Originally published 5 October 2009. This article is retained from the tCI archive. Law, policy or practice may have changed since publication.
The Mayor of Bedford died recently.
There will now be a fresh election in mid-October and, last week, the Conservative Party held an ‘open primary’ whereby anyone could come along and select their candidate. They didn’t have to be members of the Party; neither did they necessarily have to be supporters. They were allowed to come along; turn up, and you have a vote. Simple! This is not entirely new, of course. When the same party needed to replace Anthony Steen MP in Totnes after his intemperate response to the MP expenses row, they went for a postal ballot of constituents. Over 16,000 voters took part – at 24% rather more than the turnout in some of our local elections, but it cost approx £40,000 – so it’s not cheap. There isn’t a long queue to repeat that experiment, but the Town-meeting style is popular, and the problem in Bedford was that over 400 showed up leaving the organisers unprepared for such a number and postponing the exercise for an hour and a quarter.
Predicting attendances at a public meeting is always a problem. Where Councils, Health Trusts, Police or Community groups fix a meeting, there is always a risk that they only attract a few elderly ‘usual suspects’. But then, if the subject gathers significant local traction, they may greet hundreds ... as happened in Bedford.
So is it better to have 400 people in a room rather than 16,000 in a postal ballot?
If the total number engaged is the main criterion, pay up and organise a postal vote. But, if the idea is to create a ‘deliberative’ process, where those who turn up can be exposed to the arguments or to the personalities, then the open meeting formula wins hands down. Its main disadvantage, of course is that we still don’t necessarily get better decisions, for it is open to one side or another to pack the event with their supporters. It seems this may have occurred in Bedford, but supporters of Open Primaries are relaxed about this. Selections, they rightly argue have always tended to reward the better-organised over those that weren’t.
In parallel with this trend, is the growing use of participatory budgeting. This week, if you live in Lambeth you can take part in an internet poll to decide who receives grants of £50,000, £75,000 or £125,000 towards community projects. Again the danger is that decisions reflect who’s there – though the evidence is that attendees’ pre-disposition upon arrival can frequently change when they hear the competing arguments of those bidding for the money. Advocates of PB argue that as the process becomes entrenched in communities, this becomes a self-correcting problem; everyone learns the ‘rules of the game’
Both PB and Open-Primaries have been greeted enthusiastically by those who are keen on active citizenship or greater public engagement. Rightly so, for they score on the most vital aspect of public involvement – namely the importance of giving people better information about the issues.
The ‘duty to involve’ – which applies in one form or another to local government, health and an increasing number of other public bodies – actually has three different elements. It is the ‘duty to inform, consult and involve’. Without the provision of good information, the other two activities are devalued. What’s great about the two processes discussed in this Topic is that they create (no matter how artificially) an informed set of consultees whose opinions are worth taking seriously if only because they have learnt about the issue. Choose your metaphor. It matters not whether you think in terms of ‘smelling the coffee’, ‘breathing the same air’, shaking hands with the protagonists’ or ‘absorbing the mood-music’, BEING THERE does help!
Maybe that’s why modern engagement methods reward your journey!
Trigger points
- For an interesting account of the Bedford Open Primary from the man who facilitated it – Click here
- The Institute’s new training course Implementing the Duty to Involve – will cover some of the issues raised in this Topic.
- For information about Lambeth’s PB exercise, click here
This is the 145th Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement