Labour in local government by Adam Harrison

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base? • HAZEL BLEARS • STELLA CREASY • JANE ROBERTS • GERRY STOKER • STEVE REED •

Progress is an organisation of Labour party members which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century. We seek to discuss, develop and advance the means to create a more free, equal and democratic Britain, which plays an active role in Europe and the wider the world. Diverse and inclusive, we work to improve the level and quality of debate both within the Labour party, and between the party and the wider progressive communnity.

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

Published in January 2008 Honorary President: Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP Chair: Stephen Twigg Vice chairs: Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, Chris Leslie, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, Baroness Delyth Morgan, Meg Munn MP Patrons: Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP, Wendy Alexander MSP, Ian Austin MP, Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP, Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, Rt Hon John Denham MP, Parmjit Dhanda MP, Natascha Engel MP, Lorna Fitzsimons, Rt Hon Peter Hain MP, John Healey MP, Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Rt Hon Beverley Hughes MP, Rt Hon John Hutton MP, Baroness Jones, Glenys Kinnock MEP, Sadiq Kahn MP, Oona King, David Lammy MP, Cllr Richard Leese,Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, Pat McFadden MP, Rt Hon David Miliband MP,Trevor Philips, Baroness Prosser, Rt Hon James Purnell MP, Jane Roberts, Lord Triesman. Kitty Ussher MP, Martin Winter Honorary Treasurer: Baroness Margaret Jay Director: Robert Philpot Deputy Director: Jessica Asato Website and Communications Manager: Tom Brooks Pollock Events and Membership Officer: Mark Harrison Publications and Events Assistant: Ed Thornton Published by Progress, 83 Victoria Street, London SW1H 0HW Tel 020 7808 7780 Fax 020 7808 7781 Email office@progressives.org.uk Website www.progressives.org.uk

Contents

Hazel Blears

Building our base

Stronger local government

Gerry Stoker

Stella Creasy

Activating citizens

Promoting participation

Jane Roberts

Steve Reed

Winning back power

Contents

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

Hazel Blears

Building our base here is nothing inevitable about the political year ahead. There is nothing written in the stars about Cameron’s Conservatives maintaining their lead in the opinion polls; nor is Labour’s victory for a fourth term a done deal. What happens in 2008 and at the next election, whenever it comes, will be down to what Labour does in the next few months. We have a series of strategic decisions that will put us on the path to success, or not. The first decision is whether we want to win or not, and here the signs are good. The Labour party is behaving like a party of government: staying united, taking tough decisions, taking the fight to the Tories, and working hard in the marginal constituencies. There is a hunger for victory, and a determination to keep the Tories out. This will count more than ever in the local elections and London elections in May. It used to be a straightforward task to remind people of the truly terrible nature of the Thatcher and Major governments: the mass unemployment, crumbling schools and hospitals, the rising crime, and the squalor of our city centres. You could talk of Black Wednesday, the poll tax, or even the miners’ strike and people would shudder at the memory of the Tories in power. Today, the task is harder. First-time voters have no memory of Margaret Thatcher. Anyone under 30 was a child when Major became prime minister. Memories fade. People assume a stable economy and low unemployment are a given. So we need to forensically dismantle the Tories’ claims to government. On their record, and on their current prospectus, we need to describe in detail the disaster that awaits us if they form a government. We need to use their record of cuts in local government as a sign of what they would do in office. Last time round, the Tories meant poverty, homelessness, business failures, and a divided society. Next time round, you can confidently predict exactly the same thing. Why? Because although the Tory speech-writers and spin doctors have been working overtime, coming up with some useful one-liners and eye-catching stunts, the fundamentals of Tory policy are unchanged: cut taxes for the rich, roll back the welfare state, slash public expenditure, and accept high unemployment as a by-product of your economic programme. So they must be stopped. But our hunger for victory cannot be solely predicated on our opposition to the Tories. We have to want victory for a purpose, and that leads to the second important strategic decision that we face: what do we want a fourth term for? We need a ‘forward offer’ which is rooted in our Labour values, but which reaches out beyond our heartlands. Most people aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. They want to be successful. They are ambitious for themselves, their families and their communities. So our vision is simple: Labour is the party of aspiration, ambition and success. Not the narrow sink or swim Tory vision, but the historic Labour vision that to get on in life, we all need strong families, strong communities and a strong society.

