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In an email the other day I commented that the two big pillars of the Big Society were re-branding and permission. I don’t think this is anything particularly profound (if it is, I’m probably unknowingly plagiarising something I’ve read somewhere) and have even remarked on the re-branding aspect myself.

The fact is that Big Society is just a new name, perhaps emphasis, on something that already happens all over. I first pointed to this in relation to the Battersea High Street Big Lunch – something you can analysis almost endlessly through a Big Society lens. First there were the businesses, then the various community groups who attended the event, then the people who went along and enjoyed the day. But even further you can argue that the Big Lunch itself is a Big Society project, seeking to encourage and help neighbours strengthen their communities. It’s welcome the government is looking at promoting society over itself, but society has always been able to look after itself when it needed.

But permission is a different matter entirely, and works on different levels.

The obvious one is for permission to actually do things, whether its setting up a school, running a service or organising a street party – it’s crucial that people are allowed to do this (and remarkably unhealthy that we’ve developed a society in which we often feel the state has to give that permission).

But it goes further. We need to develop a cultural permission to try new things, and I’m not so sure that’s there yet.

To take one example, in the existing Big Society ordinary people help run schools. Parents are elected as school governors, the education authority appoint some more and the governing body itself appoints members from the community. This is totally unremarkable – no-one questions whether these laypeople should have a role in running a school of (hopefully) professional staff, and have ultimate responsibility children’s education. So why is there controversy over the idea these very same people should have the right to establish their own schools?

It might be politics, those who oppose the idea tend (as far as I’ve seen) to be on the left, with unions particularly objecting to the idea. It might just be conservatism, a resistance to change and feeling of comfort with the status quo. It might be fear, what if they don’t work out or, perhaps worse, what if they do? And I occasionally worry that it’s down to a belief that only the state can fulfil certain functions without really questioning if that’s true.

And maybe there is something deeper in our national and institutional psyche that doesn’t like change and is suspicious of the new and the novel: a feeling that we do just fine, thank-you very much, there’s nothing we need to change or learn.

In fact the permission is not so much about what we are allowed to do, but what we are allowed to try. It’s the difference between being part of what’s already there, and being part of something new. While it would attract the ire of the Taxpayers Alliance we should be getting back to a stage in which improvement and innovation (which will always carry the risk of failure) should be celebrated. It has almost become cliché (through my overuse alone) that dealing with the deficit is a huge opportunity because it can drive innovation. But it can only do that if we as a society give ourselves permission.

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The following is the text of an article I wrote for the Local Government Information Unit‘s C’llr magazine as part of their Big Society edition:

The Big Society’s greatest strength is that no-one actually knows what it is, possibly not even the Prime Minister whose stroke of genius was to create a concept so vague, but so obviously ‘good’, that almost anyone can support it. Whether you want a small state, government involved in every aspect of community and social life or something in between you can find some- thing in the Big Society that will fill your needs.

Trying to divine what the government actually means by Big Society has become a small industry. Taking David Cameron’s speech in Liverpool as a starting point he outlined three strands, social action, public service reform and community empowerment and peppered his speech with words like philanthropy, innovation and ‘voluntarism’. But these are hardly new concepts, most have appeared in various government fads that have come and gone over the years (I was struck by how much the themes of public service reform and innovation resonated with the early 90s vogue for Osborne and Gaebler’s ‘Reinventing Government’). Indeed, David Cameron might view the philanthropic founding of Eton College several hundred years ago as nothing more than a proto-Big Society free school!

What is new is the need for central government to dramatically reduce public spending at a time when government – for good or bad – impinges on more aspects of people’s lives than ever before.

It’s tempting to take the cynical view that it’s a smoke screen policy to offer warm and fuzzy feelings the Treasury can no longer afford. Yet that would be overly simplistic and fail to reflect the reality. Big Society is the mantra of all politicians in government. Every department has a Big Society minister, every announcement a Big Society reference. UK government websites already contain over 13,000 Big Society references and the total grows daily. Across the country voluntary organisations and community groups are starting to think about the opportunities the policy gives them. Slowly and surely a Big Society is being built, even though no-one quite understands the architect’s drawings and vision.

