Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
11:29 am
Richard Kemp: I certainly support that view. To my mind, one of the weaknesses of the mayoral system is that the mayor and the group are quite divorced. If you then have 10 people who are quite divorced, that would damage the unity of political parties, which in terms of big councils, is actually quite important.
To go back to the original question, I have been a cabinet member under the new system, a committee chair under the old system and a back-bencher under both. I must say that I get a great deal of satisfaction out of being a back-bencher. I enjoy the work in my ward and perhaps, because I have been around a long time, I can pull people together. I enjoy an element of scrutiny, although I must admit that I do not go to a lot of what we call in Liverpool select committees because, by and large, they do not function very well. I enjoy being able to stand up in council and say everything that I think without being bounded by cabinet responsibility.
We need, however, to address the point about council members’ perception that you are either a sheep or a goat; you are either in the cabinet or shadow cabinet or not very important. That is how the current power structure looks. It is does not matter how good the initiatives are—and we all try to do things to involve all the council—in the old system, you were there when the decisions were taking place, you could hear the arguments and you understood them. Getting a seminar, the appropriate report, the appropriate information on the website is not the same as being part of that debate, even if the reality was that you stuck your hand up when your spokesman or your chair told you to.
Therefore, I think there are real issues about how back benchers obtain knowledge. There are issues that need to be addressed by almost every council about how we support ward members, front-line councillors—whatever we call them—in doing the job that I define as being the cabinet member for their ward. There is a long way to go.