UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 316-ii
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER:
HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND
THE REGIONS COMMITTEE
LOCAL
GOVERNMENT CONSULTATION
Tuesday 1 March 2005
MR BEN PAGE and MR SIMON ATKINSON
DR
GWENDOLYN BRANDON, MR KEVIN SHEEHAN,
MS CHERYL KING-McDOWELL, DR PATRICIA ROBERTS-THOMSON and
MS LIZ REID-JONES
Evidence heard in Public Questions 111 - 252
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister:
Housing, Planning, Local Government and the
Regions Committee
on Tuesday 1 March 2005
Members present
Andrew Bennett, in the Chair
Mr Clive Betts
Mr David Clelland
Chris Mole
Mr Bill O'Brien
Mr Richard Page
Christine Russell
________________
Memorandum submitted by MORI Social Research Institute
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr
Ben Page, Director, and Mr Simon
Atkinson, Research Director, MORI Social Research Institute, examined.
Q111 Chairman: Could I welcome you to the Committee, to the
second evidence session of the Local Government Consultation and ask you to
identify yourselves for the record.
Mr Page: My name is Ben Page. I am Director of the MORI Social Research
Institute.
Mr Atkinson: My name is Simon Atkinson. I am Research Director in the MORI Social
Research Institute.
Q112 Chairman: Do you want to say anything by way of
introduction or are you happy to go straight to questions?
Mr Page: As you please, Chairman.
Q113 Chairman: If you would like to say a few words of
introduction then.
Mr Page: MORI has worked with local
government since the 1970s - with all political persuasions, I guess - and I
suppose we are in a reasonably good position to make some observations about the
state of practice in terms of what different authorities are doing. We also work extensively for central
government.
Q114 Christine Russell: I am not sure if you have played your part in
this but I am sure you can accept that the volume of consultation has increased
substantially over the last few years.
In your view, do you think almost too much emphasis has been placed on
consultation?
Mr Page: I do not think you are going
to get MORI to say we place too much emphasis on consultation. You could argue that quite a lot of that
effort is not particularly productive but I think the idea that the public do
not want to be listened to or that we should not ask them is not going to be
particularly popular these days.
Q115 Christine Russell: I am sure my colleagues will press you
further on the usefulness of consultation.
Mr Page: Sure.
Q116 Christine Russell: Where do democratically elected counsellors
fit into this consultation? Are they
not really elected to take decisions on the part of their constituents?
Mr Page: When MORI last checked, we
were definitely living in a representative democracy. The whole point about research is that it is not about doing what
a survey or a focus group says but it lets elected representatives make more
informed decisions about people's priorities in a way that if you are just
relying on a vote every four years is unlikely to happen.
Mr Atkinson: Where that has come closest to a case where
you have the public saying one thing about what the council should be doing, is
in consultation over budgets. Even
there, the case where the brief, if you like, to the researchers has been for
the public to come to a verdict on what should happen is quite rare. It has usually been used as consultative
exercise and to give you an idea of how the public responds to issues about,
let's say, budget consultation. It is
relatively rare that the decision appears to be devolved to the public. I think that is quite unusual.
Q117 Christine Russell: So far as you are concerned, you have not
collected any evidence which seems to demonstrate that empowering local
communities results in undermining the role of local councillors?
Mr Page: No. The difficulty is that the vast majority of
people do not vote in local elections and the vast majority of people do not
know who their councillor is, so, with the state in which we find ourselves,
there is not that much, in a sense, to be undermined.
Q118 Christine Russell: Is that part of the arguments in favour of
more consultation: that it may engage more people in the electoral process and
perhaps even result in improving turnouts.
Mr Page: You have to be clear - and
this is one of the central points we made in the written evidence - whether you
are trying to understand public attitudes, what people are actually thinking,
or whether you are trying to consult (which we would define as letting everyone
who wants to have a say, and perhaps have some sort of dialogue) and whether
you want to engage. They have very
different meanings as far as we are concerned.
There is some evidence, particularly in some of the NDC areas that you
can get people involved, they can see things happening as a result of their
involvement, and you "build local capacity" etcetera, but I would say that that
is very much in the minority.
Q119 Christine Russell: Do you have any views of consultation in
two-tier authorities? Because most of
the local authorities who have submitted evidence to us are in fact unitary
authorities and an argument is made occasionally that consultation in two-tier
authorities is simply a beauty contest, if you like, between the county and the
district.
Mr Page: There are some good examples
of joined up consultation, say, in Dorset, where the district and the county
are working together. There is a small
risk, of course, of overlapping.
Q120 Christine Russell: Are they of the same political control?
Mr Page: Not entirely, I do not
think. I am not a complete anorak: I
cannot remember exactly what the political control is in each place. No, not completely. I would not say it is a beauty contest
actually. I just think that there is
the very local and then there is the county.
We should hope to see them - indeed, the revised CPA will put more pressure
on both tiers - working much more effectively together, and, indeed, the Government
is floating the idea of moving to unitaries in due course.
Mr Atkinson: You would not be surprised for us to be
observing that some of the issues about capacity, in terms of both how you
define what you are wanting to do and using it, and, indeed, in terms of
resources to do consultation well, are more prevalent in district councils than
county councils. There is a big
difference there. I think county
councils normally do have to a greater or lesser extent - and to a greater or
lesser extent a partnership working - a certain way of doing it, a certain
budget for doing it, and they will be doing it. Districts do often find it quite difficult to struggle with the
agenda and what they are being expected to consult on.
Q121 Mr O'Brien: You say you have been involved with local
government and helping to serve local government since the seventies.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q122 Mr O'Brien: So you would be familiar with the committee
structure that was round then.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q123 Mr O'Brien: That gave greater participation at the
various levels. Then the 2000 Act
brought in the cabinet structure. Has
the introduction of the cabinet structure had an impact on consultation? Has it changed the way that MORI works with
local authorities?
Mr Page: The short answer is probably
no, but I would say that these are huge changes: the setting up of scrutiny,
etcetera, and it is obviously taking a long time for this to bed down. There have been various academic studies of
how this is working. I am not aware of
one that has looked specifically at consultation but if the clerks did a search
on the internet they might find something.
I would say that we are starting to see scrutiny committees in some
authorities taking the role that I think was originally intended for them in
the Act, to have a sort of proper oversight, looking at all the evidence,
because, of course, if you are going to look at other services like health and
policing, those two of course ... health, in particular, has very clear rules and
a much more draconian regime imposed on it by central government in terms of
the quantity of surveys that it has to conduct. ODPM only makes local government do one every three years; the
Department of Health is making every single trust do one every single year and
a staff survey.
Q124 Mr O'Brien: That has not answered the question on the
impact of consultation with the cabinet system. In the former days, you had the opportunity to consult with
committees of all dimensions.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q125 Mr O'Brien: And a number of councillors that were
involved. Now, with the cabinet
structure, we have a leader and maybe ten other members who are active. Are you saying that there has been no
difference in the way that MORI has ----
Mr Page: Not particularly. We are doing what we are asked to do. I think there are issues around ----
Q126 Mr O'Brien: What are you asked to do?
Mr Page: We are asked to go and
understand what local priorities are -
often by officers, more rarely by councillors and we will obviously use a range
of methods and techniques. But the
actual structure of the authority or, indeed, the political complexion of the
authority, and I would say both those things, seem to matter less in terms of
how effective consultation is compared to the culture of the authority. In my perception, it is not so much the
structures that determine - and in this case, we are talking about consultation
and whether or not it is effective - it is about the willingness or otherwise
of politicians and officers to engage with the data and the findings and public
opinion and public attitudes, and the ability to use that advice on performance
management systems to make changes to services that reflect public priorities.
Q127 Mr O'Brien: Do you find that officers are now more
involved with running than elected members?
Mr Page: My personal perception is
that ----
Q128 Mr O'Brien: Tell us what MORI thinks.
Mr Page: I do not know that MORI has
a view. I am the Director, so I will
take the view for MORI if that is what you would like. I think MORI's view is that, regardless of
the structures, there are some authorities which you could definitely say were
member led and there are some authorities which you could definitely say were
officer led - and, again, this is about culture.
Q129 Chairman: But you would not like me to ask you which
they were.
Mr Page: I would not, no.
Q130 Mr O'Brien: Are there differences in practice in
consultation between the leader and cabinet councillors?
Mr Page: I think you could argue in
certain situations, where there is a very strong executive - be that a cabinet
or more possibly an individual leader or even a mayor - that because there is a
single intelligence focusing on public opinion, etcetera - and I do not know if
my colleague would disagree with me, because this is not black and white - there
probably is a more disciplined focus on some of this information because there
is a much more singular point of view about what is trying to be achieved. Under the old Committee system - and obviously
there were very strong leaders under the old Committee system, because some
people ran their authorities as a sort of personal empire even then - that was
perhaps slightly less prevalent, but I would not say this is any seismic
change, to be quite honest.
Q131 Mr O'Brien: When you do an inquiry with local authorities,
how important is consultation with the communities and stakeholders?
Mr Page: In what sense?
Q132 Mr O'Brien: In any sense. If you are asked to do some research on behalf of the local
authority, having regard to the fact that the local authority serves the
community, how important is it that the stakeholders and the community are
involved?
Mr Page: We know that people want to
be listened to. They want to know that
their elected representatives are paying attention to their priorities and that
the priorities of the authority reflect local people's priorities. The best councils, be they Labour, Tory or
Lib Dem, you can see definitely do that.
Not only do they understand people's priorities, but sometimes they do
what people say. Sometimes they say they
cannot - they cannot afford it or they have chosen not to - but they
communicate why, and you can see that in the best authorities. Of course it is vital. Involving people is different from
consulting them. There has been a lot
of rhetoric about involvement over the last seven years. The practice of it, in the sense that the
public actually feels involved, is much, much less common than the rhetoric.