If there is a common understanding it’s that local councils are not a part of the Big Society. While there may not be any diktat stating that local authorities can’t join the Big Society gang, the language rarely mentions them. In the Prime Minister’s announcement he may have named four councils as early pilots, but then went on to address the people of those boroughs and challenged them – not their councils or councillors – to identify the blockages they needed removed to build the Big Society.

And it almost seems that councils have rolled over and let this happen. Two months after the Prime Minister’s launch of the four pilot areas only Windsor and Maidenhead had published anything other than press releases related to the Big Society and how they were helping to make it work. Liverpool had not even published a press release, despite being host to the launch.

It is almost as if, after decades of centralisation and Whitehall direction, Town Halls are unable to take on the opportunity without being told. The irony is that while this is the biggest chance in a generation for councils to exercise freedom in shaping their areas, it might also be their only chance for another generation. The government’s approach to local government seems to have been populism rather than localism; should a localist minister really be telling Newham if it needs a chief executive, or Leicester its councillors’ IT needs?

If the vague nature of the Big Society is its greatest strength, it can also be a great opportunity for local government. The choice is simple, either stand back and watch the Big Society being built around us, or join in with the building and help our communities improve our neighbourhoods; and isn’t that the reason most of us got into local government?

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Local Government is all about measurement (or at least it was until the coalition set about abolishing most of it). We were assessed, and assessed ourselves, on a range of criteria, outputs and scores. We’d rank ourselves according to the region we are in, or against ‘most similar groups’ of boroughs. We’d measure whether we’re in the top quartile, or suffer the angst of finding ourselves in the bottom quartile.

Sometimes we’d even stop and ask ourselves what benefit this brought.

Most measurement is irrelevant
An experience that sticks with me (and which I’ve probably written about before) was when canvassing in Merton in 2006.

I was on the doorstep talking to a woman who was perfectly happy. “But what about the state of the streets?” I asked, glancing around at the uneven, broken pavements, strewn with litter and week-old papers.

“Why, what’s wrong with them?” was her simple response.

She did not think there was a problem with Merton. That it didn’t score as highly on street cleaning as Wandsworth (and most other places, for that matter) didn’t bother her, she didn’t live in any of those other places, she lived in Merton and Merton did all right by her.

Conversely, it isn’t any consolation to a Wandsworth resident who thinks their street is dirty to know that, actually, it’s a lot cleaner than Merton. They don’t live in Merton, they live in their road, and that looks dirty to them.

So we spent our time completing irrelevant assessments, but as far as I know we’ve never actually tried to measure something that should be incredibly relevant: the health of local government.

Measuring the abstract
Now what I don’t mean is an assessment of an individual council in the way of the old Corporate Performance or Comprehensive Area Assessments. But an assessment of local government as an institution. We live in a political culture in which increasingly we are looking at localism, but paradoxically government is becoming more central.

Of course, localism doesn’t mean that the council should do everything – it shouldn’t – but if power is to be exercised at as low a level as possible and communities are to be empowered then surely councils are the best positioned to deliver on that localism promise.

The difficulty is in measuring something that doesn’t give itself to objective measurement; councils don’t have a collective heartbeat to log and monitor. But that is not a problem in other areas. Perhaps one of the best known subjective measures is the Doomsday clock. While it will be quite obvious to all when that hits midnight, what is the real difference between 11:53 and 11:54?

Even with seemingly more scientific measures there are difficulties. Take the Gini Coefficient, which attempts to measure inequality. While seemingly scientific there are all sorts of potential criticisms about methodology. But even then, there’s a fundamental argument to be had about what is a ‘good’ result. Assuming we accept there should be some inequality, if only to reflect experience and expertise at work, what is the acceptable level?

A perfect council
Politics means there will be no agreement on what a perfect council looks like. Even within parties there will be variations, interpretations and different flavours. However, there are some aspects on which there should be agreement. For example, local government should have some freedom. Wandsworth shouldn’t be able to declare war on Sweden, but shouldn’t we have the right to decide how we deliver services to residents?