Building our base

The job of a Labour government is to give people the springboard to their own success. A government on people’s side, in tune with their hopes and apprehensions, and using the tools of public policy to let people prosper. No one who wants to work should have work denied to them. No one who wants to save for a deposit on a new house should find it out of reach. No one who wants to learn, gain qualifications, and get promotion should be held back. No one should have to choose private healthcare or education because the public sector fails them. That’s Labour’s vision: a strong society where everyone can fulfil their full individual potential, no matter where they live or come from. It will not be enough to offer lists of government achievements. The nature of progressive change is that people always want more. Waiting lists may fall, but people won’t say thanks: they’ll want even faster, personalised treatment. Smaller class sizes are a good start, but now parents want more say over their children’s education. So in every policy area, we need to be ahead of where the public is, with an offer in tune with their aspirations. In short, we need to be the party of the future, not the past. Armed with these essential truths, we can build our base. It will have to be rebuilt from the bottom up, and we will have to recognise that we can’t do local politics as though nothing has changed in the past 10 years. The national media will be largely hostile to Labour at the next election, so we must use our own channels of direct communications – from the hi-tech use of SMS, emails, websites and blogs, to the low-tech use of newsletters, surgeries and face-to-face meetings. We need to refashion our local Labour parties to be outward-facing, enmeshed in local community life, and truly representative of local voters. We need to spend every spare moment from now onwards talking to the electorate, not talking to each other. Local government will play an important part in the coming months. Our Labour councillors are heroes – keeping our values and our parties alive in many parts of the country. As secretary of state I am proud of the devolutionary measures we have enacted in recent months. We have reduced the number of performance indicators on local councils from 1,200 to under 200. We have pushed forward with more participatory budgeting schemes which give local communities a real say, with asset transfers, which create new social enterprises and breed new active citizens, with local area agreements, which allow local communities to set priorities, and with a new focus on our regeneration programmes to get people into work. We’ve signed the Central-Local Government Concordat, which enshrines for the first time the devolutionary principle at the heart of government. Politics has always been local – but in coming months, that will be truer than ever. So another strategic decision for Labour will be the extent to which we are prepared to give power away. My argument is that we must be bolder in our measures which devolve power, influence and control to local councils, communities and citizens. The Governance of Britain document sets us on the course for radical reform. But central to this reform must be a strong devolutionary impulse. Power should not be grudgingly ceded to local communities; it should be shovelled in spades.

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

I want this Labour government to be the one which shakes off the old-school Fabian assumption that the man in Whitehall knows best. I want this to be the Labour government that reaches into another part of the socialist tradition: self-governance, workers’ control, and bottom-up democracy. Keir Hardie said: ‘Socialism is not help from the outside in the form of state help – it is the people helping themselves acting through their own organisations, regulating their own affairs.’ And 100 years later, this should be the approach of a modern Labour government. The result of the next election is up to us – and if we keep our nerve, stay united, focus on the Tories, and present a political programme which is devolutionary, aspirational and confident, then our electoral success becomes ever more assured.

Hazel Blears is MP for Salford and Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government

