Quality of representation

The Government claims that a benefit of moving from a two-tier system of a County Council with underlying 11 Boroughs and District Councils to a single-tier of Unitary Authorities will be savings from the reduced numbers of elected councillors.  Currently in Mole Valley the cost of Councillors’ Allowances comprises about 2.2% of Council spending so the scope for cost savings is fairly limited.

However most Councillors do much more than make decisions about Council’s policies and planning applications. Indeed, many Councillors, especially in more deprived areas, devote a lot of their own time to case-work, helping residents to engage not just with Council services, such as Highways, Education and Social Care, but also with third-party organisations such as Housing Associations, Academy Schools, Healthcare providers and Emergency Services.

As the new Unitary Authorities will, at least to start with, be based on the recently-agreed County Electoral Divisions, a key question is how many councillors will be elected for each division. 

In areas with Town or Parish Councillors, some of this case-work may be undertaken by their councillors but their work (in Mole Valley) is entirely voluntary. In unparished areas the table indicates the extent of the workload that new Councillors may face. See Community assets and “hyper-local” issues for more on this aspect

A paper[i] written in 2008 compared residents per councillor in a number of European countries; the figures it reported were France 118, Austria 209, Sweden 256, Ireland 2336, UK 2603. Whilst this data is limited and somewhat out-of-date, it suggests that the communities in the UK are already less well represented than some other countries.

We believe that the new Unitary Authorities should be set up with 3 Councillors per County Electoral Division. Anything less will make it too hard for those in need to find a Councillor who can help; it will also present an unmanageable workload for many Councillors and will deter many people with near-full-time employment from seeking election. This in turn will deprive Councils of the diversity and breadth of external experience they need.

Mandate for changes

The timescale the Government has imposed means that residents and key stakeholders will be deprived of their say before the key decisions are made – see “Do your views matter?” 

However the timescale has been achieved by cancelling May’s Surrey County Council elections. Since the last County elections, the Conservative vote in local elections and last year’s General Election has progressively fallen across Surrey. Now more than half of Surrey’s electors have a Liberal Democrat MP and the past year has also seen a rise in support for Reform UK. May’s elections were expected to see a major shift in power in Surrey.

Instead, the County Councillors elected in 2021 will serve without a new mandate for 2 or possibly 3 additional years, entrenching the current Conservative leadership of the County Council and, with it, considerable control of the future shape of Local Government across Surrey. It is little wonder that the Conservative Leader of Surrey County Council requested the cancellation of the election, but surprising that the Labour Government concurred despite the stated opposition of the Leaders of all the Boroughs and District Councils in Surrey.

Give us your views

[i] “How many elected representatives does local government need? A review of the evidence from Europe”, Kingsley Purdam, Peter John, Stephen Greasley and Paul Norman