Time for south Bristol to get more power?
I’d like to keep the conversation going about what happened with the referendum to move to a committee system. The ever-insightful Paul Mizen on Twitter, suggested that the wards furthest out from the centre of Bristol, seemed more likely to vote for a committee system. And as I look at the map, it does kind of look like that.
But the relationship between distance and voting behaviour isn’t exactly clear cut, even though it is significant. The voting didn’t happen by chance.
Now let’s add in the factor of which wards are in south Bristol. At that point, we can see that all of them voted for a Committee system.
This idea that a whole section of the city wanted change from the status quo, while another didn’t, struck me as interesting. Or vice versa, that only a very small part of the city wanted to stick with what it already had.
Sociologist Peter Latham, who is been part of the Labour Campaign for Open Local Government, wrote in his book Who Stole the Town Hall? about the committee system being one where all members make policy. This inclusion helps eliminate the democratic deficit that leader and mayor systems brought in.
But Latham also goes on to say that the UK has the highest average population size per local authority in Europe.
There should be more councillors and councils — each with the committee system, which is more inclusive than any other form of governance — covering smaller areas. (p.10)
Putting together South Bristol’s potential feelings of disenfranchisement with the need for more councillors and smaller local authorities, might we want to think about giving south Bristol its own local authority? What if Bristol was split up a bit more?
There has been talk of increasing the size of the population in Bristol, primarily to provide more council tax and make up for the lack of central government funding, but what if we reduced it instead?
I’d love to hear thoughts about this. Let’s talk.