Building our base

Gerry Stoker

Stronger local government ocal government represents an important arena for Labour not only because it has lost so much ground in local elections in recent years. Labour talks about the need for a new politics and it needs a strong capacity in local government to show how that new politics would work in practice. There are several reasons to be believe that a more robust and effective system of local democracy would benefit our attempts to reinvigorate our politics. Free-flowing politics that addresses issues that people care about can thrive through doing what is right for your area or community, and could even become a positive basis for a more consensusbuilding politics. Labour needs to do more to deliver on its commitment to localism. Without such a development it is difficult to look citizens in the eye and tell them it is worth voting in local elections. For local government the key challenge is to tackle the culture of dependency that still surrounds much of its thinking. How many elections leaflets just bleat on about what councillors cannot do because of central controls or lack of funding? For Whitehall the challenge is to break the unthinking centralism that pervades the way it responds to policy problems. Ask about how to tackle a difficult issue or crisis and the most common response is to argue for a new national institution to provide a co-ordinated national response. The case for localism rests on two grounds. First it is a realistic response to the complexity of modern governance. The solution to complexity is more local decisionmaking capacity because it is only through such an approach that local knowledge and action can be connected a wider network of support and learning. Second, it provides an open base for engagement in politics. Engaging at a local level provides realistic opportunities for more direct engagement by citizens or allows them to engage as representatives themselves without devoting their life to politics. The role of formally elected local government in this circumstance is as an enabler and supporter of a wider politics and governance. Many still hold doubts about local decision-making. One line of argument is that the perspective of communities is inherently limited and limiting. The danger of too much local decision-making is that it opens up too much to the parochial concerns of the narrow-minded and threatens the ideas and practice of a wider welfare politics. Behind the romantic notions of community lurks a real world of insular, 'not in my own back yard' politics. My reply to these concerns would be that new localism is crucially set in the context of wider policy framework setting and funding. Indeed the localism that is advocated is part of a wider system of multi-level governance. The argument for new localism is an argument for a shift in the balance of governance, one that allows more scope for local decision making and local communities. It is based on the idea that involving people in the hard, rationing choices of politics in the context of a shared sense of citizenship is a way of delivering a more mature and sustainable democracy.

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

We need to move from a logic of delegation to a logic of devolution. The logic of delegation can be invoked in a variety of ways. Policy wonks and ministers talk about giving power back to the frontline of public service providers or giving others independent power to make judgement calls on their behalf. They are recognizing the limits to their capacities and their reliance on others to deliver public services. So two cheers for that! But delegation is about letting go in the hope of getting outcomes that you value. Delegation theory would argue against an overelaborate target culture. So when you delegate you have to let go. But you can set the rules of the game: influencing how the agency can make a decision, who it needs to consult, the speed at which it can be allowed to make decisions. Most delegation assumes that accountability for outcomes remains with the principal authority, hence the justification for steering while delegating. Delegation is a great tool to break an overreliance on the target culture. It abandons the logic of monitoring in favour of the idea that those at the frontline have an information advantage and therefore more effective capacity to make decisions than those at the centre. But it is a tool that has its own logic. You can delegate with strings and keep accountability lines in place. In short it a step forward but it's not the same as a full-blown commitment to devolution. The logic of devolution is very different to that of delegation. Under devolution authority for setting both ends and means is decentralized to another. In short there is a handover of not only delivery responsibility but also accountability for outcomes. You are accepting that someone not only knows more than you but they are better placed to judge about what should be done and whether it has been done. This is the defining rationale for there to be a local politics and democracy. Devolution tends to grow institutions that expand their decision-making capacity and once the door to devolution is opened it cannot easily be closed. The most obviously gaping whole in any devolution strategy for public services is its application to England. We have made progress in Scotland and Wales. England remains as centralized as ever in its governance. The urgency of the need for a new constitutional settlement for England cannot be overstressed. Whether devolution is to standalone local agencies, local government, city regions or regional assemblies the most important thing is simply to get on with it! And yes, there remains a strong case for a double devolution not only to formal local institutions but also to more informal networks in communities and neighbourhoods. So what is required is not ever more elaborate strategic partnerships where centrally-funded agencies and local authorities sign off on agreed plans and targets but rather something that breaks the mould. Options to be considered include a parliamentary device that would vet legislation to see if it was sufficiently respectful of localism. Or perhaps a Cabinet Office function for checking all proposals - legislative and non-legislative - to see if a localist solution had been considered before a nationally-driven policy option was chosen or another national body created. Another option is to establish a new statutory body to protect and promote local government. It would be charged with making Whitehall proposals local government-friendly, demonstrate learning from and the value of local solutions, and engage in locallydriven knowledge transfer. Panic about charging for bin collections would be replaced

Stronger local government

by an assumption that local government is designed to enable us to pilot solutions to challenging issues. Some movement on local government finance is essential. A democratic system where all but four or five per cent of revenues are raised and allocated centrally through Whitehall is odd and unsustainable in comparative democratic terms. It is difficult to do a lot in the short run but perhaps one option is to give more flexibility over the business rate, or hand over responsibility for allocating centrally collected funds to an independent body. In the longer term, the best hope for substantial change is to have a cross-party group charged with coming up with a consensus set of proposals for a better system of local government revenue raising.

