Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence


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 aware—and I think the case study evidence also supported this—of 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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