Unless senior politicians and their policy advisers take on the barriers of lack of time, lack of knowledge, and lack of access, their proposals for getting more people involved in influencing policies will remain limited in their impact.
Image – from the quickly-forgotten Civil Society Strategy from Theresa May’s Government in 2018 – noting the challenge of making such things stick around for the long term.
I was browsing through this article from Francesca Gains and Liz Richardson on the University of Manchester’s policy blog and was reminded of how this area of public policy seems to go round and round in circles.
“Innovations to strengthen participation can ensure more people participate in policymaking to help mitigate issues such as structural inequalities which affect them first hand.”
Gains, Richardson, 2023
Strengthening participation has been a nominal priority (at least rhetorically) across several governments for the past quarter of a century. You can even go back to the Citizens Charter of John Major’s Government and the former PM’s much-lampooned ‘Cones hotline’. To what extent it has actually succeeded is one for the academics to assess and adjudicate on.
People have participated in their thousands on some of the big Cambridgeshire transport schemes – but huge damage has been done by the senior officers, senior councillors, and ministers concerned by botched consultations being ignored.
That was the conclusion of the Smarter Cambridge Transport campaign a couple of years ago, and it was also my conclusion when as an independent candidate in the Cambridge City Council elections in Queen Edith’s Ward in May 2023 I called for the abolition of both the Greater Cambridge Partnership and the Combined Authority. Normally independent candidates struggle to reach the 5% mark (deposit-losing/saving limits for parliamentary election) so the fact that I almost got to the 10% mark despite not campaigning for votes, is something I still find astonishing.
Lack of time to get involved in civic life
I picked up on a finding in an earlier blogpost on Total Place here, spotting a stat from a study by Jess Studdert below.
Above – from Place-based Health by Studdert and Stopforth p5
Which when you look at the model from the Henley Centre for the old Department for Communities and Local Government from the late 2000s, sort of chimes.
Above – This is from a report called “CLG Empowerment” by the Henley Centre which I acquired from a Freedom of Information request 10 years ago. It came with the disclaimer: “The results were a useful addition to the evidence pool, and informed community empowerment policy. However, the policy framework has now moved on.”
Accounting for people’s different relationships with The State
This was something I touched upon in my previous blogpost where I looked at a survey of council house tenants – one that highlighted the issues they had with their homes and communities. It’s ever so easy to overlook the intertwined relationship between council tenant and local authority housing provider. The closest a young adult from an affluent background might get is if they experience living in university-managed halls of residents in higher education. Now compare that to people who might have minimum day-to-day interactions with the state.
Take a made-up affluent family using the 1980s stereotype of 2.4 children at private school with both parents on six figure salaries, living in a detached house and with access to private health care. Following the privatisation of the public utilities, you could almost strip back their day-to-day interactions with the state as being ‘Bins, pot holes, and traffic’.
When I look back at the dozens of council and public meetings I’ve been to over the past decade or so, it comes as no surprise that the members of the public that have also shown up and asked public questions collectively do not represent the diversity of our city. The reasons for that are many – ranging from meetings held at unsociable times in hard-to-get-to venues, to the very dense packs of papers that require a huge time commitment to read through and understand them. Then finally, is all that investment in time and effort worth the outcomes at the end? Under the present system, sadly not.
If time is short, what differences can we make with knowledge and access?
CamCycle [of which I am a member because I did my cycling proficiency when I was at primary school – we learn to cycle before we learn to walk round this way] has provided a useful case study on how some campaigning groups have reacted to the deluge of consultations residents face. In this case it is the Waterbeach Greenways which they wrote a blogpost here. For some of the bigger consultations, they produce single page guides for responses that are consistent with the conversations that members (over 1,500 of us) have at meetings and online.
Above – a detail from the 3-minute response guide on Waterbeach (it’s longer than this!)
For those of you thinking they are the only campaign group doing this, I have news for you. The huge potential financial gains being realised from the Cambridge economic bubble are so great that corporate institutions and their lobbyists have their hotlines to Whitehall meaning that local councils and local democracy can and are easily bypassed by ministers. Hence no one in local government in/around Cambridge getting any advanced warning of Michael Gove’s “Cambridge 2040” plans. As a result, the city and district have had to fight something of a rearguard action to find out what the hell is going on. For example we still don’t know who the people on the “Cambridge Delivery Group” are.
One other large civic society group that also keeps watch on big planning applications in Cambridge Past, Present, and Future. Like CamCycle, they have some full time staff and also a membership that has a range of skills that other towns of a similar size would love to have. But there’s only so far that can go when you’re up against multinational corporations and properties being marketed and sold off-plan abroad – an issue that is for central government to deal with.
“Ah – the ‘who is responsible for what?’ issue again”
Yep – and we’ve been here before. In the early 1990s when restructuring of the county last came up!
Above – from the Cambridge Evening News 21 May 1991 in the British Newspaper Archive
As this Lost Cambridge piece I wrote last summer shows, it’s all too familiar!
Both the collapse of the GCP’s plans for road user charging (even though the House of Commons Transport Select Committee – Tory dominated inevitably in this current Parliament – recommended it as an alternative to existing duties on fuel and vehicles) and also the looming general election should be taken as opportunities by civic society and campaigning organisations *to educate the public on the essentials of our political system*. I was going to write ‘democracy’ but given what the House of Commons voted for this evening (The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum & Immigration) Bill), I begin to wonder. Have a listen to Sir Chris Bryant MP below.
You can read the bill’s text here. And then laugh at Clause 2.
Above – Normally under the Rule of Law, the legislation will state what the criteria are for something, and then leave it to another part of the state (for example the judiciary) to adjudicate on a case-by-case basis as to whether the criteria have been met. It’s not for Ministers or Parliament to insert clauses into legislation that pre-judge such assessments, and furthermore prevent the state’s agencies from coming to a different conclusion.
But then how can you have conversations about checks and balances in a democracy when most of the population hasn’t had the chance to learn about the basics of citizenship and politics in the first place?
That’s why the bigger picture for me is providing citizenship education for both children and adults
In the shorter term, we’ve got knowledge and access issues to handle. Enabling more people to spend time involved in community and civics requires radical economic and social change. (Especially for those in full time work or with other full time commitments). Examples of such changes could include a combination of Universal Basic Income and also a Four Day Week. And that’s just for starters. Such things don’t happen overnight. So it’s back to knowledge and access first.
Hence trying to cover the essentials in the Great Cambridge Crash Course so the curiosity in people is sparked by the discussions they have that they want to go and find out more.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 