Gerry Stoker is professor of politics and governance at the University of Southampton and founding chair of the New Local Government Network

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

Stella Creasy

Activating citizens t’s not rocket science, but for those saddled with newsletter rounds and minutes to write up it can appear equally mysterious. How can you get people to turn up, help out and come back and do it all again? Whether in local or national government, voluntary groups or political parties the question of how to engage the public in working with them is paramount. In response to declining involvement some brave it out, claiming it’s the quality not quantity of participants that counts. But anyone who has tried to run a group activity or a public event knows being able to involve others isn’t just about having more people to make tea at meetings. It goes to the heart of the capacity of any organisation to be able to affect change, be it in a local community or as a campaigning party. Those who argue the public have better things to do than be ‘active citizens’ should take note of just what the public are doing with their time. As they volunteer in ever increasing numbers and campaign for causes local and national, the belief that participation in public life is a dying art or that they are apathetic cannot be sustained. The left has always known participation matters because we believe we achieve more together than we do alone; we’ve just tended to consider the role of the public in social change as limited to voting Labour into office. The right idolises activism as a replacement for the state. This then helps them blame those who are made destitute by unchecked capitalism for their own poverty. Both perspectives stumble against the brutal complexity of the challenges of modernity. Whether climate change, terrorism, inequality or obesity, these problems stubbornly resist both the intervention of legislation or the force of the market alone. Tackling them requires a different approach, one in which every institution and individual plays their part and acts together. The problem for political parties and government institutions is the same. They need to challenge public disengagement if they are to win the elections, manage the public services or achieve the social changes they desire. For the left this means understanding why, how and when public engagement in policy and activism makes a difference and building that into our policies and our politics. We have to match our recognition of the powers of the state and the limitations of the market with an appreciation of the potential offered by public participation to achieving progressive social outcomes. Rebuilding grassroots activism requires grassroots action founded on three principles. The first is that turnout and participation in the public realm matters not just because it is an indicator of the strength of our democracy. Getting people to take part enables us to unlock the skills and talents they have in pursuit of shared solutions to shared problems. Too often public engagement is sought as a way of reasserting the legitimacy of government or political leadership. Whether the big conversation or local consultations, the result is counterproductive as the public are asked to comment rather than contribute and then feel angry if their demands are not addressed. Increasing public participation in governance can not only help strengthen accountability for decision making, it can also encourage and empower our citizens to work together with the state and each other. Debate and dialogue between users and service

Activating citizens

providers can reveal new knowledge about how policy created in town halls, board meetings and Whitehall is working out on the ground. So too, Labour needs to engage members and the public in our activities not just to secure office, but for the difference working with them can make to the causes we serve. Getting the philosophy right of why you’re engaging with the public and how it makes a difference to them is the foundation to getting the processes right and not the other way round. In local government where ward boundaries and service directorate silos dominate thinking, processes are constructed around institutions rather than issues. It’s the same in the Labour party where structures dominate rather than liberate activists. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are countless methods – whether participatory budgeting, professional facilitations, open space cafes or eforums which offer effective ways of making decisions and running organisations which make participation a worthwhile and fun experience for all. But this agenda isn’t just about fancy methods; it’s about shaping participation around the public rather than the body politic. That Greenpeace or Tesco’s are better at recruiting people, whether to help campaign or for marketing, shows it can be done in a way that works for time-poor citizens with family commitments and lives to lead. And as progressives we need to do more to make sure it is not only those who can dictate their working hours or pay that are able to give the time to such activities. Technology can help, but we also need to value occasional or episodic activism in our local areas as well as those who commit their lives to it. It is a lesson we have to learn in-house too. Where political parties start with processes that demand membership, meetings and leaflet rounds, Oxfam begins by asking supporters to donate, change their purchasing power or simply send an email. Revitalising participation is best driven by local solutions to increase activism- and the number of local activists. And it’s already happening in the Labour party - whether through members in Newcastle using Facebook to coordinate campaigning, activists in Walthamstow organising community consultations on tackling local child poverty or councillors in Southwark and Bermondsey using a volunteer coordinator. These examples show the benefits when engaging with the public isn’t simply seen as the task for the man at the top alone and is instead considered the role of all party activists. The same is true for encouraging people to participate in local democracy. Local councillors and council officers can either be the greatest champions of engagement or its most effective assassins. So it’s important the pursuit of ‘real people’ to participate does not mean those already on the ‘frontline’ become sidelined. As the first port of call for new participants in either politics or public services, those who already do take part are vital to helping others not only interact with local government or our local parties but also understand how and why their involvement matters. That we tie these people up in bureaucracy, or allow them themselves to do so, means their energy is poured into internal wrangling rather than action on the causes that motivate them. The same is true in public services where the role of the workforce in facilitating participation has been overlooked to the detriment of outcomes. Making our party work in this way, let alone the structures of local or national governance, will not be easy, cheap or quick. It will involve failure as much as success to start. Yet if we do, the rewards to society and to advancing social justice are legion.