Mr Atkinson: One of the things we put in our paper is that
sometimes those get blurred and councils try to do something which is both
classic market research (trying to understand what people think about a
particular issue) and involvement (getting them to take part in an issue) and
sometimes what happens is that they fall between those two stools.
Q133 Mr Betts: You draw a distinction in your evidence
between research and consultation. Is
that a nice distinction for political scientists? Is it applying to people on the ground whose lives will be
changed by these things?
Mr Page: The public does not care
about all of this stuff. They do not
care about whether it is this, that or the other, but I think -----
Q134 Mr Betts: You have been some research to show that,
have you?
Mr Page: We have shown you plenty of
evidence that the public is not particularly concerned about the niceties of
the .... Look, most of the public do not even know what their council's CPA score
is - only about five per cent of the public can spontaneously tell you. This is just detail to them. But what I
think is important for officers and people who are spending public money on
this sort of activity is to be very clear about are they trying to find out
what a representative sample thinks - which might be very different from the
views of voters - and one of the problems of the Bristol referendum is that the
public might have thought one thing but those who took part had rather
different views. Do they want it so
that everybody who wants to have a say, can have a say, even though they may or
may not be representative - because, it is self-selecting - or do they want to
empower and engage people which we mean some sort of devolution?
Mr Atkinson: To give you an example on that point: many
councillors are worried about community safety. They have a citizens' panel and they have decided they want to
use it to conduct some research on how safe people feel in their area or their
experience of crime. They conduct that
using a postal questionnaire using their citizens' panel and then try to
compare that with the face-to-face, mega-robust British crime survey. They mean well, they are trying to get local
comparisons with the national, but, because there is a blur between what they
are trying to achieve and what, for example, they are comparing it with, the
danger is that they end up with something that does not mean very much or could
even be counterproductive because you are making the wrong conclusions.
Mr Page: Crime in Lower Blogswallop
is through the roof because only elderly pensioners have bothered to fill in
the questionnaire and send them back.
Q135 Mr Betts: Basically you are drawing a distinction
between research where the sample is selected in some way either randomly or
specifically, and consultation where the sample is self-selecting.
Mr Page: Yes.
Mr Atkinson: In the former case you might be explicitly
not interested in those people, in the nicest possible way, after the research
exercise. You are collecting their
views, a representative sample, the right questions, we hope, doing good things
with it. Some of the consultation stuff
may be much more ongoing, in that you are trying to have a dialogue. That distinction, I think, is quite
important.
Q136 Mr Betts: There is another distinction which is
tentatively drawn between consultation and participation. Would you trying to distinguish between
them?
Mr Page: Consultation could just be a
one-off thing. MORI would define it as
letting anybody who wants to have a say: "We are looking at these plans, we are
thinking of putting a new leisure centre in, tell us what you think." But I would say participation, for example,
might be: "We want to get a group of people and work with you over the next
year to shape the leisure centre, to make sure that everybody locally has had a
say, to look at what is going to be in it.
We are going to meet regularly - in fact, we are going to give you the
budget for the decoration and your group can choose" - I do not know how they
have come forward - "what colour to paint it inside." That is participation.
Consultation is Ken Livingstone - as he has to do - putting an advert in
The Standard and saying, "Write in
and tell me what you think of the extension of the C Charge Zone.
Q137 Chris Mole: You set out clearly the new forms of
consultation and research which have increasingly been used in recent years -
such as citizens' panels and community conferences. You make no mention, however, of e-consultation, which the
Government seems to be increasingly encouraging. Is there any particular reason for that?
Mr Page: Not particularly. Actually, when we are looking at audiences
who have high access to the internet - so if you are serving council officers
or you are serving business people MORI does millions and millions of surveys
over the internet, for the general public there are still questions,
particularly at a very local level, about the proportion particularly of older
people you are actually going to find who are going to take part in something. But what is happening - and it may be an
oversight on our part - is certainly people are using it alongside representative
consultation - and sometimes younger people.
There is a very high level of internet access amongst younger
people. So, no, it absolutely has its
place, but -----
Q138 Chris Mole: Could you not do weighting to compensate?
Mr Page: You can weight, but the
problem is that if you have people who are not there at all - older pensioners
- or hardly there at all, the size of the weight you would be applying to
compensate for their under-representation is enormous. If you look at even well-conducted internet
polls, you will see that even after weighting they are still massively short of
older people simply because of that problem.
Mr Atkinson: There is another much lower level than that,
a practical issue about local levels and generating samples of local internet
addresses. So you would be likely to do
e-consultation from a group of people who you know already, either from the
citizens' panel, who have written in, or through your website, and that is doing,
if you like, classical research in that way because you would have to do quite
an exercise to get a group of people in that area with e-mail addresses.
Mr Page: But there are already local
authorities doing SMS (text-messaging) polls.
Local government is willing to try new things, and I think it should,
but we would be particularly concerned about representativeness.
Q139 Chris Mole: It seems to me that citizens' panels are
there to colour in the black and white of the statistics of polling. But you are commenting that they are often
used inappropriately. Could you give
some examples?
Mr Page: When they are used
inappropriately is when people rely solely on a self-selecting panel. The classic approach that is often used,
partly because it is very cheap, is simply to write to maybe 10,000 addresses, some
10 per cent write back, and those people then become your panel. The problem is, of course, that most young
people or black or Asian people will not have written back. There is actually a marvellous example of
one authority on the South Coast which relied on a panel of this type which
then told it that the people's key priority was the care of the elderly - because,
of course, they had obviously filled in the questionnaire. That is the problem. If it is used in isolation and people are not
sensitive to the likely problems of the non-representation of certain groups,
then you are going to have a difficulty.
Where it is used alongside other methods and people are aware of the
sometimes quite large margin of error, I think it is fine, but where people,
either because of lack of money or lack of understanding, rely on solely on
that method, you are likely to have problems if you are trying to understand
exactly what the community as a whole thinks.
Mr Atkinson: One of the issues that can come off the back
of that is the question about the extent to which these findings are
scrutinised. Having a citizens' panel
is a bit like having a central heating system in your house: no-one will tell
you off for having one. You may be able
to present the results of your citizens' panel, you may be able to celebrate an
85 per cent response rate - based on the 10 per cent who have, as Ben
mentioned, taken part in it - and to say it is accurate to plus or minus 3 per
cent, and it is very unlikely that anyone would ever challenge you on your
research into that. There are some
issues there about people going off and using it, perhaps without having quite
thought about what they have been doing.
Mr Page: We are hoping that the Audit
Commission will be more rigorous in its examination of some of the assertions
made from that type of research in the future.
Q140 Mr Page: As we all know, local authorities are
engaging in greater consultation on broader, more strategic issues than they
have done in the past. To what extent
would you expect this to influence the consultation method selected? We have already seen, fairly cynically, the
Federation of Small Business state that "consultation is often perceived to be
little more than a public relations exercise". Again, as we politicians know, when you have a referendum the
question is vital. Is there any
evidence that the consultation methodology being chosen is not much more than a
tendency to dress up the direction in which the local authority would like to
travel and gain public approval via its consultation?
Mr Page: Sometimes but probably less
frequently than in the past.
Q141 Mr Page: Are you able to give us any examples?
Mr Page: The strongest image aspect
of local government is that people think: "It never listens to them" and it
needs to make much more effort to find out what people think. That is the statement that we can get far
more people to agree with than, "My council gives me value for money" or "good
services". They always think that local
government do not listen. Our
government does loads of surveys, but it is very bad at showing how those
surveys or research have converted into action. Yes, there are times when people have decided to implement - I
don't know - a new planning development.
The council is perhaps in favour of it and it does a survey which shows
that everybody is opposed to it. Or,
classically, the mayoral issue: in many places that chose not to have referenda,
when government asked local government to consult over whether or not a mayoral
referendum should be offered, there was a clear majority in favour of holding a
referendum and in many of those cases, probably the majority of those cases,
people did not do it, so councillors chose not to. They are the elected representatives, that is their prerogative,
but I think it is about being honest and about what can actually change the
result of the consultation. I think
local government has got better about that but it could still be clearer.
Mr Page: The mayoral consultation
about cabinet structures or cabinet managers and the three options that were
put forward a few years ago was an example where you got very different results
from a survey compared with a consultation: "Tell us what you think." The "Tell us what you think" had often quite
strong messages coming back, let's say, for the need for a cabinet model; and a
survey, if you like, of a broader group of people tended to have much more
equivocal findings and many more "Don't knows," and you got a real sense that
the public did not quite know what you are talking about at times, frankly.
Q142 Mr Page: It will be very interesting in my area to see
whether the East of England consultation on the number of houses to be built in
the area does have any validity in the outcome at the end of the day. Tell me, when you worked for the local
authority, to what extent do you advise on the methodology that is going to be
used?
Mr Page: We will advise and we will
not allow something to be misrepresented in terms of its likely reliability or
otherwise. But obviously at the end of
the say local authorities are free, within reason, where it is not a statutory
exercise, to do what they like.
Q143 Mr Page: Would you still accept a consultancy if they
went through a methodology that you personally would not have chosen?
Mr Page: Sometimes we will do postal
surveys of people. Obviously in a
perfect world we would prefer something that was fully representative and
postal surveys very rarely are. On the
other hand, there is an issue or proportionality. If you are reviewing a service and the total budget for that
service is only a few hundred thousand pounds a year, it would seem crazy to
spend £50,000 doing a piece of research about it. So there is purity in research and there is also the practicality
of the costs and the timing and everything else.
Q144 Mr Page: You are dodging the question.
Mr Page: I am not really.
Q145 Mr Page: Let me ask you a straight question.
Mr Page: Okay, ask me a straight
question.
