Reforming local government has been a rather fruitless endeavour since devolution – to the extent that a few years ago I added the absence of reform to a list of failures of devolution.
Despite dissatisfaction with the current unitary authority system – and the role of town & community councils – the system inherited from the UK Government in the 1990s remains stubbornly in place.
The issue go much deeper than the map, of course – all of which will be looked at in more detail here.
Low turnout in local elections
The proportion of voters who actually vote in local elections is consistently low. It’s normally in the 30s or low-40s percentage-wise; the mean average figure for 2022 was just over 39%5.
The early signs are that reforms (“gestures” if you were being unkind) in the Local Government & Elections Act 2021 (lowering the voting age to 16) – and associated pilots such as multi-day and early voting – had little impact on turnout.
It’s a more general problem that’s not exclusive to councils and has multiple causes: voter apathy, votes having little impact on council policies (due to the influence of officers and statutory guidelines/legal duties), lack of knowledge on the role of councils and councillors and maybe even a sense that councils (particularly town & community councils) don’t have the power or resources to do very much.
“The situation is even worse at the town and community council level, where in 2022 around 60% of seats were won without an election and 15% didn’t attract any candidates at all. It’s fairly offensive to even call that an election, more an appointment.”
A high proportion of uncontested seats
At each local election around 5-10% of all county councillors are elected automatically because they were the only candidate; the figure in 2022 was 72 (out of 1,233 or 5.8%) and this was a bit better than in 2017 where 92 seats (7.3% of the total) were uncontested.
This seems to be more pronounced in large rural unitary authorities such as Gwynedd, Powys and Pembrokeshire which have many wards that are geographically big or isolated but have low population densities.
The situation is even worse at the town and community council level, where in 2022 around 60% of seats were won without an election and 15% didn’t attract any candidates at all6. It’s fairly offensive to even call that an election, more an appointment.
There are several conclusions you can draw from that: wards are too small, we have too many council seats more generally, we have too many town & community councils and political parties have a crisis in trying to find candidates.
The “worst electoral system in the world”
The multiple non-transferable vote system has been described in the past by Cardiff University’s Prof. Roger Awan-Scully as “a strong contender for the title of worst electoral system in the world7“. If you’re electing councillors in a multi-member ward, you have as many votes as there are seats to fill. If there are three seats, the three candidates with the most votes are elected.
That sounds fair enough in the spirit of “one person, one vote”. What it means though is that a party can receive a 25-30% share of the vote in a 2-to-4-seat ward and win all of the seats. Repeat that across a county with several multi-member wards and it distorts the result.
Of course, through the Local Democracy & Elections Act the 22 unitary authorities can choose to ditch this system and adopt single transferable vote8 – where you rank candidates by preference.
Labour-controlled Cardiff Council held a vote on this recently and it was comprehensively defeated. Despite attempts by the opposition in the Senedd to enforce it, again it demostrates weak leadership by the Welsh Government to make it optional (if councils get a choice on this specifically, why not other things?). Plus, there are other proportional voting methods they could’ve adopted, such as the closed-list D’Hondt method that the Senedd are so keen to adopt for themselves.
“The introduction of the BBC-backed Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has resulted in a visible uptick in local government stories being published, but all that’s happened is that the same story/copy gets posted to multiple outlets within a few minutes of each other. It’s a good stop-gap to deal with the immediate decline in the local press, but it shouldn’t be seen as a long-term solution. And don’t get me started on those council press release farms.”
Lack of transparency and the loss of local media coverage
As citizens, we have a right to know as much as possible about what’s going on in our councils, when we want to, on our terms – all independently scrutinised.
The situation has improved. Most council documents are now published online days before meetings and there’s a requirement for county council meetings to be webcast (it was only a few years ago that bloggers – sorry, “community journalists” – could be arrested for trying to do so).
The introduction of the BBC-backed Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has resulted in a visible uptick in local government stories being published, but all that’s happened is that the same story/copy gets posted to multiple outlets within a few minutes of each other. It’s a good stop-gap to deal with the immediate decline in the local press, but it shouldn’t be seen as a long-term solution. And don’t get me started on those council press release farms.
The problem here is that while it’s easier than it’s ever been to read officer reports and planning applications etc. when you want specific pieces of information you have to jump through multiple hoops to get it. If a council gets too many Freedom of Information requests it’s a sign they’re not very “transparent”. Though there are times when excluding the public is warranted, those justifications can and are being abused; “commercial sensitivity” being one.
If you want an example, read about the experiences of Wales Online’s Will Hayward trying to get consistent Freedom of Information responses from councils and various regional boards and services (such as the 4 police forces).
“Pale, male, stale”
There’s a stereotype that local government is primarily made up of men of a certain age that has a basis in fact.
A Welsh Government-commissioned report on local government diversity, published in 2014, found the average local authority councillor was a white man aged 609. Things haven’t changed much since then.
While the proportion of women county councillors increased in 2022 to around 36% (much higher than in previous years) – and there’s been a conscious effort in some local authorities to promote women to Cabinet/senior roles – women remain a minority in local government despite making up a majority of the Welsh population.
At the start of 2022, the WLGA said that only 11% of councillors had a disability (compared to the population average of 22%), while just 1.8% of councillors came from a background other than white (when they make up 4.9% of the Welsh population, though it’s much higher in some local authorities such as Cardiff).
Meetings scheduled during working hours naturally impact younger councillors with full-time jobs. Though the introduction of remote attendance during the Covid-19 pandemic (now a right enshrined in Welsh law) may have a longer-term positive impact on the range of backgrounds councillors come from.
5. Ryan O’Neill, Wales Online (22nd May 2022). “The voter turnout for every council in Wales’ local elections”. Available here: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/voter-turnout-every-council-wales-23994360
6. Welsh Government (13th July 2022). “Written Statement: Community and Town Council Sector – Update July 2022”. Available at: https://gov.wales/written-statement-community-and-town-council-sector-update-july-2022
7. Democratic Audit (15th February 2014). “Wales should change the electoral system used to elect councillors as part of local government reform”. Available at: https://www.democraticaudit.com/2014/02/15/wales-should-reform-the-electoral-system-used-to-elect-councillors-as-part-of-local-government-reforms/
8. Local Government & Elections (Wales) Act 2021, Part 1, Sections 5-12.
9. Expert Group on Diversity in Local Government (2014). “On Balance: Diversifying Democracy & Local Government in Wales” (p34). Available at: https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-06/140305-expert-group-report-en.pdf