And presumably few would argue that there should be a sense of connection between residents and their council, people should feel informed, there should be a high turnout at elections and people should see how the vote they cast (or most of their neighbours cast) has an impact on the direction and policies of the borough. There’d probably be a growing consensus there should be transparency, so people can easily see what a council is doing and get information about their local area.

If there can be a broad consensus on the framework in which a good council exists, the broad powers it has and the relationship it has with its residents, then surely we can measure it.

Sticking my finger in the air
Herein lies the difficulty. There are all sorts of measures you could try. What set me off thinking about this was a discussion I was having with someone on whether or not I would recommend a career in local government (as a councillor or an officer). A fairly straightforward measure might be the changes in numbers applying for graduate positions in local government and the civil service. In terms of engagement we might look at the turnout at elections. But others are far more subjective measures – can you ever objectively measure administrative power and freedom?

But to a degree accurate measure isn’t that important. If you take the Doomsday Clock it’s the arbitrary judgement of experts. There probably isn’t that much difference, in practical terms, between 11:53 and 11:54 – the point is that it provokes discussion, debate and raises awareness.

And I think this is something we need more of in local government. In the time I have been interested in and followed politics I’ve seen local government become, relatively, less and less important. From Thatcher onwards power has been centralised and local government devalued. Blair talked the localism game, but cloaked it in targets that meant councils could do little more than deliver central government goals.

I have hope for the coalition government. But I also know from 30 years of history that the words of an incoming administration are frequently forgotten as new policy priorities emerge and local government changes political complexion. My biggest fear is that currently localism and populism are very close, and I have my suspicions which will win when they diverge.

The Digby
So in the spirit of arbitrary judgements I propose that we measure the health of local government with the Digby Index (the naming of which I will explain if anyone pays any attention). It’s simple, it goes from zero to one: zero being no local government and one being ‘perfect’ local government. And it’s measured to three decimal places (because I like the arbitrary, and also because it makes the smallest unit of measurement the milli-Digby).

I happen to believe that local government is probably looking the healthiest it has for decades. But that cannot overcome the fact that there has been decades of centralisation. Our powers are incredibly limited and most of our money comes via central government. Additionally, the mindset is still overcoming all those years of central direction. So although opportunities might be there, it’s still coming to terms with being in a position to overcome them. The threat is that they might not be able to adapt before a government (whether coalition or something else) starts centralising again.

On that basis I’m think the Digby index currently stands at 0.378, although there is the prospect for significant revision upwards.

What do you think?

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My post yesterday about the Redbridge YouChoose site reminded me of some work I’d done looking at what services people thought were important.

Back in 2008 and 2009 we were required to conduct the Place Survey. Now abolished by the coalition government, the Place Survey was, very simply, a survey of people about the place they lived.

The most recent I could find was reported to the council in paper 09-823 (link to PDF). It makes interesting reading, not least because it seems to generally reflect the views of Redbridge residents. My recent interest in it was a result of my thinking about what it was that made Wandsworth Wandsworth. Why do people like it here and what do they like about it?

In some ways it isn’t that illuminating, because it doesn’t really give any unique answers. But it does provide some insight into what people think is important.

The 2009 Place Survey
They survey asked two questions that I’m particularly interested in for the purposes of this post:

Thinking generally, which of the things below would you are most important in making somewhere a good place to live?

then:

And thinking about this local area, which of the things below, if any, do you think most need improving?

The list provided was fairly generic, covering things like transport, crime, parks and the like. The results for Wandsworth, inner and outer London are all fairly much aligned. While there are differences, there are no major differences that would point to a specific ‘Wandsworth’ mentality or issue that is a major problem here compared to elsewhere.

Where it’s a little less useful is in helping the council allocate its budget in the way that Redbridge’s does.