Q146 Mr Page: Are there any projects you have turned down
for local authorities?
Mr Page: Yes. There are certain things we just will not
do.
Q147 Chairman: Do you want to tell us the sort of things?
Mr Page: The areas where it is
particularly contentious are surveys around planning. It is more about the representation of the results and how they
are used where we would get into particular problems. We are quite happy to sell you, if you like - I don't know - a
Volkswagen or a Ferrari and in different situations, depending on where you are
driving, one of those cars might be appropriate, and it is up to you. But as long as we are clear it is a Ferrari
or it is a Volkswagen or it is a Mini, we are fine. I think the problem comes when people say, "We have consulted all
these people and this is their view ..." and the sample is completely
unrepresentative, the questions are biased and all the results have been
presented in a misleading way. The
classic is: "50 per cent of people said they did not know. Of those who managed to express an opinion,
30 per cent were in favour and 20 per cent were against." The council then re-percentages the results
to report that: "60 per cent of those who replied" - and in very small brackets
at the back "and expressed a view" - "were in favour and 40 per cent were not." We will issue a public retraction if anybody
tries anything like that.
Mr Atkinson: The other area on which we keep a bit of an
eye is the questionnaire. I think there
comes a point where you have to say, "You cannot ask it in that way," and, if
necessary, "We will not do this ..."
Mr Page: We will just refuse. We will go to the wire over question
wording.
Q148 Mr Page: And you have refused projects on that basis.
Mr Page: Absolutely.
Q149 Chris Mole: The consistent questions and standardised
approach of the Best Value Performance Indicator Satisfaction Survey has
created a huge national dataset. Do you
think it is really being exploited? Can
it be? Who should?
Mr Page: It can be exploited and we
are very much looking forward to the day when ODPM release the data from the
2003 BVPI exercise. We are now in March
2005. I am looking forward to seeing the data.
It is all there. I am sure it
will be released very soon. It should
also, we think, be available on the website for people to conduct their own
analyses. As other major government
surveys are, perhaps the ESRC archive out in Essex .... Absolutely. The sooner,
the better, quite frankly. I think we
are very clear that there are whole areas of that data set which are of
potential relevance to colleagues outside the classic town hall: health,
transport, community safety and crime.
We see little evidence on the ground, where the data is available in
individual authorities, that that is being used. Obviously all councils did it but we also hope that ODPM will
have a careful look at out-lyers, perhaps at the time they publish the data, or
comments on out-lyers because there is quite a range of schools and ----
Q150 Chairman: Could you explain what an out-lyer is?
Mr Page: An out-lyer is just anything
that is odd. MORI has a saying: If it
is interesting it is usually wrong.
Should anybody perhaps have managed to double their level of
satisfaction when the national trend is for satisfaction to fall by ten
percentage points, you just want to check: "Are all the other stars and the
moon aligned in that direction, or does something seem a bit odd about that
finding?"
Q151 Mr O'Brien: In your statement to the Committee you stated
that: "the ODPM has helped to encourage a standardised approach to customer
satisfaction measurement across the local government community." How can we measure the effectiveness of
consultation? Is it measurable?
Mr Page: I can show you lots of
authorities where they have clearly tried to respond to public priority and
where you can see, as a result of that, they have bucked often falling
satisfaction across the piece which is related to national factors, council tax
levels and everything else. So I think
we can show you individual authorities that have done that. How much of that change in their
performance, and, indeed, how they are perceived, is due solely to consultation,
as opposed to performance management, rigour by the elected members, focus,
etcetera, I think is very hard to say, but you can definitely see that the
places that do better on consultation tend to perform better.
Q152 Mr O'Brien: There is no real answer.
Mr Page: The point is that people are
not running their local authorities solely based on survey research. If they were, I think that would be
extremely unhealthy.
Q153 Mr O'Brien: If we are talking about responsibility for
monitoring the quality of usefulness of consultation and MORI is brought in to
do that, who should measure that?
Mr Page: The new CPA, as far as I
understand it, is going to look at how effective each authority's "user focus"
is.
Q154 Mr O'Brien: And that would be in without MORI.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q155 Mr O'Brien: How would MORI measure it? If you are doing an exercise on a transport
proposal, how do we measure your effectiveness?
Mr Page: Our effectiveness is about
delivering robust data and delivering hopefully sound advice based on that data
to the authority. We are not a
consultancy, so we would deliver those messages to an authority. We will point out what public priorities
are, but, to be honest, at that point it is up to the authority, both the
officers and the members, to take that information and do something with it.
Q156 Mr O'Brien: It is their responsibility to measure it.
Mr Page: It is their responsibility
to do something with it.
Q157 Mr O'Brien: I am talking about measurement. It is their responsibility to measure it or
is it your responsibility?
Mr Page: It is our responsibility to
do our job properly; it is their job to measure our effectiveness. All our work is competitively contracted,
and if we do not do a good job presumably they will use somebody else.
Q158 Mr Betts: You talk about consultation exercises and say
that unless it is rigorous and scientific, the surveys done are about "prone to
attracting more active citizens - typically older, more middle class, white,
British citizens." Does that mean that
every other form of consultation is flawed?
Mr Page: Not at all. I think it is just about being clear. It is about fitness for purpose. If you are trying to do something that is
representative of the whole community and it excludes young people and black
and Asian people and you are living in a multi-ethnic city, clearly it is not
going to be representative. It may
still tell you what people who like filling in questionnaires - probably
actually voters who tend to be older, whiter and more middle class - might
think, but I think we are trying to get people to be just honest about the
strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. We are not saying you should always do an opinion poll. That certainly is not the case. But I think it is about being clear about
the strengths and weaknesses of each approach you are adopting and being aware,
when you make a decision to take a particular approach, what the pros and cons
of that are, because all of these things have pros and cons.
Q159 Mr Betts: Even the rigorous, scientific type surveys
may still have problems, presumably - maybe more difficulties in accessing
young people and maybe ethnic minorities because they do not speak English as a
first language.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q160 Mr Betts: Can you tell us how you make sure you get
scientific examples.
Mr Atkinson: You would do some kind of carefully
controlled sample which would include particular steps to ensure you are not
missing out people, so that it might be that you are setting quotas of younger
people or quotas of the key ethnic groups in the community, or it could be, if
it is a random sample, about going back again and again to those addresses to
make sure that you have got hold of them.
It is still fair to say that with even the best face-to-face survey, if
you like, in terms of its "Ferrari-ness", as Ben just mentioned, you are still
going to work quite hard to get people who will not come to the door, who are scared,
who are not able to speak English, some of those things, and I think the best
survey will have to hold its hands up and say that that probably needs to be
complemented by more one-to-one work, if that is felt to be worthwhile as part
of the project.
Mr Page: With the right measures, you
can still in this country construct samples that are broadly
representative. We can get into the
detail about its polling and its accuracy or otherwise, but you can, with the
right effort - sending out people who can speak the main community languages in
places like Tower Hamlets - achieve representative samples. I certainly would not recommend that for
every single exercise the council do - it would not be good value for money -
but occasionally I think you would still have to do that.
Q161 Mr Betts: We move on to another exercise where you are
trying to engage people, encourage them to participate, as well as be
consulted. Do you have any examples
where MORI have helped councils develop forms of involvement which actually do
engage with groups who do not come forward very easily, like the young, maybe
the disabled, maybe ethnic minorities?
Mr Page: I think there are real
examples - places like Southwark, where they looked to setting up community
forums. The members there wanted to try
out three different approaches with differing degrees of local control. We were able, just by small meetings like this,
with different community groups, with cross-sections of people right across the
borough, to reconfigure those in a way that more accurately met the real needs
of local people as opposed to some sort of theoretical model. At these first meetings they had people
queuing up to get into these meetings when the area forums were first set
up. So I think there are lots of
examples of services being reconfigured and I think if you look at some of the
NDC areas, particularly where there is money going into an area and you are
getting local people who perhaps have never taken part in a committee in their
life on to things, there is a whole range of techniques where that does happen. But I think you have to remember also that
most people do not want to come and sit in meetings like this.
Q162 Mr Betts: You would do a check of how representative
that process is by looking at the people who come along.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q163 Mr Betts: You still have to accept that the people
who come, be they black, white, young or old, are probably the ones with the
loudest voices rather than always representative.
Mr Page: We are back to our central
point: is that consultation, which is not purporting to be representative and
is about just engaging with those who want to engage, or is it research? If it is consultation you still of course ....
Yes, if you observe that all the people here are old, white pensioners and we
are in a central London it is quite likely that a key group is missing. You would then advise the authority that it
needs to do some outreach work. There
is a whole practice area of this type of thing. We do a survey for the Youth Justice Board of kids who have been
excluded from school, to track their participation in crime every year. So there are things that you can do. Indeed, there are lots of good examples of
authorities working with - I am using these dreadful phrases now - "excluded
groups", so you can see that, and developing a dialogue and so on.
Q164 Chris Mole: Many doubt whether their opinion will have
any influence with the council and often assume that relevant decisions have
already been taken before the consultation takes place. How important is it to combat that sort of
cynicism? Is it possible to measure the
impact, if, say, you take a council who have not yet made up their mind and
demonstrate that before and after there has been a change?
Mr Page: One of the things we do on
some of these exercises is to get members of the public to fill in a
questionnaire before they come to spend a day talking to councillors and
officers and then again at the end of the day, and you can actually see how
their opinions have shifted about the extent to which the council is listening
or their views on a particular issue as a result of that day of discussion and
deliberation. I think the key point is
the one I was making earlier: in a perfect world, you would write back to
everybody who took part and say, "Look, these are the findings and this is what
we are going to do about it."
