Sheffield Council row over fears of move back to centralisation of power

The debate arose during a meeting of the council governance committee yesterday (November 22), which was discussing a report looking at how to increase the involvement of Sheffielders in decision-making.

The council is keen to improve the ways in which it involves citizens, embedding better engagement and more collaborative methods of working into all its services. One aim of the change is to rebuild trust in the city council as an organisation that listens to people.

LibDem and Green members of the committee overturned a plan to allow the key strategy and resources (S&R) committee to take over the work they have been doing on the issue. S&R is made up principally of chairs of policy committees and is chaired by council leader Coun Tom Hunt.

Members said they are worried that deferring to the S&R committee is effectively seeing a return to the ‘strong leader’ model that was rejected in the city’s 2021 referendum. Sheffielders voted two years ago to remove the council cabinet in order to involve all 84 councillors in decision making.

A report before the committee looked at the work the council has been doing with the participation charity Involve to develop new policies.

Council head of policy and partnerships Laurie Brennan said: “Through the conversations we’ve all had with citizens and with our staff, it became really apparent that the city council needs a really strong vision of what it sees and what it wants to achieve from community involvement.

Vision

“It’s not something we can do to people, it’s something we need to do alongside our communities.

“That vision is not just is not just about having a piece of paper or a framework that says we know what we mean when we talk about community involvement now.

“What that vision actually means is us understanding and it being part of our being about why we value that and why that means something to the city council and how it helps us all get to where we want to be in the city and how it helps the council deliver services and the help people need.”

Coun Laura Moynahan gave an example of working with the residents of Skye Edge and Wybourn who want a children’s playground to ensure that it is the type of facility they actually need.

Deputy chair Coun Sue Alston welcomed the report and said: “We need to start early. Before we take any decisions we must look at who we can consult and how we consult them.”

She stressed the importance of changing the council’s culture so that consultation is a part of the way the whole council works, engaging both those who come forward and those who don’t.

Trend

Coun Alston said that the six Local Area Committees (LACs) serving the city must be a key part of that work, speaking to local people about issues and feeding that in to the work of policy committees.

She said she fears that allowing the strategy and resources committee to take over the work that has been done is part of a general trend in the council: “Anything difficult or controversial at policy committees or elsewhere, the answer seems to be ‘send it to S&R’.

“I’m worried this is a move to recentralising.”

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Coun Dianne Hurst agreed, saying the move feels like kicking the issue into the long grass.

Coun Minesh Parekh said that the council spends £2m a year on average using outside consultants. He said that as much of that money as possible should be spent locally.

He said that some of the problems over the introduction of low-traffic neighbourhoods like the one in his ward in Crookes stemmed from the way that consultants tackled public communication.

Coun Simon Clement-Jones said: “It seems to be we’ve gone from a strong leader model to a strong S&R model.

Default

“Work from the LACs is being taken straight to S&R. It is being taken out of the hands of people at the sharp end. It seems to me that is the default.”

He added: “Tomorrow the audit committee is looking at one of the most critical audit reports we’ve ever seen (on Fargate Container Park) and all that the audit committee can do is note it. We pass on everything to S&R.

“The people who drove us off a cliff in the first place are now responsible for making sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Coun Paul Turpin said: “When we engage with the public, we don’t just necessarily follow populist views when they could be discriminatory or when we recently experienced road safety measures being removed because of some noisy car drivers.

“More specifically, to do with road safety measures to make school routes safer for children, the children’s voices weren’t loud in that campaign, and we say we borrow the world from our children but then we don’t let them have a say in what they’re going to get when they leave school, and I’m pretty sure the kids would have to have a road free of cars to walk home from school on.”

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He stressed the need for the council to build back trust, including the need for councillors to speak the truth, particularly at election times.

Committee chair Coun Fran Belbin: “If we can get to that stage I would like to see us being a community-powered council, not just because it’s a ‘nice to have’ but I feel it’s a necessity in the modern world that our communities and our citizens are really involved in not just how we deliver our services but potentially in delivering those services themselves or commissioning those services themselves, so we know that they are effective.”

She highlighted positive collaborations that involve the council, the NHS and the community sector working together to deliver public health, intervention and prevention work.