Crime: feelings and practice
For example, the most important thing in making an area a nice place to live is ‘The level of crime’ – 69% said that was an important factor (people could choose more than one) and 34% went on to say that it was something that needed improving (again, people could choose more than one).

When you look at the council’s budget on this (using the 2009-10 actual revenue expenditure) it only spent just over 2.6% of its revenue budget on this, around £5.5 million which went on the community safety division, youth offending team and graffiti removal. Odd, you might think, to spend relatively little on resident’s highest concern. But, of course, this reflects that the council is not the biggest player when it comes to crime, that’s the police. Additionally, there are roles for other public bodies to play – for example housing associations – when it comes to preventing and tackling crime and antisocial behaviour.

Health: feelings and practice
The inverse happens with health where 36% said health services were important and 13% said they needed improving. Effectively half as important. But this takes (using the adult care services figure) £84.4 million from the revenue budget – just under 41%, nearly twelve times as much as ‘crime’. And that’s only the start of it, on top you would have to add the huge budgets of the NHS!

Evidence of ‘imminence’ affecting people’s views?
What, of course, is interesting about these two examples is that they also deal with very different attitudes and services.

When you consider the adult care services budget large sums of that will be spent on a relatively small number of people with significant needs. The crime budget will largely be trying to address the fear of crime amongst a community in which the majority of whom, thankfully, will never be a victim of crime in their lifetime.

Oddly, for many answering it’s probably more likely that they would eventually need some sort of care provision from the council or NHS than they would need the services of the council’s community safety team because they’d been a victim of crime. However, for many their responses would have been driven by the feeling that they could be a victim of crime at any time, but are unlikely to have imminent need of health services.

Does this help at all?
Does this help the council in setting the budget? I’m not sure it does, and I’ll give two reasons why.

First, we have no choice about a lot of this spending. This is especially true when it comes to spending on things like social services. While we can look at making our spending more cost effective, in many cases we are legally obliged to provide a service and we cannot cut it.

Second, there has to be an element of strategic thought in this. While that might be there in the Redbridge exercise, I don’t think it is here. Indeed, it’s telling that the majority of the top factors in making somewhere a good place are what I would call ‘doorstep’ issues, basically the things that strike you when you walk out your front door in the morning: is the transport working? are the streets clean?

And it certainly doesn’t get anyone any closer to working out why people like their particular borough.

[The data I used in this post are at jamescousins.com/data.]

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Redbridge's YouChoose website

One of the consequences of hard times is that people often become more inventive and innovative when looking for solutions, and this seems to have been true when it comes to informing people about the consequences of dealing with the deficit. Several councils have come up with interesting ways of doing this. But to my mind by far the most innovative (at least as far as technology goes) is Redbridge who are consulting through a vehicle called You Choose. It appears it’s a YouGov product, although I’m not aware of any other council that has implemented it. However, it’s fascinating to play with it.

It starts with the premise the basic premise that the budget is overspent by £24,849,000, which would need a 25% council tax increase. However, only a 5% council tax increase is possible. It’s down to you to get it to that figure, and you do that by adjusting the budget for various departments and services.

It isn’t that sophisticated. You can reduce or increase budgets, but you can’t look at many different delivery models (cutting the sports budget reveals that the Fairlop Sailing Centre would have to close, whereas that seems to me exactly the sort of facility you might be able to transfer to a sailing club or community group). But that doesn’t detract from its ability to show that Redbridge, like so many other councils, faces hard decisions.

And that’s the main reasons I think it is excellent, because it has educational value. It’s impossible to get to the magic five per cent without seeing some services go, and it does contrast the different approaches; the salami slice from all services, or making the savings in just a few budget areas so you can protect (or maybe even enhance) some priority areas.

What is good is that they are publishing the results as they come in so you can see what other people are choosing. And these are providing some fascinating insights.

At the time of writing 955 people have submitted their budgets. The headline is a 3% reduction in council tax. At first sight, it seems that people are going for bigger than necessarily reductions to cut council tax, not making the smallest reductions necessary. I’ve not gone through the raw data, so it might be that a few people cutting to the minimum to bring the average down, but the other breakdowns suggest that people are actually making the tough choices.