Sometimes, of course, with some of the findings it takes time - people
have to look at reallocating money, changing the way the services are
configured - so you cannot necessarily go straight back to people and say,
"Right, you said you were very cross about dustbin emptying, now we are going
to buy five more dustcarts." It will
not happen that quickly. But I would
say that the best authorities are very good at reflecting that this is what
people's priorities are. Take where we
are sitting now: in the city of Westminster, if you listen to the leader's speech
that they make every year - it is a big part of civic life in Westminster the
leader's speech: you will see Simon Milton talking later this week, and Jane
Roberts, Labour in Camden doing exactly the same sort of thing - he will be
reflecting, "You said you were worried about street crime, you said you were
worried about this, you were worried about value for money, and this is what we
are doing about it," and making sure you are consistently getting those
messages across, not just to the people who took part but also to the
population as a whole, so that they can see that it really resonates, that
these are the issues that we know people are concerned about, we think is healthy
and local government should do more of that.
Mr Atkinson: If you ask people whether the council listens
to local people's views, they will give you the benefit of the doubt and they
will often have a relatively positive assessment. If you ask whether it acts on their views, you will get a rather
lower proportion, 30 per cent, saying that it acts on it. There is a big gradient there. Some might say that is as it should be, in
that you have an authority that is listening and it is not seen so much as
directly acting - and there is an interesting question there about the role of
an elected member which we started off talking about. But I think both of those are showing some improvement - not
huge, but some improvement.
Mr Page: It is a real uphill slog, in
fairness to local government. Richard
Page was talking about building houses and the delights of many areas in the
South East receiving extra housing. It
is very clear in one part of Surrey.
One district has made a real effort: "This district is going to take a
certain number of houses (as agreed by the government) under the plan for the
area," and the councillors there have visited every single home in the town
around which this is going to happen, and I think, from memory, the proportion
of the people who believe that the council never listens to them and that this
is all a council plot to tarmac over the surrounding countryside - having
visited every home twice - has gone from 90 per cent to 60 per cent. So this is a tough one.
Q165 Mr O'Brien: In my opening question I was asking you how
you measure the results of your exercise.
Could I ask another question on that: In your experience, which section
of the community are the hardest of all for local authorities to engage?
Mr Page: I would say young people,
quite frankly. Young people, and
obviously working-class young people who are not particularly well educated,
shall we say, who are disengaged from the whole political process. Most of our polling at the moment is
suggesting that only 23 per cent of 18-24 year-olds as a whole are going to
vote. If we then look at young people
growing up in somewhere like Barnsley, it might be even lower.
Q166 Mr O'Brien: People not going to vote does not mean to say
that the council are not engaged.
Mr Page: Absolutely.
Q167 Mr O'Brien: How do you arrive at that view that the young
people are the hardest to engage?
Mr Page: Because when we are
conducting surveys, where we are actually trying to ensure that we have the
correct proportion of people in each of the different age groups in a
community, and we know from the census data, whatever its strengths and
weaknesses, in each street what the profile is, we know that without special
efforts we are going to be under-representing the views of that particular age
group. As a result of that, we will be
making particular efforts to find those sorts of people.
Q168 Chairman: Is that not an indication of your
difficulties as a polling organisation rather than necessarily the difficulties
for a local council?
Mr Page: I think you will have to ask
the councils how easy or difficult they find teenagers as opposed to pensioners
taking part. Our general view is that,
whether it is the council or MORI doing it, until you are socialised, until you
have set up home and have a family, you are generally not that interested in
the council - and of course the dreadful day on which one sets up home and has
a family for many people is now being extended later and later into their lives
- and, as a result, I imagine both of us will say that, quite frankly,
Chairman.
Q169 Mr O'Brien: Have you had any experience in the campaign on the Young People's
Parliament?
Mr Page: I have certainly met with
the Young People's Parliament.
Q170 Mr O'Brien: Have you done a report?
Mr Page: We have not done a report about
it, but I am sure -----
Q171 Mr O'Brien: Because I find that, in my area, where I went
to address some of the candidates, the schools who are voting for candidates
and the response of those canvasses and the undertaking that has grown up is
very impressive.
Mr Page: Yes.
Q172 Mr O'Brien: I consider that there is contact with young
people; the question is that MORI has not caught up with it yet.
Mr Page: I have two observations on
that. There may be something that
colleagues may want to look at. We did
some work for an organisation called Young
People Now, a magazine, that involved some focus groups among younger
people who themselves feel excluded from this process. We also did some analysis of the media
coverage which was almost exclusively negative in terms of how young people
were portrayed. So there are some
interesting things which might be worth picking up on. The BVPI surveys which we have talked about
I think are indicative of some of the experiences that both MORI and councils
have had. If you look at the group aged
18-24, they are about 16 or 17 per cent of the population; if you look at who
has responded to the BVPI survey sent out to a random sample, they are about 5
per cent. So we have to weight the data,
but you know that your 5 per cent is almost certainly an atypical group of
young people and we have missed out on huge segments. You have to work very hard to get relatively small numbers of
people taking part. The other thing I
would say about the Young Parliament, is that I think it is entirely
commendable, I think it is absolutely the right thing to do, but I would
guarantee that, if you asked a representative sample of young people whether
they know much about it or who their representative is, that it may be even
lower than their knowledge of their MP.
Q173 Mr O'Brien: That is something we may go on to. Finally, on this question of consultation,
in your summary to the submission you outline the most difficult challenges for
research and consultation in local government, and you list five items. You never mention community once. Why is that? After all is said and done, local authorities, as you agreed with
me earlier, are there to consult communities: stakeholders, council taxpayers,
business payers. Nowhere in this
conclusion do you mention the word "community".
Mr Page: Quite frankly, we would
think that was so self-evident that we did not even bother mentioning it.
Q174 Mr O'Brien: So we need someone to research MORI.
Mr Page: If you want to.
Q175 Chairman: How can local authorities be consulting
future users as opposed to ones at the present moment? The Select Committee has looked empty
homes. One of the sad things there was
that there was some evidence of one or two refurbishment schemes, where local people were very well consulted,
that everything was put in that they wanted but they still ended up with a lot
of empty homes because they were not consulting with the possible people who
might have moved into the area. In
quite a lot of areas local authorities ought to be looking at future
users. Do you think that is a failure
on their part or is it that it is really almost impossible?
Mr Page: Unless something is very
targeted, it might be quite difficult to predict hypothetical future use. But, as a more general point, Chairman, there
is an issue about non-users of services, and obviously the classic, easy thing
to do is to leave a self-completion questionnaire around a swimming pool or
something like that and ask the receptionist to give it out to everybody who
comes in. There is a broader issue
about the people who do not bother using that swimming pool: Is that because it
is too expensive, or they do not like what is on offer or because it does not
offer women-only sessions, if you are in Bradford or somewhere like that? There is a big issue about making sure you
have looked at users, potential users, people who used to use something and no
longer do, but with all of this there are issues around cost as well.
Q176 Chairman: How good is your organisation at sharing
information? If you do a piece of work
for one local authority, do you make it available to all other local
authorities?
Mr Page: That has been entirely our
approach over the last three decades, that we allow people to compare their
results. Because one key thing to
remember is that if you are looking at people's attitudes, for some services
that local government delivers 30 per cent satisfied would actually be
brilliant. From memory, Gateshead has
the highest level of satisfaction with pavements anywhere in Britain when we
last looked, and it was about 33 per cent.
Gateshead is a great council.
But if you get that level of satisfaction in dustbin cleaning, it would
probably mean the council is about to change political control very
dramatically at the next election. The relative
standing on any question is extremely important and that is something that MORI
provides as a matter of course.
Q177 Chairman: Could I ask you about a different example
now. In Stockport there were
discussions about whether the licensed taxis should be retained. I understand that Stockport Council have
asked you to do a survey. The taxi
proprietors and drivers are very keen to see the questions before they are
asked. I understand that you have told
the council that would not be a good idea and that they should use Section 22,
I think it is, of the Freedom of Information Act to refuse to release that
information. Would it not be far better
to release that information so that the taxi drivers can have a feeling as to
whether the right questions are being asked?
Mr Page: I am quite happy to go
off-line on this one but I am not au fait
with all the 600 or 700 exercises with which we might be engaged across UK
local government.
Q178 Chairman: I am more interested in the principles.
Mr Page: In certain cases, where
something is highly contested, you may want to say, "This is the survey." We
would say: "These are the questions asked, here is the sample method" and be
entirely transparent about that, and the local media, the different stakeholder
groups, like the taxi drivers can reach their own conclusions about the
robustness or otherwise of that exercise.
We are not going to be asking biased questions. In some instances, it is desirable - but I
do not know the local circumstances - for everybody beforehand to agree what
the question wording is, so that there is less contesting of the data and
everything else later on. But it may be
that the two parties' views are so polarised that it is almost impossible to
agree a question wording that we be suitable to both of them. We might also find this in areas such as
hunting, where one person's unbiased question is somebody else's extremely
leading question. As I say, I am very
happy to talk about that off-line and I can go and find out about it.
Q179 Chairman: As a matter of principle, you would prefer
the two groups to agree the questions.
Mr Page: If at all possible, but it
may be that in this instance that is not the case. I cannot say.
Q180 Chairman: Would it not be better, before you do a
survey, for there to be a proper public debate in the newspapers, so that when
people are responding they have a bit more idea of what the issues are rather
than responding to things that are fairly abstract?
Mr Page: That would apply to a whole
range of areas of endeavour. If both
local government and Parliament had more debate about key issues I think that
would be very good for public life in this country.
Q181 Chairman: And you think the debate should occur before
you do the survey rather than afterwards?
Mr Page: Or even - and we would say
this, wouldn't we? - do the survey first, to understand people's views before
they are informed, have the debate, and then do another survey to see if the
debate has shifted opinion one way or the other.
Chairman: On that note, may I thank you
both very much for your evidence.
