Councillors warn they lack powers to represent local community properly

A survey of almost 800 local authority representatives has found that two-thirds feel they lack the powers to properly represent the needs of their local community, the Electoral Reform Society has said.

Publishing a report, Democracy Made in England, the ERS said: “The first principle of devolution should be that the people of England should have the right to decide on how they wish to be governed.

“It’s clear that, so far, those calls for greater powers, for the large majority of councillors and authorities have not been met….It is clear that, for many who serve their communities at the coalface of local democracy, questions remain unanswered about how relations between the centre and localities can be better structured in favour of local decision making.

“With so many local councillors feeling powerless to serve their constituents’ needs, we must find a better balance between those two levels of government that truly serves the interests of communities across England.”

In the report the ERS criticises the fact that often any transfer of decision making-powers in England had come as an afterthought – “and where reforms have taken place these have been driven from the centre and done little to genuinely empower local government or the communities in which people live”.

England remains one of the most centralised nations in Europe as measured by the local control of resources and the over-dependence on Whitehall decision making, it said.

The ERS also suggested that the Government’s levelling up strategy was about tackling the long-standing inequalities across the UK but had so far, failed to provide the answers to England’s democratic deficit.

The Society seeks in the report to set out how a new relationship between national and local government can be created, and how a policy of devolution in England could be developed and the principles which should underpin such a move.

The ERS said: “It is not for the centre at Westminster to decide how local communities should see themselves and how they should be governed but to set out how those communities can choose their own governance, how citizens can themselves reinvigorate local democracy.

“Now is the time to rebuild our local democracy but, to do that, England can no longer be an afterthought.”