Good Cities 4: Democracy & Power
By Tim Thorlby
6 mins
This is the fourth and final blog in a series looking at what makes a ‘good city’. Taking the idea of a 15-minute city as a starting point this blog explores the democratic gap that exists in our towns and cities.
1 – Introduction
What is a ‘good city’? What does it look like? Who decides what it looks like?
Given that over 80% of us live in towns and cities in the UK these are important questions.
The first blog in this four-part series introduced the idea of the ‘15-minute city’. It’s not a full answer to the question – but I think it’s a good starting point. Each blog in this series is exploring one of the four features of the 15-minute city – proximity, ecology, fairness and democracy.
This fourth and final blog looks at how our towns and cities are governed. This is about power and who shapes the places we live in. You might be surprised by some of it.
2 – The 15-minute city, briefly
My first blog explained the ideas behind the 15-minute city and so I will not repeat all of that here, just give a brief reminder.
The ’15-minute city’ is a simple concept, drawing on longstanding ideas about what a ‘liveable’ city might look like; cities on a ‘human scale’.
The idea is that in our towns and cities our daily requirements – work, shops, schools, healthcare, leisure – should be easily reached within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. The aim is to make cities healthier, more environmentally sustainable and improve the quality of life for all residents, rich and poor. Some have described it as a ‘return to a local way of life’ with less long-distance commuting and less reliance on the car and a more decentralised city pattern. The aim is to spend less time commuting between places and more time actually in those places.
No-one is proposing that we demolish our urban areas and start again, or introduce draconian policies, so the challenge is to retro-fit such ideas onto existing places, which is why making it happen would require some creativity and time and no doubt move forward in fits and starts.
There are four dimensions to the 15-minute city which I am considering in turn in this series of blogs:
Proximity
Ecology
Solidarity (or fairness)
Participation (or democracy)
The rest of this blog will explore the final theme of ‘citizen participation’ and what this means in practice for a ‘good city’.
3 – Citizen participation
In many ways, the fourth theme of the 15-minute city is the odd one out, as it is not directly about the physical shape of the city; rather it acknowledges that any attempt to shape and run our towns and cities should actively involve local citizens. The fourth theme is therefore about ‘active citizenship’ in the governance of our towns and cities.
Citizen participation is an antidote to any ‘top down’ attempt to shape our cities regardless of what residents want. It also recognises that finer grained planning and shaping is nearly always best done as close to the ground as possible and builds support for changes.
I want to look at how citizens hold ‘power’ in our cities to account in two main ways:
Through local government – what sort of power does local government have in the UK today? How ‘fit for purpose’ are our local governance arrangements for helping us shape our towns and cities to be better places to live?
In the marketplace – the private sector (the ‘marketplace’) occupies a huge space in the UK and has much power in practice. I want to take a look at how citizens are able (or not) to hold local employers to account in how they shape our towns and cities.
4 – Citizen participation and local government
Local governance (local decision-making to shape local life) is not new but the present form of locally elected ‘councils’ took shape in the 19th Century in response to the slums and the horror of rapid and uncontrolled industrialisation and urbanisation. Local councils acquired more powers through the 20th Century to improve our quality of life.
Today, local government in the UK has many relevant powers for shaping our towns and cities and our quality of life:
Land use planning – the planning system provides some local democratic influence on what gets built where, subject to nationally agreed policies
Childcare and education – councils oversee the provision of nurseries, schools, adult education and libraries
Social services – providing care to children, vulnerable adults and the elderly in their homes or in residential settings
Leisure – councils often provide leisure centres, swimming pools and maintain parks and playgrounds and sometimes arts centres too
Environmental health – from emptying the bins to sweeping streets to inspecting the kitchens of local restaurants, the council protects us from bacteria and rats
Social housing – councils remain the place where you apply for housing benefit and they have a role in co-ordinating social housing provision and many still maintain a dwindling stock of council housing, although Housing Associations now provide most social housing
Economic development – councils have a role to play in promoting business and jobs, although this has been reduced in recent years
Having so many local services provided by a local organisation which is subject to local democracy makes them amenable to the views and preferences of local communities. This is a good thing. I think most people would agree that having local swimming pools or libraries in Manchester run by an organisation based in London is a ludicrous idea.