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

As a party of government and a party of progressive activists, people power must become our core purpose. Those who rely on progressive governments need and deserve to be part of nothing less.

Dr Stella Creasy is head of research at Involve. She is Labourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s candidate for Walthamstow at the next election. Read more at www.involve.org.uk/participation_nation

Activating citizens

Jane Roberts

Promoting participation 've always thought that for a local authority to be successful, it needed essentially to have able members, high-calibre officers and a good working relationship between the two. Whatever structures and systems were in place, it was the people at the heart of the organisation that ultimately mattered most. So I was glad to agree to chair the Councillors Commission that emerged from the 2006 local government white paper. The Commission was an independent cross-party review of the incentives that encourage and the barriers that deter people from becoming councillors. We were charged with making recommendations to get more able and talented people from a wider spread of backgrounds to put themselves forward in local elections. Coyly put it may have been, but we should squarely acknowledge that there were concerns about the calibre and competence of some councillors. And council chambers are made up of members who are a far cry from the populations that they represent. Younger people especially are notably absent with barely eight per cent of councillors under the age of 40, never more than a third of councillors who are women - and this, 100 years after women could first stand in municipal elections - and just about four per cent of councillors who are from a black and minority ethnic background. We had just nine months to complete our work and report back to the secretary of state for communities and local government: our report, Representing the Future, was launched on 10 December. But even in that relatively short time, it became very apparent that an easy pick-and-mix approach - a bit more support here, a bit more remuneration there - just wouldn't be adequate. We needed to be clear about the task that a councillor is elected to do in the modern context before we could come to useful recommendations. We therefore needed to step back further still to look more closely at those wider contextual changes over the last few decades. We therefore ranged pretty widely and came to see the debate about the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state - the disenchantment, disconnection and, at times, mutual incomprehension between the two - as the backdrop to our work. And in this debate, we came to see local government as very much a key part of the solution, rather than - as some would have it - part of the problem. People after all relate much more easily to the local and what goes on immediately around them. And so it is with governance: the local should be where people can make sense of how change comes about and how they can get involved if and when they wish. Surprisingly, however, the green paper on governance published last summer barely mentioned local government at all except in its injunction to local communities that they should have new means to keep renegade councils on their toes. But if local government is to be a significant part of the solution to that wider democratic malaise, then it has some distance to go to persuade not just Whitehall - long contemptuous of local government - of its merit but the general public too. And councillors are absolutely key to this: who they are, who they are seen to be and the skills that they have are crucial. Public understanding of local government is negligible. Five per cent of the population claim to know a great deal about what their council does and even when those claiming to

