Lowri Griffiths on Local Government Decision-Making, the Pavement Outside Her Flat, and Why Democracy at the Borough Level Is Both Essential and Maddening

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | BigSmokeBroke.com

There is a stretch of pavement near the end of my road where, three years ago, a consultation document appeared in a laminated sleeve attached to a lamppost proposing the installation of a public bench. The document invited comments. I submitted a comment. The comment said, in essence: yes, a bench would be good here, there is an elderly man who often pauses at this point in what appears to be genuine need of a seat and a bench would serve the stated public interest goal of the consultation, which was to improve pedestrian amenity. I felt civic about submitting this comment. I felt that democracy was being practised at the appropriate granular level and that my participation in it would produce, within a reasonable timeframe, a bench.

There is no bench. There is a new laminated consultation document on the lamppost, now somewhat weathered, which is the second consultation on the same bench, and which invites comments on a revised proposal that moves the bench twelve centimetres from the original proposed location in response to a concern raised during the first consultation about the proximity of the original proposed location to a dropped kerb. The revised proposal has been out for comment for eleven months. I have submitted another comment. The comment says: the bench is fine, please install it, the elderly man is still there.

The Mechanics of Local Government Decision-Making

I do not wish to be entirely unfair to Haringey Council, which is a borough that covers some of the most diverse and economically varied territory in London — from the relatively prosperous areas of Muswell Hill and Crouch End, which get a disproportionate share of the neighbourhood journalism, to the areas around Tottenham and Wood Green that have higher rates of poverty, housing stress, and the accumulated deprivation that the council is managing against a budget that has been reduced by central government over fifteen years of austerity that councils have had to implement without any corresponding reduction in the need for the services they provide. The council is not, I suspect, spending three years on the bench consultation because it has nothing else to do. It is spending three years on the bench consultation because it has too much to do and the bench is not at the top of the list and the consultation process that must be followed before the bench is installed is the same process that must be followed before anything is installed, because legal requirements and liability considerations and the accumulated procedural framework of local government apply equally to a bench and to a bypass.

This is the institutional truth about British local government: it operates under a legislative and regulatory framework that was designed for an era when councils had more staff, more money, and more time to apply those staff and that money to the framework’s requirements. The framework has not simplified as the resources have reduced. The procedural requirements for a bench are the same as they were when councils had the staff to process them in six months rather than thirty-six. The bench waits. The process continues. The elderly man pauses at the lamppost and then continues, benchless, toward wherever he is going.

What Local Government Actually Does

This mild irritation about the bench should not obscure the fact that the council is simultaneously doing a large number of things that I benefit from and never think about because they happen at the infrastructure level of daily life that is visible only when it fails. The waste collection that happens every week. The social services that support the families in my borough who need support. The planning decisions that determine what can and cannot be built around me. The libraries — threatened with cuts by governments of both parties for a decade, still there, still serving the children who use them after school. The road maintenance that fills potholes on a schedule that could be faster and is faster than it would be if there were no one to do it. According to the Local Government Association, English councils are managing a collective funding gap that has grown every year since 2010 and that now requires continuous service reduction to avoid insolvency that would produce something worse than slow bench consultations.

The bench is a metaphor that I am now slightly embarrassed about having extended as far as I have. The bench is not the council’s failure. The bench is the evidence that the part of the council’s capacity that processes bench installations has been reduced below the level at which bench installations happen on a normal human timeline. Everything works at the speed of the resources available to it. The resources are not enough. The bench takes three years. And yet.

The Civic Contract

I still want the bench. I still believe that a neighbourhood’s quality of life is expressed in the small things — the bench at the pavement corner, the working playground equipment, the maintained parks that are genuinely available to everyone — as much as in the larger policy decisions that attract journalist attention and political energy. The local government that cannot install a bench efficiently is not failing at the meta-level of strategic policy; it is failing at the immediate level of what it means to live in a well-governed place. These are not separate levels. They are the same governance, operating at different scales, and both matter. I will wait for the bench. I have been waiting for three years. I expect I will wait another year or possibly two. When it arrives, I will sit on it with considerable satisfaction and then write something complaining about something else the council is doing slowly. This is North London. This is local government. This is what it means to be a civic participant in a borough where the bench takes three years and the NHS wait times are too long and the bin collection is mostly fine and the parks are lovely and the library is still open and the elderly man is still walking that stretch of pavement without anywhere to sit. I see him most mornings. I nod. He nods. We are waiting together.

Lowri Griffiths writes about North London and its institutions. Her homepage is at The London Prat.

For more North London local government observation, visit The Poke.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/