However, since the 1980s, local government has been subject to ever increasing control by central government, through increasingly prescriptive national policies and regulation and restrictions on funding, so that England now has one of the most centralised systems of governance in the world. Devolution has given Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland much more say in managing their own affairs, but England has largely missed out.
The disembowelling of local government has accelerated since 2010 as funding has also been significantly reduced by central government. A recent report by the Centre for Cities showed that spending by local councils in England fell by nearly 20% from 2010 to 2018 and is now one of the lowest in Europe[1]. So, today:
Councils are no longer able to build houses on any scale
They no longer run most schools
Budgets for libraries, leisure and many other services have been cut significantly, and many have closed
Most statutory services are now tightly prescribed by guidance and targets from Whitehall
And it doesn’t work well.
A healthy, effective system of local government requires strong local autonomy and the ability to raise funds to power local services and work with local communities. This would also be a more democratic approach as it would bring more decisions within the influence of those local communities which are directly affected by them.
Our system of local government in the UK is quite badly broken today; a patchwork quilt of overcentralised programmes and bespoke sub-regional arrangements here and there. Much effort is invested by civil society in trying to invent innovative forms of citizen participation, and whilst these can be interesting, the elephant in the room is the comprehensive disempowering of local citizens through the downsizing of local government. This is the main problem to fix.
A serious and nation-wide devolution of power from Whitehall to Town Hall would give each town and city more of the tools required to shape better places to live – and give local residents access to more power over their own towns and cities.
5 – Local accountability of large institutions
The second issue around citizen participation which I want to briefly focus on is the presence within our cities of very large, powerful institutions which appear to be almost immune to democratic accountability. Yet they can exert huge impacts upon our cities. This is an oddity which I think deserves much more attention.
The most obvious examples are large, global businesses which may be headquartered in a city, employing thousands of people and then – without much warning – they move on, vacating buildings and leaving thousands of unemployed people behind them. In a global economy, such experiences are hard to avoid entirely, but with more pro-active government and also businesses which took their social accountability more seriously (e.g. putting workers on their company board) then this could at least be better managed and perhaps avoided quite so often. This kind of thing is well understood, even if the UK isn’t currently very well set up to manage it.
However, there is another kind of major institution which I want to focus on, and that is our universities (and other Higher Education institutions). Whilst these are, of course, a ‘Good Thing’ and deliver many benefits, there is definitely an oddity about having major employers within our cities which are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and yet which appear to have almost no accountability to local communities whatsoever. No wonder many university cities have a ‘town and gown’ problem.
The reason why this matters is that in many of the UK’s cities, the local universities may well own more land, employ more people and spend more money than the local city council. And yet, it will have little local representation on its university council/board and no formal local accountability at all. Isn’t that a little odd?
I had a look at one of our most famous universities out of curiosity to see if I was exaggerating my concerns.
City of Cambridge: The Council vs The University
Cambridge is a city with a population of over 130,000 people. I compared the University with the City Council, as institutions. See Table 1 below for some key comparisons[2].
Table 1: Comparison of Local Authority & University in Cambridge City
The University dwarfs the council in almost all respects; in fact, it’s in a different ball-park entirely. Yet not a single councillor or elected local representative sits on the University Council; it just does its own thing.
And we shouldn’t forget the ‘other’ university. No, not Oxford, I mean the other university in Cambridge – Anglia Ruskin University – the council has two universities to deal with, not just one.
A national conundrum?
Across the UK, there are nearly 300 Higher Education Institutions, employing nearly 400,000 people and with a combined economic impact of over £130 billion[3]. Whilst they undoubtedly have many positive impacts, they are also major players in their respective cities and, well, it just seems odd to me that semi-public bodies have so little engagement with their local communities.
