decisions and
so on. I think, as Lawrence has said, those authorities who are
at the vanguard are actually helping to raise some of these points
about the transaction costs that start to emerge when these processes
get embedded, and they can help warn us what is upstream.
Chairman
79. You have not got a sheet on positive experiences
of a similar kind, have you?
(Lawrence Pratchett) No, we have not.
We did have some benefits, but they were the sorts of things which
are in the reports.
(Vivien Lowndes) We had the chart on
purposes, we also had data on benefits, but, perhaps unsurprisingly,
benefits were aligned almost perfectly with purposes. That is
the downside of a survey instrument. Once you have ticked the
boxes or made your rankings regarding the intended purpose of
an initiative you are likely to say: "Well, yes, it had this
outcome and this benefit," which is why it is then so important
to ask the questions about the downsides, the frustrations, the
costs; we were quite impressed with how honestly those were answered.
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