Details on how Bristol’s new committee-run council will work are due to be revealed by the end of the year.
Major changes are coming to how Bristol City Council is run, following the referendum on May 5 when the city voted to scrap its directly elected mayor. But so far it’s not clear exactly how the new committee-led system will actually work.
A new working group of 12 councillors will soon be tasked with exploring how the new system should be set up, including what committees are needed, how other councils have transitioned to a committee system, and if there are any examples of best practices to follow.
Read more: Fraud cases increasing with 1,000 reported victims each month in Avon and Somerset
Three councils elsewhere in England also previously voted to scrap their directly elected mayors—including the monkey mascot of a local football team—while several other councils have chosen to move to a committee-led system similar to what Bristol will have from 2024.
Councillors are due to ratify the results of the referendum at an extraordinary full council meeting on Tuesday, May 24, as well as set up the new working group. Reflecting the council’s political balance, the group will include four Labour councillors, four Greens, two Conservatives, one Liberal Democrat, and one councillor from the Knowle Community Party.
A report to the full council said: “The working group will be responsible for developing the design principles for the structure of the committee model. This will include considering roles and responsibilities under the new model, the functions of full council, and the committee structure. It will also need to consider democratic engagement and public participation.
“It’s anticipated that the working group will consider how other councils have made a transition to the committee model, what lessons can be learned from their experience, and what examples of best practice can be identified.”
It’s expected the group will meet each month, reporting on their progress regularly to all councillors, and with a full report on details of the design principles by the end of this year.
The switch to a committee system will take effect after the next local elections, in May 2024. Mayor Marvin Rees will stay in power until then. But Bristol isn’t the first to abolish its mayor.
Commenting after the vote, Jonathan Carr-West, of the Local Government Information Unit, said: “We can’t ignore the fact that Bristol—the only one of 10 cities that voted for an elected mayor in the 2012 mayoral referendums—has just voted to scrap it. Nor is it the first to do so: Hartlepool, Stoke-on-Trent and Torbay have all been down this road already.”
On the same day a decade ago that Bristol voted in the city’s first directly elected mayor, George Ferguson, Hartlepool voted to abolish the position of mayor. The post had only been held for 10 years by Stuart Drummond, also known as H’Angus the Monkey, the mascot of Hartlepool United football club. He was initially elected promising free bananas for schoolchildren.
Stoke-on-Trent voted in a referendum to scrap its mayor in 2008, after just six years of the post starting. Torbay voted to bring in a mayor in 2005, then voted to scrap the position in 2016. Both councils chose to return to a council leader and cabinet system.
Bristol also isn’t the first council to switch back to a committee-led system. Most councils change over six to nine months, with Bristol’s two-year transition exceptionally long due to the law requiring directly elected mayors to serve their whole terms. Ed Hammond, of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny, said this extra long transition could be an opportunity.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “Every council is different and the way councils deal with the transition has to be based on their unique context and environment. What’s unique about Bristol is it has two years to think about and make the change. There’s an opportunity to get local people involved in thinking about the design of the future system.”
While it’s difficult to tell the reasons why people voted the way they did in the referendum, he said many might have wanted the public to play a greater role in council decision-making, and for those decisions to be more transparent. The two years before the switch could be used to experiment with greater public involvement and cross-party decisions, he added.
“One way the council can commit to that,” Mr Hammond said, “is by drawing the public into thinking about what the design could look like. The biggest pitfall is councils thinking it’s about structural changes on their own, as an internal council project. You want to change the overall behaviour and culture. Often people think the way councils work needs to change.”
Prominent examples of similar other councils who switched back to a committee system include Sheffield, the London Borough of Richmond, the Wirral, Basildon, and Cambridgeshire.
Sheffield voted to move to a committee system recently, in May last year, and the new system has only taken effect since the local elections earlier this month. The city took a year to transition to the new model, with four transitional committees set up to explore how the model could best work.
