Four years or one year?

Once upon a time local elections were held every year, when a third of the councillors stood down or sought re-election. It is surprisingly difficult to find out when this practice came to an end in Brighton & Hove. To judge from the composition of the separate councils of the two towns, it was in the late 1970s but it could have been later. Since the creation of the unitary authority on 1 April 1997 elections have been held every four years, a policy that was last decided by the council in October 2000, as confirmed in a memorandum by the city council to the Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions and published by the House of Commons with the Select Committee's report on 10 April 2002. The report's conclusion: 'A great deal of time, money and effort has gone into changing the political management arrangements of local authorities with apparently little change to the overall quality and credibility of local government.'

It is up to councils to decide how often elections are held, either once every four years or annually for three years of a four year cycle. There is no nationally imposed standard. In 1986 the Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business (the Widdicombe Report, Cmnd 9797) recommended single-member wards with elections every four years, similar to the parliamentary model, but this was rejected by the government of the day. In fact, at this Thursday's elections, 20 out of the 45 contested unitary will be electing only a third of the council. (This appears to be an increase in the number holding partial elections compared with eight years ago.)

There are arguments for and against each system that are cogently presented in a consultation paper from the Electoral Commission in 2003. This noted among other things that is costs less to hold elections every four years rather than annually. Solution: never hold elections if cost is an issue. MORI research for the Commission found widespread ignorance and confusion about the timing and frequency of elections, especially among the young.

However, the Commission's report in January 2004 recommended that clarity was needed in the system and because of the problem of creating wards of approximately equal size, all councils should hold elections every four years. This is all getting a bit technical but it is probably largely forgotten today that (small) wards were introduced in the middle of the 19th century to ensure that local authorities represented a cross-section of the social classes: if the electoral areas were too large, the lower orders would have an unassailable advantage. As parliamentary elections have shown ever since, the argument doesn't hold much water.

If clarity is the issue, holding elections every May is clearer than remembering in which fourth year they will be held; the Electoral Commission argued against holding all local authority elections at the same time so as to preserve a differentiation between different tiers of authority. Which means there are local elections somewhere every year, a fact reflected in news and current afairs programmes to add to the confusion. How perverse can you be?

There is, for Grumpy Old Voter, one overwhelming argument in favour of annual elections: to allow the electorate to feel more powerful. Local government, more than national government, is about issues that affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. A system that is more responsive to the public mood about the conduct of affairs on their behalf would increase the power of electors and, marginally perhaps, diminish the power of politicians. And that is a fundamental principle of democracy. We, the voters, are already too marginalised, as the steady decline in the average turnout at elections shows. Danes are twice as likely to vote at local elections than the English, who are bottom of European turnout league. Grumpy Old Voter reckons hat makes the Danes twice as democratic.

Sources:
Memorandum by Brighton and Hove City Council (LGA 30).
Electoral Commission: The Cycle of Local Government Elections in England, Report and recommendations (January 2004).
'Local elections: The key battlegrounds' in The Guardian, 5 February 2007