The Wardman Wire

Taking the numbers of Local Councillors from my earlier article, and the population figures, we get:

• England has 19668 councillors for 50,431,700 people = 2564 per councillor.
• Northern Ireland 582 has councillors for 1,724,400 people = 2963 per councillor.
• Scotland has 1222 councillors for 5,094,800 people = 4169 per councillor.
• Wales has 1264 councillors for 2,958,600 people = 2340 per councillor.

A couple of comments from Iain Dale’s thread asking “How many councillors are there?”:

>Lots of them…

>Whatever the answer is, it is probably too many!

The knock about is fair-enough, but I don’t think they mean “too many”; I think that is a proxy for “too much” (i.e., money from my pocket).

Efficient, volunteer, Local Councillors who do not take the “p” where allowances are concerned (and there are plenty around), but do take the time to help local people with the problems, are a benefit to any community - and deserve our respect.

Having said that, we have seen a concerted move by our Masters and Commanders to take the “local” out of Local Government, and saddle us with County Councils with 5,000 to 15,000 employees, large call-centres of people answering phones, computerised audit-trails, long journeys to see anyone, and all the other things that come with large organisations.

My opinion is that smaller is better for councils, and if that means more essentially volunteer Councillors on our streets, I say that is a good thing.

In my book, small means less than roughly 1000 staff (preferably smaller) where possible, so that if I have a problem I am likely to talk to the same person next time I phone, and where it is possible to do things inside the organisation by walking around and talking to people rather than by submitting emails in triplicate to an entire management chain - which removes the need for much of the bureaucracy.

One place to learn from about devolving power downwards is probably France, with their larger numbers of small councils which still have significant powers.

It doesn’t do much for those who like empire-building, but that is not the purpose of Local Authorities.

Tags: lcoal government, local authority, couny council, district council