Witnesses: Dr
Gwendolyn Brandon, Senior Research Officer, Brighton and Hove City Council,
Mr Kevin Sheehan, Head of Community Governance
and Public Management, and Cheryl
King-McDowell, Head of Policy & Partnership, London Borough of
Lewisham, Dr Patricia Roberts-Thomson,
Policy Officer, and Ms Liz Reid-Jones,
Head of Policy & Performance, Leicester City Council, examined.
Q182 Chairman: May I welcome you to the second session of
our evidence session on Local Government Consultation. Could I ask you to identify yourselves for
the record.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: I am Patricia
Roberts-Thomson. I am the lead officer
involved in the consultation with Leicester City Council. I am a policy officer.
Ms Reid-Jones: My name is Liz Reid-Jones. I
am Head of Policy & Performance at Leicester City Council.
Dr Brandon: Good morning, I am Gwen
Brandon, senior researcher, research and consultation, Brighton and Hove City
Council.
Mr Sheehan: I am Kevin Sheehan, I am
Head of Community Governance and Public Management, the London Borough of
Lewisham.
Ms King-McDowell: I am Cheryl King-McDowell,
Head of Policy & Partnership Unit, Central Policy Unit, London Borough of
Lewisham.
Chairman: Does anybody want to say
anything by way of introduction or are you happy to go straight to
questions? Straight to questions.
Q183 Christine Russell: The Chairman has not said this, so I will say
it: if you all agree with each other, you do not need to state your particular
view. My question is a general
one. How important is it for local
authorities to consult stakeholders?
What should that consultation be about?
Should it be about strategic issues or day-to-day provision of public
services?
Ms Reid-Jones: It is very important for us
in Leicester to consult with the local citizens, not just people who live in
the city but also people who come into the city to work, people who visit to go
to the theatre or the nightlife or so on.
It is very important for us to reach everybody. In terms of the issues, whether it is
strategic or specific services, I think it is both of them. We have carried out some good consultation
on a strategic level for our community strategy and I know other authorities
are in similar positions on that. Also,
we have some good examples of specific services where we have carried out
consultation, for example on the building of schools for the future, on our own
special educational needs service, on our night-time economy and so on. We rate consultation quite highly in
Leicester.
Q184 Christine Russell: Where do local councils fit into the
picture? Is it not their role to
represent their local communities?
Ms Reid-Jones: I think there is a role for
both sets of people, for members and for officers.
Q185 Christine Russell: Where is the dividing line between the role
of the local councillor and officers?
Ms Reid-Jones: I think the local councillor
can bring quite a lot of information from surgeries back to the officers who
are doing consultation, and can also be involved in the consultation exercise
in terms of developing questions, they have been involved in focus groups and
so on.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: If I may add to that, we do
such a lot of consultation now. Over
the last 12 months, we have done something like 80. Many of the issues are so complex, so intricate, that in fact we
would not expect .... Even officers do not have all the information. The complexity of some of the consultation
now -----
Q186 Christine Russell: Is that a criticism of the calibre of local
councils nowadays?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: No. I think it is a reflection of the complexity
of government now, that in fact we do have a range of issues. Whether it is the night-time economy or the
care of the elderly or housing tenants associations or race relations in
Leicester, we do not have the answers to all of that, and that is why
consultation is important, to ask people.
We just do not have the answers to everything any longer because of the
complexity of government.
Mr Sheehan: Could I add to that. I think local councillors should be at the
heart of consultation exercises that you are conducting or that we are
conducting in local government. If you
are going to build a new school in an area, like we did last year or the year
before, and you are going to make a big infrastructure investment, you are also
going to establish a new institution which is going to serve the citizens and
people, some of them in a local area, some of them from further afield. Local councillors will want to be a part of
that consultation. It will be quite a
long-running, ongoing consultation process probably before you arrive at the
end result, but they will want to be at the heart of it and they will want to
be contributing to how it is set up, how it is conducted, and they will
certainly want to be involved in it. I
do not think they would want to have a decision made on the basis of their
judgment without actually going further, involving stakeholders, whether they
are young people in the area, whether they are parents in the area, or whether
they are parents beyond the area. They
are at the heart of it and part of it.
We would see them as part of the driving force.
Q187 Mr Clelland: Are they not elected to exercise judgment?
Mr Sheehan: They are elected to exercise
judgment and they do exercise judgment but they will be the first to say, "I
think we need to consult further on this particular issue" - if you like
building a new school or making some infrastructure adjustments in the area -
because they recognise that they get one shot at being elected, once every so
many years, and all of the questions that arise over a period of four years do
not get dealt with in that shot. They
are aware of the pressure from their constituents. Their constituents want, as Ben was saying earlier, to be
listened to, and they want their views to be heard not just once every four
years but on an ongoing basis.
Ms King-McDowell: I could give you some examples
where our local council, involved in scrutiny committees, has involved local
people in some of the discussions and thinking, and that has informed their
thinking. The Public Accounts Select
Committee invited local residents to comment on the PFI discussions; the Joint
Select Committee on Social Services has invited foster carers and other carers
to participate in the discussion, and that has informed thinking. We had an Environment Select Committee that
held a transport review. It was held in
the town centre and people were invited to come in and use the video booth and
that was a way of engaging people. It
was very much a partnership informed discussion.
Q188 Mr Clelland: Is it not just a way of local authorities saying,
"Well, if we get it wrong, it is your fault because we asked you first"?
Dr Brandon: I think there is a
misconception about the extent to which decisions are influenced, if you listen
to what my colleagues here have said. I
would say that very seldom, from my experience, is a consultation exercise undertaken
where everything is up for grabs. The
degree to which decisions can be influenced by the responses back varies
enormously, so that would influence the type of consultation we do, the role
the councillors have and so on. I think
it really depends what it is you are consulting on and what level of decisions
can be influenced.
Ms Reid-Jones: That may particularly be the
case in terms of statutory consultation.
What can be influenced in statutory consultation is often a lot less
than can be in terms of a blank sheet of paper, if you like.
Q189 Chris Mole: I think you are saying that the degree of
influence consultation can have as an impact on the decision-making process is
horses for courses. You might also
agree that, as part of explaining the consultation process, you need to be
upfront about what the likely impact might be.
Can you give any examples where the outcome of consultation has had an
identifiable impact on a particular decision relating local authority services?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: In Leicester the housing
stock options consultation has had an effect.
That was a 12-month consultation.
A large number of public meetings, focus groups and smaller activities,
fieldwork, etcetera, actually led to the decision to retain the housing stock
within council control, so that was an extensive consultation that did result
in a very clear decision - partly because a decision had to be made, but that
was a good example. Another example
would be a consultation on community cohesion in Leicester which has led to a
very clear community cohesion strategy and the implementation of that strategy
now. That was different again because
it was a new area, so we were starting off, in a sense, with a blank sheet of
paper, but the consultation there was with, I think, 199 people, all over the
city, a range of community groups and voluntary organisations as well, and that
has led to very clear perceptions within Leicester of what community cohesion
was for Leicester and how it should be addressed.
Mr Sheehan: In Lewisham we did a best
value review of transport a couple of years ago and we had a whole range of
consultation mechanisms to talk to people about various transport issues and
transport related matters and we used elements of a citizens' panel, we used
focus groups, we used neighbourhood management forums, and we used our annual
residents' survey - all those factors.
The outcome was to redirect a significant amount of our budget towards
an investment in our highways and transport infrastructure, which probably
would not have happened, certainly to the extent that it did, if we did not
have the amount of feedback that we got about how important it was to our
citizens. That is a fairly
straightforward budget issue which made a difference.
Q190 Christine Russell: To what extent do you think the increase in
consultation exercises is attributable to the decline in turnout in local
elections? It is a response?
Mr Sheehan: We have a directly elected
mayor in Lewisham. We are very
interested in issues of engagement, participation and turnout. We live in a much more complex society
now. In Lewisham we have 250,000 people
and over 35 per cent of our population are from ethnic minority groups. If you go down into the younger age groups,
it is even more significant than that. I
think over 50 per cent of our school population are from ethnic
minorities. We have a huge amount of
new arrivals. We have had to find
different ways of communicating our population and engaging them and making
sure that we know what they want us to do and what is possible, what the
parameters are. So I do not think it is
necessarily a response to low turnout, I think it is a response to a much more
complex social circumstance in which we find ourselves.
Q191 Christine Russell: Do you have any evidence in your three
authorities of where the local authorities have gone to a particular area and
done some consultation which has resulted in improved turnout at subsequent
elections?
Dr Brandon: I was going to be a bit more
contradictory and say that I do not think it is a response to low turnout - in
fact, I do not think it has a great deal to do with increases in wanting to
know what people think generally. I
think an industry has grown up around it.
I think when people carry out consultation in local authorities it is
often a knee-jerk reaction and they do not have the skills and the ability to
know why they are doing it and whether a decision is going to be
influenced. I am not saying this is across
the board, and of course local authorities vary, but it is almost a treadmill,
and it does become in lots and lots of cases a tick-box exercise.
Q192 Christine Russell: Who is putting your authority on the
treadmill?
Dr Brandon: I would not say it is
necessarily for our authority, but for some authorities it does happen because
it is seen as a good thing to do. To
consult is seen as a good thing to do: "It is good practice. You must consult."
Q193 Chairman: Is it good practice or an excuse for putting
off making a decision?
Dr Brandon: It could be both, and often
is.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: If you read the submission
of the Audit Commission, there is a lot of references that they encourage
councils. This is seen as being good
practice. It is part of the CPA now
that grew up around the Best Value thing.
There is this huge demand that we consult as much as possible. Policies and strategies and developments are
not seen to be legitimate until we have consulted with our people. The complexity of these issues is what is
driving us forward. Also, there is a statutory
requirement with a lot of our consultation that we must do it. It is not optional. I have here some evidence from some of our
current consultations in Leicester - and perhaps, Chairman, I could pass these
up.
