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Measure the effectiveness of councillors, not just the casework

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CROYDON COMMENTARY: Our report on councillors’ casework and the volume of residents’ enquiries they handle is only a very limited way of measuring their effectiveness, according to ROBERT CANNING (pictured left). He’s even done an equation to prove it…

Your report about the volume of councillors’ casework was an interesting read, but your methodology is flawed.

Workload: is your local councillor pulling their weight?

Councillors do casework as ward councillors. Anything from reporting fly-tipping and potholes to difficult housing casework. That’s why they all get the basic councillor allowance of £11,692.

Special Responsibility Allowances – SRAs – are paid for additional work, such as chairing a committee or being in the cabinet or shadow cabinet. The SRA is specific to that role.

Consequently, the number of bits of casework handled needs to be costed using only the basic councillor allowance, and nothing more, for an accurate assessment of value for money.

For a full picture of what the Council Tax-payer is getting from each of their elected representatives, you would need to look at the total allowances each receives relative to all the work they do and develop and apply an equation along the lines of:

where

V = value for money
Ca = total casework undertaken
Co = community engagement (eg meeting with a residents’ association or the local Safer Neighbourhood Team etc)
Cc = council committee work (membership of committees that do the day-to-day work of the council such as scrutiny and planning)
E = extra work undertaken on behalf of the ward such as arranging a litter pick, engaging with developers or responding to TfL consultations on, say, bus services – and which is largely seen as voluntary or optional by many councillors
S = work done for a special responsibility allowance (including cabinet membership and cabinet meetings)
A = total allowances paid

I also think casework needs to be disaggregated between “easy” and “difficult”.

Any idiot can report a pothole, but getting a needy family rehoused or sorting out someone’s Council Tax arrears is usually anything but straightforward. Just wandering around the streets taking lots of snapshots of the latest graffiti tags and reporting it through the council’s casework management system does not make you a good or effective councillor.

When I was a councillor, I usually dealt with around 20 bits of casework a week (although the new casework register didn’t exist when I was in office). The vast majority of these were straightforward reports of potholes, missed bin collections and fly-tipping.

There were probably one or two difficult cases a week.

There was no need for me always to go to officers when accumulated experience and knowledge meant that I could give an answer to a resident without the need to contact officers. The data on the casework register won’t record these instances.

I don’t know whether the Freedom of Information request data you received is just cases logged, or cases that have been successfully dealt with. I would prefer to see the focus on resolved casework rather than reported casework. Too many councillors report something and think that’s all they need to do, rather than check that casework is then actioned.

Nor do I know if the casework register includes planning objections on the part of councillors, or if these are still logged directly with the planning department.

Finally, it must surely be the case that many residents with a local issue – particularly in Tory wards – will now go directly to the all-powerful executive Mayor rather than their ward councillors? Mayor Perry will invariably get a better standard of service from council officers than ward councillors.

If Walter Cronxite doesn’t already have a doctorate in politics, I’ll leave him to decide if he wants to develop the councillors’ value for money equation and undertake some further analysis. It could make for an interesting read.

Read more: Revealed: Croydon’s laziest and costliest local councillors
Read more: Making the case for councillors’ casework to be made public

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