Social services looks to be (jointly) the second most cut budget (the most cut budget is, unsurprisingly, ‘council support and public engagement’) although there seems to be some competition from ‘regeneration and environment’ and ‘culture, sport and leisure’ for the most favoured for reductions.

And that runs counter to my first instinct when I saw this site; my mind immediately jumped to an episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker blurted out what is all too often true about the political mentality: “I am their leader, I must follow them.” I have always been of the opinion that one of the reasons people are elected it to make those tough choices, and then defend them to the electorate.

But if the current results in Redbridge are anything to go by, the general public are more than capable of making those tough choices themselves.

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Yet more democracy in action last night at the Environment, Culture and Community Safety OSC.

I was there for the community safety and town centre parts of the meeting which come under my portfolio. In many ways it was a relatively straightforward meeting. There wasn’t anything particularly contentious on the agenda, although as the deficit is addressed I’m sure that is to come. The full agenda is on the council’s website (which does work from time to time, I promise you) but to give a few selected highlights.

10-646 Domestic Violence Strategy
Domestic violence is woefully under-reported and, unlike most crimes, almost all victims are repeat victims. The problem is that domestic violence and abuse often take place in situations that are hard to leave, perhaps because they are in the home, and the victim has nowhere else to go, or it might be that children are involved. In many cases there is a feeling of shame or embarrassment, particularly where the situation doesn’t fit the stereotypical man abusing woman scenario (one of the specific areas of focus are abuse in LGBT relationships).

10-647 Community Safety Division – Annual Quality and Performance Review
This is one of those monster reports that covers everything (each service produces one of these a year), but worth dipping into if you are interested in the sorts of things the council does to make Wandsworth safer.

This prompted a lot of discussion on Neighbourhood Watch (NW), which is one of my pet subjects because I think NW has such great potential and is one of the policy priorities for the coming years. We’re trying to see how we can expand the benefits of NW into hard-to-reach areas, for example council estates have traditionally had much poorer coverage, but also to see how we can create networks of watches and whether we can help in strengthening communities.

Of course, one of the problems with this is that it is uncharted territory. Wandsworth is something of a leader in this field and it’s difficult to know what will and won’t work. It’s a subject that I’ve touched on before, that to develop and improve you often have to accept that your experiments may end in failure, which is not something that sits well in politics. While exciting, I won’t pretend that I don’t have the occasional worry!

10-649 Policing in the 21st Century
This is the council’s response to the government’s white paper. It is generally supportive, although one of the biggest parts of the proposed reforms, directly elected police commissioners, will not affect London as the Mayor would take on that role.

The Labour group voted against this, disagreeing with the abolition of the Metropolitan Police Authority (a better reason than disliking the title of a white paper which they said they largely agreed) and I’m wondering if there’s a degree of oppositional politics starting to return. It is an unusual time for all tiers of government – national, London and Wandsworth to be (largely) politically aligned. It hasn’t happened for 13 years, and then probably only because there was no London government!

10-651 Petition – request for CCTV installation in the area of Leverson Street
This was the council’s response to a petition asking for CCTV to be installed in what is seen as a trouble black spot.

The council rejected this. For me there is a big issue about installing CCTV in primarily residential areas. As a matter of principal it feels wrong to me to have these areas surveilled. However, there are also practical concerns.

CCTV works well in areas where the problem is ‘contained’. So, for example, CCTV in town centre areas can help deter problems (or justify prosecutions, about half of all cases the local police bring use CCTV evidence) that are specific to that sort of area, for example issues around disorder or theft. When dealing with anti-social behaviour problems these can easily relocate, there is little difference between street-corners. In effect the problem is moved, not solved.

And that is the second problem, very often these problems are much better tackled by joint work between the police, council and (frequently) social landlords. Together they are able to tackle those who create problems and divert those on the fringes. Temporary, mobile, CCTV can be effective in gathering evidence for this. Personally I think we’re much better off going for a solution than seeing CCTV as a panacea – it never has been.

