The Ladder of Citizen Participation in Barnet - More Snakes Than Ladders.

 Tomorrow there is a Community Leadership & Libraries Committee meeting where one of the agenda items is all about resident participation. The main thrust of this is about getting Barnet residents to do more for themselves but they also talk about greater engagement and participation and include a section about informing and consulting with residents.

There is quite an academic tone to the paper referencing the ‘Ladder of Citizen Participation’ "first modelled by Sherry Arnstein in a US planning journal in 1969" as the report says.

From my perspective we are definitely stuck on the lower rungs of tokenism and that is where we will remain unless there is a change of administration or we encounter more snakes and slip further back down the ladder as the urge to suppress discussion gets worse.

Over the last ten years we have seen many backward steps in resident participation.

• No longer allowed to address (speak at) a committee. Originally you could ask to address the committee for up to 5 minutes and committee members had the opportunity to ask questions of the speaker to get more insight into the issue. This was then reduced to three minutes, then the right to speak was removed entirely.

• Not allowed to ask more than one question on an agenda item, no more than 100 words, and if more than two people want to ask a question about the same agenda item only the first two questions are taken and all others are rejected. 

The excuse given was that people were asking too many questions even though the time for questions and speeches was limited to no more than 30 minutes. Some agenda items especially those dealing with budget and finance may be accompanied by up to 12 additional reports running to several hundred pages. Irrespective of the length of report or topics covered, one agenda item, one question is the limit.

• Restrictions on asking questions at residents forums. Pre 2010 residents forums used to be held up to 10 times a year, you could submit questions on the evening and there was a dialogue about the items. Now forums are just 4 times per year, you have to submit your question a week in advance and you can only speak for three minutes which is rigorously enforced. One councillor, John Marshall, disrespectfully labelled people who wanted to speak for four, five, six or seven minutes as "village bores". 

The report identifies the need to "reinvigorate" residents forums but what I find so galling is that exactly the same message was given 10 years ago in a detailed paper which you can read here. Set out below is an extract from that research paper:

The research asked what would encourage residents to get involved, the most common themes were:

• Topics needed to be of specific interest and relating to their local area;
• The Council should demonstrate they are taking action and feeding back what was happening as a result;
• Engagement should be better publicised through a variety of methods.

As a result, their principal requirements for an attractive engagement model was that visible action resulted on the night from those with authority, which was then fed back. The system should also be more widely publicised, and there were a number of suggestions on how this be done including greater use of electronic communications. There were also suggestions that the council should make greater use of Barnet online and the web to understand the issues that were causing residents most concern within different areas.

In terms of format some participants said they did not like the top table format and would prefer the meetings to be more informal, with table discussions, mixing residents, councillors and officers on each table.

There were some requests for all local issues, including other public services, to be covered, and for meetings to allocate a small budget, but this was by no means universal.

The research paper also identified barriers to people attending residents forums which included:

• Lack of action as a result of what is raised or discussed was the main deterrent to getting involved in the future
• Lack of feedback and explanation of the process was also seen as a key deterrent
• Lack of time was also a barrier to getting involved
• Inconvenient time/day - some participants felt if the engagement foras were held at inconvenient times this was a particular barrier to some residents. Reference was made in particular to mothers with children who would find it difficult to attend in the evening due to childcare
• Inconvenient location – if the event was in held at an inconvenient location and not in participant’s local area
• Confidentiality - was also mentioned as a barrier to raising issues in face to face foras. Particular reference was made to raising anti social behaviour issues about neighbours.

At the time, I thought the officer responsible had done a good job in identifying the problems and therefore their recommendations would be accepted. But no. This is Barnet and of course they ignored the findings and made it even more difficult to ask questions by banning a range of issues that could be raised. No surprise when people stopped going. 

Now they say they have a problem with engagement and want to 'reinvigorate' the forums. Ten years, no lessons learned, no one looking back to research carried out previously, same councillors doing their utmost to supress, ignore and discourage resident engagement. No wonder people are disengaged.

