Decisions, decisions...

Have you been consulted today? You probably have – but without realising it. Hardly a day goes by without national or local government or their agencies announcing a consultation on this or that. It may be a long and serious consultation with a high national profile that you can hardly miss – like the Government’s current one on Britain’s future energy needs. Or it may be of importance to a single village or community like the current one on the future of Redlynch School.

When we hear about a national opinion poll on how the nation would vote at a General Election, we know that a statistically sound sample of about 1000 people will probably have been consulted and remarkably consistent results can be obtained.

The Council Tax Bill arrived on your doormat last month and Salisbury District Council wrote that they had asked a number of questions of ‘community representatives’ how much they would be prepared to pay for their rubbish to be collected every week, amongst other things. The same ‘budget consultation workshop’ asked those representatives about park and ride, car park charges, swimming pools, arts grants, bus subsidies, and community grants. All very hot topics! And I’m glad they asked. But quite honestly I think I’d rather trust the judgment of our 55 Councillors than the ‘residents selected from the People’s Voice Panel to reflect the split between male and female and rural and urban residence’ – all 24 of them!

And who will say our Cabinet was wrong to be generous in interpreting how they should apply the legislation for the introduction of ‘free’ bus travel for the over 60’s?

On the right track?

A lot of rail users are angry to discover that services and stops they took for granted are now under threat – Salisbury to Paignton direct, calls at West Dean Station, Bristol to Waterloo via Salisbury – and so on. I wonder if you were even aware that the Department for Transport had been consulting on these changes as part of the new Franchise Agreements with the train operating companies (documents were available on line and at railway stations – but it closed back in January). The cuts were proposed not by the wicked operators but by the Department itself because fewer stops mean less subsidy. Silly me – and I thought we wanted more people to use trains not cars!

The vote motive

The relationship between representatives and the electors is a very precious thing. In the UK we still manage to keep that relationship alive and well because of the direct relationship between councillors and MPs and their constituents. Electors will sometimes have tough choices to make between a Party or a policy they find attractive (or not) and a local candidate they trust (or not). But we all face a real problem of low voter turnout.

It was all very well in the days of Greek direct democracy. Turn up at the Agora and have a show of hands (slaves excepted, of course) on almost anything you liked. A referendum is about as close as we get to this in the modern world. Swiss voters can challenge any policy or law by gathering the signatures of 1% of the electors and demanding a referendum. If people want a new law or policy and gather 2% of electors, there must be a ballot..

In 27 of the United States they use referendums to aid government. In California ordinary elections are accompanied by referendums. The ‘propositions’ can be sponsored by the legislators or by petitioners – who can now collect signatures on the internet. But in the UK we reserve referendums for rare constitutional issues. Has the time come for Britons to flirt with referendums in a bid to woo the voters back to the ballot box? Should government be about having your say or getting your way?

Next May we are due to hold District Council elections. I wonder what questions you’d like tagged on to the ballot paper? Don’t tempt me! But why am I telling you all this?

The governance of England

Yes, England. Working at Westminster and observing this tired government push its programme through with the help of the Scots and Welsh MPs, each with their own national administrations, leads me to encourage you to take note of what is going on in the minds of our rulers. Westminster is the Parliament of England as well as the UK – and we don’t need another. But two things are going on that you should know about.

This summer the government will publish a White Paper on local government reform. Whatever people may feel about regional government (which is now taking very important decisions), Ministers seem set on converting County and District Councils to Unitary Authorities. They also want to empower neighbourhoods and communities – which they call ‘double devolution’ from central government to local authorities and from them to parishes and neighbourhoods. That sounds good to me – if uncomfortable for those facing change.

More dramatic – and more interesting for Salisbury – are moves to scrap the familiar economic planning regions of the UK (e.g. Government Office of the South West based on Bristol) and develop a national framework of City Regions. We’d abandon lines on maps for regions defined by interdependence between cities and the regions around them.

Since Salisbury was founded in the thirteenth century, we have developed our own ‘city region’ on a very local scale. We have a feel for the villages that ‘look to Salisbury’ and those that identify more with Winchester, Bath or Southampton. Where do we fit in on a national scale? I’ve never felt comfortable with Bristol as our regional capital. If it means reinventing Wessex, with Southampton as our big-city focus, I could live with that! Watch this space.

Robert Key MP
March 31st 2006