10-655 Town Centre Management – Annual review
The council’s approach to town centres has been one of the real success stories of Wandsworth, and has helped the borough avoid the problems faced by so many of having a single, fairly soulless, shopping destination and then nothing but residential areas with little focus.

The paper details some of the activity that has been taking place in each town centre to support, enhance and promote the businesses that are there. It’s split into sections of the five town centres so worth having a browse to see what’s been happening in your local centre.

Labour voted against this (disappointingly, I have to say). They felt that we should be putting equal support in for all shopping areas. The problem with that approach is that if you focus on everything you actually focus on nothing.

It’s also the case that we put a lot of support in to the ‘secondary’ shopping areas. Indeed, I’m meeting with a collection of the business associations representing them tonight to talk about how they and the council can work together. But increasingly we are seeing these areas, along with their local residents, developing their own initiatives (with some support from the council), Southfields and Battersea Square both being success stories of combined resident/business associations. It’s that sort of work we need to support and not applying a one-size fits all town centre management everywhere.

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I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m in a small minority of those who are excited when it comes to Cameron’s Big Society policy. In part that’s because I think it’s vague description and undefined edges could lead to some real innovations.

And looking at those areas that were identified as ‘vanguard communities’ (Eden District council in Cumbria, Sutton, Windsor and Maidenhead and Liverpool) it seems even those supposedly at the forefront of the policy aren’t getting that excited.

A search on the relevant council websites reveals very little.

The only council of the four that returns anything worth reading is Windsor and Maidenhead.

It might well be that they are still thinking through the policy implications internally, but doesn’t it rather go against the spirit of the policy not to have some of that thinking done out loud so ‘society’ can participate?

[And before anyone points it out, I know Wandsworth is no better!]

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The secret to a good council meeting?

I love this story from a New Hampshire council meeting. (The article disappears behind a paywall eventually, so here’s a PDF version.) Essentially protesters against the town rules against street drinking decided to protest by turning a council meeting into a drinking game – having a drink whenever certain phrases were uttered.

About six members of the libertarian Free Keene movement drank in unison from brown glass bottles, soda cans, paper coffee cups and metal flasks every time City Council members or officials said certain words or made certain actions.

Aside from the huge debate underneath the article, the suggestion by the police that they can’t tell if something is alcohol (a sniff, maybe even a swig, perhaps) or the fact that the argument is that blanket bans are often ineffective, what got me was that the council meeting was attended by 50 people!

Even if you discount the people playing the drinking game (6) and the people mounting a counter-protest (3) that still leaves 41 people attending to watch their town’s democracy in action. Given they have a population of around 23,000 if Wandsworth had a proportionate turnout we’d need a public gallery of something like 500.

While alcohol might make our meetings almost bearable, I don’t think it’s the answer, but I’d love to know what they are doing to get so many people along to see how their town is run. What would make you go to a council meeting?

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Since I’ve moved to London I’ve had five main addresses, not including a couple of stints ‘between homes’. Effectively a different home every 2.6 years.

Of course, if I’d been living in social housing, that would have been one home for all that time – and, actually, if I were a social tenant the chances of me moving to London in the first place would have been close to nil.

The Prime Minister’s suggestion that we should consider fixed term tenures for council properties might or might not be the right way to go about it, but that does not mean he is wrong to look at the principle. The fact that the main criticism seems to have come from Simon Hughes and not the Labour party suggests to me that David Cameron isn’t the only person thinking that things need to change.

To my mind, it’s always worth looking at a service and asking the simple question: “If this didn’t exist, would we feel the need to create it?”

Sometimes the answer is no, there are services scattered around that the council are running mainly because of historical accident or because of a need that has long since passed.

Very often the answer is yes, but not like this. And that’s the case with council housing.

To my mind, council housing should be a safety net, or a starting point, but never an ambition or a destination. But for far too many social housing has become just that.