Q194 Chairman: At the end of the session, yes.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: There are 22 here and nine
of them are statutory and we have to do them.
So there is a range of complex issues which is driving us and I am not
quite so sure whether it is being driven by low turnout.
Mr Sheehan: I think appropriate
consultation is what we would try to aim for.
We recognise that, on the one hand, there is a significant driver in
lots of central policy to include a massive amount of consultation, but, on the
other hand, we realistically know that we cannot work with our population and
our citizens unless we engage them in how we do things. I will give you an example of something I do
not think would work if you did not consult properly and engage properly. For us, one of the most significant things
that has happened in Lewisham over the last few years is the success of Sure
Start initiatives. Part of their
success is the time taken to engage and consult properly with local
populations, local areas and local people about how you set up Sure Start: What
are the issues that are going to have the biggest impact on that area? How are they as citizens going to take part
in that change that the area is going to go through? It is allowing them to have some say in the design of services in
their area and how they are brought together.
That may be something as simple as bringing a housing area together with
social services officers and an early years nursery. Giving people the chance to have that voice and to be listened to
about that will mean that the ownership of it as a result will be much greater
and therefore the respect for and the engagement with what the objectives of it
are will be that much more important.
Q195 Mr Clelland: Might the consultation process actually have
a detrimental effect on turnout, in so far as people feel, "It does not matter
who we vote for. They are going to
consult us anyway, so why bother? We
are going to be taking the decisions in any case."
Dr Brandon: There is an element that if
you consult people and you do not respond then you have completely
disengaged. There is a massive danger,
in terms of the amount of consultation that local authorities do, be it
statutory or that they decide themselves, that you use up the goodwill of
people. Certainly, say, with
regeneration issues, you go out to the same people and ask, "What do you
want? How do you want the money spent? What are issues for you?" then maybe in five
years time another bid has been put in and the same questions are asked, and
there is a risk of disengaging people if you do not respond.
Ms Reid-Jones: I think there is an issue
about managing expectations as well. We
go to people and ask, "What do you want?" and it is not about saying, "Yes, we
can deliver that." We have to be
realistic in what we can and cannot deliver as well. I think Ben touched on that earlier.
Q196 Mr Page: We all know there are many more consultations
taking place, particularly in the voluntary sector, so I would like to probe
the possible effect that these consultations might have on the long-term
relationship between the local authority and the community. The Chairman, being a hard man, said this
may be a way of getting out of making a decision. Surely a local authority going to do a voluntary consultation has
to be completely relaxed on the result, because if they do not accept the
result they do not listen. It seems to
me that unless you are very, very careful you are going to find yourself having
a problem on how this consultation will affect your long-term relationship with
the community. Am I right? If you do not accept what they say you are
odds-on a loser; if you keep on consulting, you do not need your local
councillors, but then your local authority and your community will get, as they
have found in the charity world, consultation fatigue. Are they not going down a rather dangerous
route?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: The answer to that is yes,
it is a dangerous route because you increase your relationship with the
community if you do what they want but you damage that relationship if you
consult and then do not do what they want.
We have an unfortunate example of the latter in Leicester around the
swimming baths. We consulted, and for
economic reasons which we found it difficult to explain to the public we found
we needed to close the swimming baths.
In a few years time we will build a bigger one and it will be better but
in the meantime we lost a lot of goodwill, because in consulting we could not
consult and say, "But we have a different timeframe. If we leave it as it is, it is going to be massive extra expense
to bring it up to scratch. There is no
parking and there are a few other things around it, there is the whole range of
other issues around it." Also, in that
instance, the media got involved and were very hostile to the council's
response. We had to consult, because
you cannot close a swimming pool without consulting, but in fact the economics
of the case were so poor and it was difficult to say, "In the future we will
replace the swimming baths with bigger and better" and in the meantime it was
difficult.
Mr Sheehan: There are different types of
consultation. On the one hand it is
about informing people what the circumstances are and giving them the amount of
information you have and being transparent about information.
Q197 Mr Page: That is marketing, not consulting.
Mr Sheehan: You could call it one end of
the consultation spectrum. On the other
end of it, you have an open decision, whereby you are saying "We will do what
you want to do on this." The assumption
that you might get a result from consulting is not always the case either,
because when you consult you get many results.
It is not a vote, necessarily; it is a whole range of different views
coming back. As to how you weight those
and how important some of them are, you need to take into account all sorts of
factors.
Q198 Mr Page: I am sorry, you cannot get away with that,
because if you go for a consultation, at the end of that consultation you have
to ask your voter to define what they want of a series of courses of
action. Just to say you get a random
variant back in fact makes the consultation worthless.
Mr Sheehan: It depends if it is a yes or
no question. If the question is: "Do we
want a new swimming pool?" or "Do we want a new school?" then you will get a
vote on that, if that is the route you choose to down. But if it is a much more directional than
that and you are asking: What are the criteria that you want to use to, say,
invest in a particular area, then it might be a much more complex consultation
exercise. It is not necessarily about a
vote, it is a much more informative theme, where you are looking for views.
Dr Brandon: Giving information is not
consultation. That is where I think a
lot of public bodies generally misunderstand.
You have people here who work in consultation and research elements of
local authorities. There will be lots
and lots of other officers around local authorities who do not know about
consultation research but will be carrying it out or will be told they have to
do it by whatever statutory body. In a
way, perhaps you are talking to the wrong people here. Certainly there is a misunderstanding of
what consultation is. As we put in our evidence, what you are actually talking
about a lot of the time is public information: telling people what you are
going to do, as, possibly a PR exercise or a way of being polite. It only becomes consultation when you ask
somebody, "Do you want a drink?" and then "Would you like tea or coffee?" It has to be a two-way process.
Ms King-McDowell: There are occasions where we
have surveyed people to get an idea of what their views are, for us to develop
and improve services. We conducted a
quality of life survey which involved partners, which involved the voluntary
community sector. We used the Lewisham
Strategic Partnership as a vehicle for gathering information. That survey was commissioned and went out to
a large number of Lewisham residents and the purpose of that exercise was to
gather information about the quality of life in Lewisham and to help inform and
develop and improve services.
Q199 Mr Betts: We have talked about the increase, whether it
is getting information, participation, consultation, research, but there is
hardly a lot more going on in terms of engagement with the public. Have any of your authorities done any
analysis of the burden that imposes on the workforce of the council, and,
indeed, what costs are involved - because you always have choice as to what to
spend money on?
Dr Brandon: It is a huge burden. It is increasingly a large burden on local
authorities - so, for example, are the recent stock options that the council
has had to engage in now. Arguably you
could say there a message from central government about how that was to be done
and what answers should and should not come back, but it involved a hell of a
lot of money for local authorities to carry out. It is an increasing burden. Councils, local authorities, public bodies have not understood
that research and consultation is an expertise. There is a feeling that anybody can do a survey. That is wrong. There are experts who are trained in research and consultation,
yet people are loath to invest that capacity in local authorities so that there
are people there who could maintain standards and review and ensure that
consultation when it is needed is done properly.
Mr Sheehan: I would differ from that, in
that in Lewisham there is, I would say, a big political will on behalf of the
Mayor and politicians in general to invest in consultation to try to get it
right and to look at new ways of consulting and to try different things. Because we recognise that things get tired
and things get played out and sometimes things stop working, but also we
recognise, as some of my colleagues have said, that there is a lot of
consultation and some of it is duplicated and some of it does not have the
appropriate objectives laid out beforehand.
We are trying to cut out as much of that as possible and to try to
introduce some sort of consistency across the board in the council but also
with our partners in the public sector in the borough we have introduced a
mechanism to try to reduce the amount of inappropriate consultation but to
invest in the stuff that really matters and which can make a difference, both
to the citizens and to any policy development that we have.
Q200 Mr Betts: On the cost of consultation, does anybody sit
down -----
Ms Reid-Jones: Yes, we have the figures for
Leicester.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: This is an estimated cost -
and I stress that - but we have considered that consultation costs about half a
million pounds a year. From a survey we
have done of current consultations, of 22 that we have done, about 20 per cent
actually employed consultants. The average
cost of that is about £8,500. If we had
80 consultations over a year, on 20 per cent at £8,500, that comes to
£170,000. We have about 60 people that
we use in-house, so we would save about £5,000 for staff costs, training and
that sort of thing, so we are looking at about £470,000 as a rough
estimate. This is big business. This is serious money that councils are
paying out for consultation.
Q201 Mr Betts: You talk about staff costs. Is that specialist staff?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: No, this is just ordinary
staff who are doing this as part of their job.
Q202 Mr Betts: Do they get advice and training about how to
do consultations so that they are not biased?
Ms Reid-Jones: In Leicester we do not have
any specialist consultation and research staff. We have a number of policy officers and about half are dedicated
to consultation and research. For other
people in departments it will be a part of their day job, which raises the
issues my colleague raised about skills and capacity as well, but we do provide
a programme of specialist training run through a corporate officer group who do
have some expertise. We buy in training
as well. We send people on different
courses.
Dr Brandon: I would say local
authorities waste thousands and thousands ... Millions of pounds are wasted on
consultation, because they do not have experts who can review the tender that
comes in from the likes of whichever company it may be, Ben Page's company or
any other. They do not have the
expertise to review that and know whether they are getting value for money, so
a lot of money is wasted on consultations that need not have been done.
Q203 Chris Mole: It has been suggested that consultation can
help local authorities improve value for money in service delivery or even save
money. Can you point to any practical
examples in your experience where consultation has saved money?
Mr Sheehan: I would give an example
where performance improved considerably.