Many of our universities haven’t even got as far as paying the Living Wage to their staff – at the last count[4], 60% of our universities had not agreed to pay it.
In a ‘good city’ I think there is a strong case for all major employers – public, private or voluntary sector – to be accountable in some way to the local community of which they are a part and which they rely upon as the base for their operations.
A growing number of universities are now publishing ‘Civic University Agreements’ to engage with this agenda, but these will be meaningless documents unless they address these concerns. In practice, this means opening themselves up to local scrutiny, sharing information about their local impact and having locally elected people on their councils/boards.
6 – Questioning power
I want to briefly consider this from a theological viewpoint too. In this blog, we have been looking at local government and semi-public institutions (like universities) which operate within local communities and we have seen how local communities have been increasingly excluded from decision-making that impacts upon them.
There is a strong theme throughout the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, about the danger of overcentralised power in our national institutions, whether public or private – it corrupts those who wield it and normally leads to abuse and exploitation. The Law and the Prophets did not accept the abuse of power as an inevitable and unavoidable feature of how society operates; they recognised the abuse of power as a problem and set out practical ways to ensure fairness.
The Old Testament approach to how Israel was to build a happy nation rested upon universal land ownership – every family was to have its own ‘patch’ to ensure they could work and feed themselves and every 50 years, the ‘Jubilee’ would ensure that any land that had changed hands would revert to the original family, ensuring that every family continued to have a stake in national life. Debt was managed, interest was banned. The approach was to actively prevent the centralisation of power by a handful of people within the marketplace or by the ruling monarch. The vision for the people was that “everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree”.
Whilst these ideas and rules were primarily about money and markets, I think the principles and vision apply to government and its institutions too. Anything which undermines the agency and autonomy of families and their communities is to be regarded with scepticism and carefully tested. There is clearly a balance to strike between national strategy and local agency but if there is to be respect for human dignity, agency and voice, as called for by most orthodox Christian theology, then any arrangement must properly give a healthy respect to local communities.
More pragmatically, there is plenty of material evidence that an overcentralised government bureaucracy just does not work as well as a system that allows for local and regional agency. Trying to run local services from Whitehall has never worked and never will because it’s just impractical, but central governments find it hard to give up power and control. Our present situation therefore, with a heavily centralised system of governance and locally unaccountable institutions like universities, needs correction with a healthy dose of local involvement and accountability, and this will probably only come about through agitation and provocation from below.
7 – Conclusions on the Good City
A reinvigoration – and improved funding – of local government would be a very healthy thing for the UK’s towns and cities. Building local accountability into the governance of major employers would also be a step forward. Most of our European cousins seem to do this better than us.
What can we do? As ever, it’s partly about how we vote and express ourselves through national and local politics, but also how we push for change in other ways.
Citizens UK is a great innovation, filling some of the gaps in local politics with practical grassroots ways to bring about change. They now have chapters in many UK cities and are continuing to grow (there is even one in Cambridge now). Do check them out and see if they operate in your city.
We all have a stake in the place we live, and so I would always encourage you to push for change when you find something in your local community that needs fixing - get involved, be curious, ask questions and make your own contribution to making your own town or city a better place for you and your neighbours.
Thanks for reading!
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up for the free monthly email alert if you’d like to know about future blogs.
Notes
[1] Breach, A. & Bridgett, S. (2022) Centralisation Nation, Centre for Cities| Available at: https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Final-Centralisation-Nation-02-09-2022.pdf
[2] The data is drawn from various sources. Most of the university data is from London Economic’s 2023 report ‘The Economic Impact of the University of Cambridge’ and the city council data is drawn from various published council reports, available on their website.
[3] London Economics (2023) The impact of the higher education sector on the UK economy: Summary Report for Universities UK
[4] Heery, E, Nash, D & Hann, D (2023) The Real Living Wage in Higher Education, Cardiff Business School | Available at: https://www.livingwage.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10/Higher%20education%20report.pdf