One of the problems is in allocation. Currently once you have a council house you get security of tenure, as long as you keep up the rent and don’t do anything to get yourself evicted you are there for life. In Wandsworth, that tenure can be inherited once, in some places there is no limit on inheritance. Never is need assessed once the property has been allocated. There is no other benefit that works like this.

There are reasons for security of tenure. It creates security to help change it from a house to a home, and means people can put down roots in an area and feel they are part of the community. But people who are in private sector housing are still able to do that, despite the fact that most people know their home is not likely to be their home for the rest of their lives. I do not feel any less a part of Wandsworth because I’ve moved a few times.

It creates problems and distortions. We have a huge waiting list for large properties, partly because many of those large houses only have one tenant because, although their children have left home, there is no incentive to leave a large house that is largely maintained by the council. In Wandsworth and many other place we resort to ‘buying’ people out, offering a cash incentive and help for them to move to a smaller so people with larger families who need the room can move in. Of course, it’s a constant battle because, over time, those children grow up and leave, creating exactly the same problem.

And it creates problems for people in social housing too. They are less mobile, because moving social housing is incredibly difficult, often reliant on arranging a ‘swap’. And moving to larger properties virtually impossible. A young couple will often face a choice between not having a family or having to cope with over-crowding for several years until they can move.

Because of the glacial pace allocations move – we need to wait for properties to become vacant – instead of being a supply of housing to those in most need, it has become a supply of housing to those in most need a few years ago. It’s easy to see why, once in a council flat or house, there’s not much incentive to leave even if you don’t need it. Much better to stay put, then you aren’t at the back of the queue if private sector doesn’t work out.

I suspect that for many of the people I come into contact with, facing years of over-crowding or keen to move closer to the support of their families, it’s David Cameron – not Simon Hughes – who’s more in touch with their needs.

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Ages ago I – sort of – defended Cambridge City Council against the allegation they were ‘wasting money on iPads’. The story was that they were looking at spending thousands of pounds equipping their councillors with iPads to save money on printing.

My contention was that it was possible this would, actually, be a way of saving money and providing a better service to the taxpayer. Now, at a time when I am still a councillor, and have become an iPad owning councillor (not paid for by the taxpayer), the inevitable has happened and Leicester City Council have given some of their councillors iPads as a trial.

And I’ve changed my mind. It’s a waste of public money.

The story has appeared in a few national papers. I’ll point to the local paper’s coverage where a similar argument to my own back in February is being given. Apparently the £40,000 cost will potentially save the council £90,000 a year in printing costs. Now that, in itself, seems a little excessive. It would equate to £1,667 of printing per councillor per year. Even conservatively estimating a cost of 10p per double sided sheet we’re looking at over 33,000 pages of documents per councillor. That’s 90 pages of reading per day. While I get a lot of paper, I don’t get anything like that over a course of a year.

Even if that was accurate. It would have to be one of the least efficient bulk printing set-ups in the country. And does raise some questions. Would it be more cost effective to look at how they print? And who the hell is writing all this stuff? And who is actually reading it?

But there are broader concerns. Would the iPad actually help the councillors become more efficient? I suspect not. Much as I love mine (and am writing this on it), there are some things for which paper is just better. Are they seriously going to make notes on them, when it is so much easier to do on paper than on an iPad? Are none of them going to want to flick through reports, which isn’t as easy on a screen as it is with a wodge of paper? And are Leicester councillors really such a technophile bunch (in Wandsworth we’ve only just got a full set of councillors on email, in 2010) they are ready for electronic-only business?

But there is a more fundamental point behind all this. It’s the deficit.

Even if there were a strong argument for giving iPads to all their councillors it still smacks of providing them with toys at a time others are seeing job losses and cuts in services. While I often rail against the Daily Mail and Taxpayers Alliance mentality that any spending is necessarily bad I cannot help but agree with them on this one.

It’s very very hard to justify buying everyone top-of-the-range iPads (and they all seem to have gone for the top model – presumably to hold 60GB of documents, rather than music or films) at a time when we are all having to making savings. And if it’s difficult to justify financially, it’s near impossible to justify morally.