The Candidate: are the best people representing Labour at local level?

So, Labour will devolve more power and money to the regions and give local authorities access to millions of pounds currently controlled by Whitehall. Great! Ed Miliband, launching labour’s local government innovation task force report, also called for the establishment of Public Accounts Committees to ensure value for money in public services. The implication is that the leadership is not confident that councils currently scrutinise effective spending of resources. It is that lack of confidence that has led to the century of centralisation that Ed referred to in his Guardian article. The establishment of cabinets and scrutiny committees was supposed to provide effective monitoring of the local decision-making process, with backbench councillors, responsive to local needs, holding the executive to account. But are we confident that Labour councillors provide the democratic in-puts to decision-making bodies? In other words, are we getting the best possible people with the right skills, knowledge, experience and political commitment to represent Labour at local level?

Local Labour Party branches up and down the country will be selecting candidates for their local authority elections, which will take place on the same day as the 2015 general election. The councillors elected on 7^th May will receive significantly larger  number of votes than in non-general election years, simply because turnout will be around 60% rather than the usual 30% or so for local authority elections. But will that higher turnout do anything to address the democratic deficit that exists with councils? Not really.

As the Electoral Reform Society has recently found, 111 councils have at least 75% of councillors from a single party. About half of these are Labour authorities, with such secure majorities that any real concept of accountability to the electorate as a whole is meaningless. In ‘safe’ Labour wards, where in many cases usual turnout for council elections can be down to around 20%, nomination as the Labour candidate pretty much guarantees election for a four year term, with, incidentally, an allowance that equates to the earning of, say, a full-time teaching assistant. In wards where there is a sitting Labour councillor, short-lists of one are not unusual, so ‘here’s another term, see you in 2019’.

Labour is rightly proud of supporting, and in many cases introducing fair, equitable and robust employment selection procedures into local government and other public and private bodies. Yet little has changed (with the exception of all women shortlist) when it comes to the selection process for local authority council candidates.

The selection meeting is still the first chance members get to assess the capabilities of perspective councillors. This means in ‘safe’ wards, we are choosing someone to represent the party and the community for four years on the basis of a selection meeting that would fail to meet even the first principles of recruitment and appointment procedures. In my ward, the entire selection process was made-up of a candidate’s statement on one side of A4, five minutes speaking and 10 minutes for questions. No job description, no person specification, no forethought to questions, and no accountability. Where were the questions on ‘vision’, skills and knowledge, leadership, and experience, let alone commitment to Labour principles? We’d expect more from even the least experienced candidate for a part time job with the local authority.

It is high time we brought our internal selection processes in line with what we would expect at work. We should develop proper person specifications, and develop a process to ensure that our councillors (and MPs for that matter) can effectively represent their communities.