I do not think it was after consultation on its own, but as part of a
package, a Best Value Review which we did in Lewisham on pupils at school. We did a lot of work with parents as part of
the proposals that we were making. Over
a period of time the improvement rate was very significant for us, and the
amount that we were spending on the service did not grow, certainly. I would say the big impact was to engage
people in the problem and engage them in finding some of the solutions.
Q204 Mr O'Brien: Do the elected members get involved with
consultation in your authorities?
Ms Reid-Jones: Yes, they do.
Q205 Mr O'Brien: How?
Ms Reid-Jones: In different ways, depending
on the issue on which we are consulting.
It might be a ward issue, so the ward's members would be involved.
Q206 Mr O'Brien: How do they get involved? How do they consult with their ward?
Ms Reid-Jones: They would feed back
information from their surgeries. Also,
if we were running focus groups -----
Q207 Mr O'Brien: That is complaints more than anything else
from surgeries.
Ms Reid-Jones: Some of it is.
Q208 Mr O'Brien: A lot of it is! The question is how do they consult with their electorate?
Ms Reid-Jones: We have involved members in
focus groups that we have run. We have
had them coming along and talking about the issues that are pertinent to a ward
issue.
Q209 Mr O'Brien: Are focus groups open to the public?
Ms Reid-Jones: That would be a
representative sample.
Q210 Mr O'Brien: If there is an invited audience, how can we
call that consultation? If you consult,
it should be open to all.
Dr Brandon: It depends. We would tend not to hold a focus group that
was a random sample. We would hold a focus group where we wanted to try to
cover more qualitative, deeper issues, so it may be Asian mothers or it may be
with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people. We would not use a focus group for a general cross-section of
-----
Q211 Mr O'Brien: How would you get to the general consensus?
Dr Brandon: Things that Ben talked about
earlier. It is a variety. It really is horses for courses.
Q212 Mr O'Brien: Give me some examples.
Dr Brandon: We have things like
citizens' panels, post-out services, on-the-street surveys, people visiting
homes. It really will depend what you
we want to know and who you want to talk to.
Q213 Mr O'Brien: Have the new council constitutions announced
in the Local Government Act 2000 made it easier for local people to be involved
in decision-making?
Mr Sheehan: We would say yes in
Lewisham.
Q214 Mr O'Brien: In what way?
Mr Sheehan: We have a very accountable
mayor. On our latest survey results, he
is more well-known than any of the MPs in the area, for instance.
Q215 Mr O'Brien: Does that make it easier for decision-making?
Mr Sheehan: It does because they have
access to him. He visits every ward in
the borough and has public meetings. He
also visits community groups.
Q216 Mr O'Brien: We are living in a democracy. You are saying, "We have a mayor and he
knows everything, so decision-making is easy."
The inference there is that it is through the mayor. Why have elected councillors if the mayor is
the one who is going to make all the decisions?
Mr Sheehan: Because local councillors
are also significantly involved in those ward visits as well, because they are
will be accompanying him on his ward visits.
We also have area forums which are, again, another forum where
councillors can consult with the public and get views and speak directly and
listen.
Q217 Mr Clelland: Can the mayor launch a consultation exercise
without the approval of the full council?
Mr Sheehan: It would depend on the
scheme of delegation.
Q218 Mr Clelland: But he could.
Mr Sheehan: He could.
Q219 Mr Clelland: Is the politics of the mayor the same as the
majority group on the council?
Mr Sheehan: In Lewisham it is.
Q220 Mr Clelland: If the mayor was having difficulty with a
particular project he wanted to push through and he was getting resistance from
the council, is it possible that he could launch a consultation exercise and
bypass the majority of the councillors?
Mr Sheehan: I would imagine the leader
could do that as well. I mean, I would
not say that is particularly the mayoral thing. Anybody could do that. In
fact, an effective cabinet member could probably do it as well.
Q221 Christine Russell: Getting
Close to Communities is going to be one of the themes of round six of the
Beacon awards. Do you think this will
lead to improvements in the quality of consultations or will it simply lead to
an increase in the volume of the consultations?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: In Leicester we are try to
improve our quality all the time. It
varies - we are honest about that - but we certainly try to improve it. We make sure we have a representative
sample; we make sure the questions we ask deal with what we can actually
change. We are very strong on making
sure we do not ask questions we cannot do anything about or that we cannot
change. Then we try very carefully to
act on the results that we get. If we
cannot, we then try to explain: "I am sorry, you wanted more parking, but in
fact we have the transport strategy which also involves air quality, looks at
long-range forecasts for congestion or office accommodation in the city. This is impossible." We try to improve the quality all the time
and hopefully the Beacon council does share good practice around and gives us
good ideas.
Dr Brandon: I would say, yes, it does
run the risk of more consultation. Ben
talked about the distinction between research and consultation. The emphasis is very much on consultation,
but often, if you do your research beforehand and you have the capacity as a
public body to do your research beforehand, you may well find that the
questions have been answered. There is
always this drive that we must go to the horse's mouth all the time. Actually, you do not always need to. It may be politic to do so and you may need
to do so to tweak specifics locally, but there are vast bodies of research and
information about most of the questions that local authorities deal with. So if you do not get that front end of back
end or whatever in place, so that your local authority stores results from
previous consultation, shares them, has ways of sharing data and reports with
colleagues ... We have a system in Brighton that whenever anybody says, "We want
to do some consultation," we look to see what has been done before and
encourage them to look to see what has been done before, what other colleagues
have done, what other local authorities have done, and that will inform and
make their consultation better. Without
that, I think you do run the risk of duplication.
Q222 Chairman: You are expressing some concern that if the
Government is going to have this emphasis on the Beacon theme for consultation,
then it has to be on good consultation rather than on, as you are implying, a
lot of poor quality consultation.
Dr Brandon: Yes. And, as I say, consultation is only half of
the story because consultation produces data and it produces results and you
have to make sure that that data and those results are also kept and available
to feed into decision-making consequently.
Q223 Mr Betts: One of the criticisms often of local
government is that every council tries to reinvent the wheel. How far have you disseminated good practice
in the development of consultation either within the council or outside? How much have you taken on board other good
ideas from elsewhere?
Mr Sheehan: I think we need to do a lot
more. As my colleague has said, one of
the issues that arose because of Best Value was that cycle of consultation
going on and on around the place, but I think we need to do a lot more about
disseminating what we know. But, don't
forget, a lot of issues are local and very local. You still need to bear that in mind, I would say. For us in Lewisham, certainly, we are trying
to make sure that across the public sector you do not get five different
agencies consulting in one small area about very, very similar issues. We are trying to bring people together so
that actually we can be a bit more strategic and coherent about that.
Q224 Mr Betts: They are very localised issues, but very
often they are the same local issues in different authorities. Whether it be stock transfer or the closure
of a swimming pool or whatever, they keep re-occurring. How far are you working with each other?
Ms Reid-Jones: You can maybe not transfer
the issue but you can transfer the learning about the process, the pitfalls
which you might have fallen down or things which were good practice. Patricia has spoken at a national conference
about the way we did our community cohesion consultation work. We have also set
up some twinning links with a community cohesion pathfinder with Wigan Council,
learning and sharing best practice from that.
But I think my colleague is right, we still have an awfully long way to
go on this. It is not that the
willingness is not there; it maybe comes down to some of the other issues, like
the capacity that is available, as well.
Ms King-McDowell: If you are doing a
consultation exercise, the preparation and research in advance of the actual
exercise should mean that you are exploring what other authorities have done,
other organisations, and, if you have got that background, it might be that you
decide that the issues are similar and you can contact the organisation or that
authority directly and share that learning rather than conduct another
consultation exercise for the sake of it.
So I think there are ways.
Certainly we are part of the London Network which looks at sharing good
practice in consultation.
Q225 Mr Betts: How much should central government be
doing? Is it doing enough to ensure
that good practice is known by authorities, that there is somewhere you can go
to identify whether another council has done this and done it well or not.
Dr Brandon: The resources are
there. If you are a good researcher or
you have the capacity you will find them out.
Central government does make things available. The Audit Commission has produced links. One of the problems is also that central
government itself is guilty of not producing terribly good advice for
consultation and local authorities where they have more expertise may then be
critical. There may be a capacity
problem as well in some of the departments of central government. We have had a recent DfES consultation. It is statutory, we have to do it, it is
deeply flawed, it may put vulnerable people at risk. Lots of local authorities have tried to feed back to the DfES to say,
"This is flawed." So good practice sits
in certain pockets. We need to make
links perhaps more with our universities as well locally and use their good practice
and share.
Ms King-McDowell: The Civic Pioneers
information that has been released recently has been quite useful in helping to
share good practice and examples.
Documents such as that and research such as that is helpful.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: On this topic, we are
produced a consultation bulletin which goes to everybody at Leicester City
Council involved with consultation and with our partners. On the latest draft one, we are sharing good
practice with Farnborough Council, which is using text messaging to reach young
people. It is a means not only of
letting people within all of our council know but also within the wider
community of Leicester and Leicestershire, because this goes to the county as
well.
Dr Brandon: But good practice is no substitute
for having controls. Again, there is
this assumption that you can take a horse to water, but if they are a junior
officer in some part of the local authority who has been told, "You have to do
this consultation," and they have no skills to find out about research or
information that has gone on before, then you are going to end up with poor
quality. The same things would not
happen in other professions. If you
wanted to have somebody who was an architect, you would have to have
professional standards. With research
and consultation often in public it is assumed anybody can do it.
Q226 Mr Clelland: There is a lot of cynicism around these days
of people in the world of politics. Do
you find this finds its way into the consultation exercise? Do people say to you "It is just a public
relations exercise, the decisions have all been taken, what we say does not
matter?" and if you do find that sort of cynicism, how do you overcome it?
Mr Sheehan: There is a question of
fatigue and you particularly find that when people feel you are asking a
question that has already been answered.