Barnet's Governance System - The words Titanic and deckchairs spring to mind

How effective are the Barnet Council at engaging with residents? Based on the results of the recent consultation exercise into the proposed changes to the councils governance system, the answer would have to be utterly ineffective.

 Barnet Council are moving from a cabinet system where decisions about the way the council is run are in the hands of just 10 people, to a committee system where, in theory, there will be much more debate and most of the councillors will get involved. The council undertook an initial phase of consultation using a questionnaire survey distributed as follows:

"Respondents views were fed back via a link to an on-line survey incorporated on the Engage space (the council's consultation website)
Paper copies of survey were circulated in:

• Council offices at North London Business Park, 
• Barnet House, 
• Burnt Oak, 
• Hendon Town Hall; 
• at the Arts Depot; 
• Barnet libraries (including community libraries)

The survey was promoted via the council’s social media channels and was supported by a press release to the local media, who gave the project press coverage. In addition, the survey was circulated to local groups (via CommUNITY Barnet) and to key partners (Barnet Clinical Commissioning Group, Barnet and Southgate College, Middlesex University, Brent Cross Shopping Centre, Barnet Group, Metropolitan Police
Barnet, Capita and Job Centre Plus)".

And how many responses did all this activity elicit. Just 71. Out a population of 356,000 that doesn't seem like very many. Indeed it is just 0.02% which by any standards seems woeful.

They fared somewhat better with the Citizens Panel (a group of "1,600 Barnet residents, selected to be representative of the adult population of the borough in terms of ward, age, gender, ethnicity, housing tenure, faith and disability") where they had 504 responses. This high response rate might be because the council spent £2,440 posting the survey to recipients.

However when you start looking at the results, the answers are somewhat shocking. For example:
92% of Citizen Panel respondents had not attended any council meeting including residents forums in the last 12 months. When asked why, their responses were as follows:

1. Did not know where the meetings were held (61% / 283 out of 464)
2. Lack of time (48% / 223 out of 464)
3. Inconvenient time (34% / 158 out of 464)
4. Inconvenient location (21% / 97 out of 464 responses)
5. Issues considered not relevant to me (19% / 88 out of 464 responses)
6. Not interested (17% / 79 out of 464 responses)
7. Have attended before but did not find them useful (10% / 46 out of 464 responses)

7% (16 out of 464) of respondents to this question cited other reasons for not attending
a meeting, including ‘too infirm/ ill health’ (3.4%), ‘do not know what items were on the
agenda/do not know if relevant’ (1.9%) and ‘do not know if allowed/needed an
invitation’ (1.7%).

Even worse is when you look at the basic knowledge of the Citizen Panel respondents, with 68% saying they do not know who their ward councillor was. Of the 32% who said they did know who their councillor was less than half (45%) had ever contacted them. To me this suggests that councillors need to start working a bit harder for their £10,000 a year in allowances and start talking to the people they are supposed to represent.

In terms of understanding the current governance system, only 7% of Citizens Panel respondents said they understood the system fully. That is completely unacceptable and the council should hold its head in shame.

In my humble opinion the biggest problem here is that the council is completely out of touch with residents and that any changes to the governance system are being introduced for the benefit of the people who run the system i.e politicians,  not residents. From my perspective this should act as a wake up call for the council to stop navel gazing and start getting residents involved with the council. I have repeatedly asked for a resident engagement strategy to get people involved with what the council does and how it affects residents. Only when you have an informed constituency can you start to ask them about how it should be run more effectively.

Barnet should stop rearranging the deckchairs and focus on stopping the ship from sinking. Democracy is in real danger of disappearing unless the council takes positive and assertive steps to engage residents and starts a programme of educating residents as to what the council does and how it operates. Oh and by the way I would like to see a performance measure introduced for councillors where, if less than 75% of residents know who their councillor is, they don't get any allowance. That might make them engage a bit more.