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

know a fair amount are added, the total still only reaches 32 per cent. Only seven per cent of councillors think that they are out of touch with those they represent, whereas 43 per cent of the public think they are. A prevailing atmosphere of public mistrust with formal politics, political parties and institutions of government leads to councillors being viewed in highly negative terms. It should be added, however, that when people do come into contact with a councillor, they are often pleasantly surprised by how helpful and responsive the councillor is. Bear in mind too that local government has shown some of the most impressive improvements in performance within the public sector in the last decade, while the best of local government far outstrips the work of much of central government. So, how to take things forward? Local representative democracy, informed and enriched by more direct and participative means of engaging in democratic debate, must be reinvigorated. The interface between the two arms of democracy - representative and participative - needs to be more coherent. That's a task for both councils and councillors and therefore the political parties too. It's a pretty complex task and puts a high premium on communication skills too. We laid down five principles underlying our recommendations: o Local authorities are key to promoting local democratic engagement; o Promoting a sense of efficacy - the feeling that people can influence what happens around them - is key for better engagement; o Councillors are most effective as locally elected representatives when they have similar life experiences to that of their constituents; o Key to effective local representation is the relationship and the connections between councillors and their constituents; o It should be less daunting to become a councillor, better supported once elected as a councillor, and less daunting to stop being a councillor. These principles can and should be given effect differently in different areas as local government must be about difference. That's why we tried also not to be too prescriptive about our recommendations, instead encouraging local experimentation in many instances. But our first recommendation was unashamedly prescriptive: local authorities should be charged with a new statutory duty to facilitate local democratic engagement. Now that the Electoral Commission no longer has this remit, surely local government is where this rightly belongs? But how authorities implement this duty should be up to them - from disseminating clear and accessible information to all on how local governance works - who is accountable for what and to whom - to facilitating more active civic participation in a range of different areas as well as raising interest in what councillors do. People can hardly participate in something that they do not understand. The rest of our recommendations covered a range of areas including raising the game of councils' communications; the responsibilities of public service broadcasters; much more proactive engagement with young people both at and beyond school; all out fouryearly elections in multi-member wards and with more razzamatazz on the regional local election day; experimentation with incentives to vote, perhaps a council tax discount, maybe a local lottery; easing existing legal restrictions on who can stand; encouragement to the political parties voluntarily to comply with equalities legislation; and far better support to councillors including harnessing all the possibilities to enable more and better contact with constituents using the newer digital technologies.

Promoting participation

As for remuneration, we made a number of recommendations that included a very modest 'parachute payment' for executive councillors who lose their seats. You wouldn't have thought this would have been very contentious given that all MPs, already with generous pension payments, can rely on one year's salary to tide them over. But no, a shadow minister couldn't quite resist the temptation to put the boot into local government in the tabloid press. Ignore the tabloids, read the argument, debate the recommendationsâ&#x20AC;Ś

Jane Roberts is chair of the Councillors Commission and former council leader of the London Borough of Camden

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

Steve Reed

Winning back power xperience shows that Labour loses power when we stop talking about the things that matter most to people, whether at a local or national level. Losing power, as we did in Lambeth in 2002, is a wake-up call. It forces you to look at how you’ve become disconnected from ordinary people and what you need to do to reconnect. After our defeat in 2002, we set up a process to listen to the community and ordinary party members so we could understand where we’d gone wrong. We called it ‘Learning the Lessons’. We learnt a lot. We learnt that in our community, where nearly 40 per cent of the population is Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) and over 50 per cent female, we were too white and too male. It was sobering to learn from our own analysis that a white male putting himself forward for selection was nine times more likely to be elected a councillor than if he had been black. In fact, the council as a whole was only six per cent BAME. Being more representative matters for two reasons. First, people are more likely to vote for candidates who they think share or understand their experiences. Second, if we don’t bring the range of diversity and experience from our communities into our town halls, then the policies and services our town halls develop are unlikely to meet the needs of the whole community. We set up a programme to address under-representation of BAME communities in the ranks of our Labour councillors. The first meeting, attended by 30 black and Asian party members, told us where we were going wrong. We learnt that our meetings were off-putting because of what we talked about, where we held them, when we held them, how newcomers were treated, and how we used impenetrable language talking about GCs and LGCs and ECs and the detail of party organisation – acronyms and issues that don’t mean much to most people. We developed the programme to build the capacity and experience of our black members to win selection in winnable council seats. We held workshops and discussion groups with senior party figures, offered mentoring and arranged shadowing with sitting councillors, and held campaigning activities and training events specifically for BAME members. In total, up to 60 people took part in the programme. To ensure we didn’t just select more diverse candidates in seats we were less likely to win, we secured the support of the local party in principle to reserve Labour-held seats where the councillor was standing down for experienced BAME candidates who, thanks to the programme, were now in greater supply. The results were spectacular. Before the election, Labour had just three BAME councillors out of a total of 28. Afterwards, we had 12 out of a total of 39 and all of them with real leadership potential. By contrast, there are still just two BAME Lib Dem councillors and, to their shame, the Tory councillors in multi-ethnic Lambeth remain a whites-only zone. Our diversity showed we were the only party that was serious about representing the whole borough. I have no doubt that the increase in diversity among our candidates contributed to the scale of our victory in the elections in May 2006. That year, we were the only