I would say do not do that. If
you have an answer and decide on a route, do not pour salt on it because you
are wasting people's time and they will be very cynical about that. That is the simple answer.
Dr Brandon: What we have done, as we put
in our written submission, is we have brought in a research governance and
project approval. If consultation comes our way and that is a learning process,
getting officers to realise that it has to come through the corporate process,
if it is, as you say, a rubber stamping exercise then it is not given approval
because it is not a genuine piece of research or consultation. It is something else, it is a public
information exercise or something else so it would not be approved.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: There is a complexity to
this because often there is a statute renewal from Parliament that we
consult. In some of the big major
strategies like the environment, air quality and transport, the actual room for
manoeuvre or room for influence is very small but, nevertheless, you have to go
through a very required procedure to fulfil the requirements.
Q227 Mr Clelland: I understand that but you may be required to
do it.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: This can be misleading
because people can say "Right, I am going to set an example, we are going to
improve parking in Leicester" ---
Q228 Mr Clelland: How do you overcome the cynicism?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: It is about public
expectation and then you get into issues about information because the flipside
of consultation is that councils need better mechanisms about information: "In
fact, I am sorry but we just cannot do this because it conflicts with much
wider strategies. There is not the
opportunity. It is too expensive". Often we do not get the opportunity to put
that other side because it seems to be one way, we are required to consult but
we do not have that opportunity to say that, in fact, we can only consult on a
very narrow range because we are bound by lots of other national things.
Q229 Chairman: Government is requiring too much
consultation, in fact?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Yes, in many cases.
Q230 Chris Mole: Is it that it is over-specified?
Dr Brandon: Some of it is poor
consultation, some of it is not actually genuine consultation. Talk about cynicism, stock options was a
very good example of cynicism where the public saw this was not a genuine
consultation and there were separate answers which had to come back and if they
did not come back the right way then the exercise would have to be done
again. Yes, there is a lot of
consultation that is repetitive, the information is there already.
Q231 Chris Mole: What is to stop you wrapping your own stuff
around some of that to turn directed centrally less than useful consultation
into a more useful product?
Mr Sheehan: I would say something like -
I do not know what it is called now - the UDP, that huge tome that all councils
had to produce and consult on. Not very
meaningful for most citizens, certainly, I have not met anyone who ever read
one and understood it but actually what I think you can do with that and that
statutory consultation is you can pick the things out of it which are
meaningful for people. If in your UDP
or its equivalent, or whatever it is now, you are going to have town centre
development or things which will make a difference, in Lewisham's case the East
London Line, things which will make a difference to people's lives, then those
are the things that you consult on around that statutory process which are
meaningful for people if you can pick it out.
That is what you have to try and do to reduce that level of cynicism.
Mr O'Brien: How would you advise
Leicester to achieve best practice on any consultation?
Chairman: Come on, you get full marks
for being honest.
Q232 Mr O'Brien: If it is not possible then say so. We are looking for best practice.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: For best practice to be
instituted we need a lot more commitment from members to understand and to work
through and to realise what the consultation means.
Q233 Mr O'Brien: Members of the council?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Members of the council, yes,
because if the members are very keen on the consultation, they want to see it
introduced and then in fact that filters down.
Q234 Mr O'Brien: How involved are the members of the council
now?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Variable, I think would be
the honest answer.
Q235 Mr O'Brien: If they are not involved, how can they be
held responsible for not implementing best practice?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Some of them are involved.
Q236 Mr O'Brien: Some of them. I am asking how do we get best practice every time?
Ms Reid-Jones: I think there is a lot about
the skills and capacity issue as well of officers. You need officers who are doing the consultation to have the
right set of skills so they can engage with other people as well. We have guidelines but maybe we need to set
them at higher standard.
Q237 Mr O'Brien: Who sets the guidelines?
Ms Reid-Jones: We have a corporate officer
group which has set the guidelines and it has some member buy-in as well. Maybe we need to go one step further and we
have started to look at how we evaluate the consultation exercises, and this
issue of value for money that has been raised.
Q238 Mr O'Brien: Do you have a scrutiny committee that goes
into this?
Ms Reid-Jones: We probably have not made as
best use of our scrutiny committee as we could have done in terms of this.
Q239 Chris Mole: Is this the point that MORI were making about
talking to the organisation? If you are
citizen focused and you want to listen, you will probably be more likely to get
it right across the organisation.
Ms Reid-Jones: We are not saying that our
people are not interested in that.
Q240 Mr O'Brien: Mr Sheenan wants to answer.
Mr Sheehan: I agree with the point that
it is very important to have political engagement. In Lewisham we have got the Mayor's Consultation Board and the
Mayor sees it as part of his role to make sure that we have got consistent,
coherent consultation. He has got a
lead member, also, on the cabinet who leads on consultation.
Q241 Mr O'Brien: How do you get best practice every time?
Mr Sheehan: I wish I could say we got
best practice every time. I think we
get a lot more best practice ---
Q242 Mr O'Brien: You cannot get best practice then?
Mr Sheehan: I would not like to say
that. Our ambition is to get it every
time.
Dr Brandon: In Brighton and Hove, as we
put it, we have endeavoured to make sure that we do. It is not just best practice because that has an opt-in, it is
aspirational, this is actual standards, ethical standards, methodological
standards, it is not something you can opt into and you can opt out of. The buy-in in that will have to come from
managers in different directorates ensuring that their officers understand that
there is a process to go through. They
have to put down their methodology, they have to detail what the consultation
is about, that they have done some desk research into it. It is then reviewed
by myself and my colleagues who are experts in research and consultation and
then we help and advise and tell them how to improve the products, improve
their piece of consultation research; if they cannot, it is not approved. It is
a new process but it is beginning to show results.
Q243 Mr Clelland: In the evidence from Brighton and Hove you
say that a number of activities are encouraged to ensure that consultation is
inclusive and, where necessary, targeted.
Can you tell us how your research approvals process ensures that the
consultation is inclusive?
Dr Brandon: It is a form of a couple of
pages for work that is initiated by officers or officers contracting
consultants on behalf of the council.
There are three questions, I think, off the top of my head, that refer
to equalities and equal opportunities.
They say specifically "Please detail in your methodology how you are
taking on board equalities issues, equal opportunities issues". We expect to see, if it is relevant to the
piece of consultation being undertaken, that translations would be available,
interpreters would be available, large print format would be available,
whatever was appropriate for the piece of consultation which was being
undertaken. If that is not there we would then question the officer and say
"Who is it you want to speak to? Which
stakeholders?" and then again it would be making appropriate suggestions to
ensure that they cover equalities.
Q244 Clive Betts: Lewisham, you talk about the Mayor's role
with his various boards and trying to make sure there is consultation with
different groups, can you talk about how the Mayor consults with young people
because they are one of the hardest groups to get any proper engagement with on
these matters?
Mr Sheehan: Yes. That was one of the things the Mayor picked
up when he first got elected, that he felt he did not have the voice of young
people. We have done a few things, I am
not saying it is not comprehensive but we have a young mayor in Lewisham.
Q245 Chairman: What do you call young?
Mr Sheehan: What do we call them?
Q246 Chairman: What do you call young?
Mr Sheehan: He is 15, so he is young in
my book anyway. He can be up to 18, I
think it is, so basically in secondary school.
We ran elections last year in all of the secondary schools and youth
clubs and local college. The turn-out
for the young mayor was something like 44 per cent, so quite high in percentage
terms to other turn-outs. The young
mayor also has advisers, I think it is about 20 other young people who are part
of that process and who are engaged in that process. We use various techniques to test some of our policies against
some of the ideas which have come from the young mayor and the young mayor's
panel. We have got, also, a young
persons citizens panel which has about 500 young people on this panel and we
use them and consult with them regularly on all aspects of policy, not just
things which supposedly affect young people, on all aspects of life.
Q247 Clive Betts: It sounds like you have a young persons'
consultation industry? Has it made any
difference?
Mr Sheehan: I think it has. Most of us
were concerned with the number of young people who were going on to get on to
the electoral register and this is a process which engages them in the early
stages of decision making, they see how things work.
Q248 Clive Betts: Do they really make decisions?
Mr Sheehan: We have given them some
money to spend on things.
Q249 Chairman: How much?
Mr Sheehan: £25,000. It is not a huge amount of money but it is
significant for a young person of that age who probably has not had access to
anything like it. There are some
officers in the council who would like access to it as well. We have tried, also, to involve them in the
life of democracy in the borough so they come to certain council meetings and
they get a chance to talk to all the councillors about exercises that they have
been involved in and engaged in. We
have had occasion, also, for the young mayor and his advisers to come and
inform your colleagues here in Parliament on certain aspects of stuff that is
going on in Lewisham. We are beginning
to develop an opportunity for young people to have a voice.
Ms King-McDowell: We have also given them the
opportunity for skills in terms of how to prepare a manifesto and how to
present. It has been a development opportunity for them as well and also
thinking about issues which affect young people's lives: crimes, safety, those
kinds of issues. It is about the
process as well as the result they get.
Q250 Mr Clelland: Staying with this theme of consulting young
people, Leicester City Council have set up the Children's Rights Service which
is designed to consult young people in the council's care about the services
that they receive. Can you tell us how
that is working out?
Ms Reid-Jones: Unfortunately, I do not have
any information on that.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: I am not sure that we said
that. Certainly we have consulted
extensively ---
Q251 Mr Clelland: You do not have the Children's Rights Service
in Leicester?
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Not that I am aware of.
Q252 Mr Clelland: We have been misinformed.
Dr Roberts-Thomson: Not that we put in our evidence.
Chairman: It is the IDA who put it
forward as an example which is quite interesting on their front. We will pursue that further with them. On that note, can I thank you all very much
for your evidence.