Winning back power

council in the country where Labour won back majority control from opposition, and we did it by a landslide. But it wasn’t just how we looked that mattered; it was what we said and the credibility we had when we said it that gave us the edge. A second major issue we had to address was remoteness. We learnt that voters saw us as too distant from their locality, more likely to be walking down the corridors of power than down the streets or through the estates where our voters live. That required a different form of engagement to understand people’s concerns street-bystreet and area-by-area. It’s nothing we don’t already all know – it meant knocking on more doors and delivering more questionnaires so that we really knew the local issues. On the doorsteps, instead of following the script and asking people, ‘which party do you most identify with?’, we asked them, ‘if there’s one thing we could do locally to improve things for you, what would it be?’. That gave us our issues. We took a decision not to fight a borough-wide election but to fight the council as if it were a series of byelections. We talked to people only about the issues that mattered most in their area. By having these issues voiced by a more diverse group of candidates, we won greater credibility for what we said. In a local election, even when the national situation is difficult, people will vote on local issues if we make a powerful enough case. People won’t use a local election to have a cost-free kick at the government if they think it will mean losing their local swimming pool. Back in power, our newly elected BAME councillors are already making a huge difference to our Labour administration in Lambeth. A stark example of this is our response to the gang-related violence we’re experiencing in south London in common with a number of other inner-city areas. The socio-economic issues that underlie alienation and social exclusion are experienced most heavily in Lambeth by BAME communities. It is black boys, in particular, who are drawn into gang membership, while nearly every victim of gang-related gun crime is black. These individuals come predominantly from poor families living in poor areas where a disproportionate number of black people live. It is impossible to get under the surface of these issues and find credible answers when the council is almost exclusively white. It’s our black councillors who are the leaders in the work we’re doing to tackle guns and gang-related violence. Lorna Campbell is a lifelong Lambeth resident with first-hand experience of bringing up children and grandchildren on an inner-city estate. She was elected a councillor in 2006 and is now leading the search for solutions as chair of our cutting-edge Guns and Gangs Commission. The solution we’re working towards is very wide-ranging. There are five themes in our approach – tougher enforcement against violent and anti-social behaviour; stronger support for families who are struggling to cope; action to get people into meaningful work; more resources for schools; and a better deal for young people with more activities, mentoring, youth facilities and help for those getting into trouble. All of this aims to extend opportunity to those young people who currently feel it is denied them. This isn’t just about a deeper understanding of the issues; it’s also about being able to face tough decisions. We recently cut funding to a number of black-led projects and voluntary organisations that were failing so the money could be switched to programmes that make a difference. An unrepresentative council would find it harder

Labour in local government How do we rebuild our base?

to defend these decisions. At the same time, we are conducting a review aiming to increase support and capacity-building for black-led organisations, a fundamental equalities review of decision-making across the council, and launching a programme to involve more black citizens in decision-making in public life by serving as school governors, members of service-user groups, on the boards of voluntary organisations and as councillors. The same insight got us talking to faith groups and community organisations about involving them in delivering services because they are closer to many of our diverse communities than the council could ever be. This is challenging for a council that prefers to do things itself, but we believe in empowering communities to do things for themselves. When we look like our electorate and when we talk about the things that matter most to our electors, we give ourselves the best possible chance of winning.

Cllr Steve Reed is leader of Lambeth Council

Winning back power

Hazel Blears

Building our base

Gerry Stoker

Stronger local government

Stella Creasy

Activating citizens

Jane Roberts

Promoting participation

Steve Reed

Winning back power

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