Parish councils in England collected £596m in local taxes in 2020-21. For around 20 million people, and 100,000 councillors, they are a part of our democratic fabric and civil society (arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales vary). As well as small villages with just a few hundred residents, parish councils (the name is confusing) include town, community and city councils, for example in Salisbury. Yet their workings remain obscure to many people.
Whether the spectacle of a meeting of Handforth parish council held via a Zoom conference call in December, which became a viral sensation at the end of last week, will do anything to alter perceptions remains to be seen. Any lasting impact will surely depend on whether the video’s millions of viewers are more impressed by Jackie Weaver, the official praised for her calmness in the face of chaos, or the display of personal animosity coupled with arcane procedure that to some people sums up everything that is wrong with politics. Particularly at the neighbourhood level, where the stakes are understood to be lower, such passions are often treated as ridiculous.
Without knowing the background, it is unwise to comment on specifics. The public’s unfamiliarity with “standing orders” (rules for meetings) says more about low levels of participation in democratic organisations than it does about a handful of parish councillors in Cheshire. The impact of social media firestorms should also be considered, especially by anyone with concerns around bullying. As Ms Weaver has said in interviews, the rules governing the conduct of councils were not designed for our digital age.
But civil parishes should receive more attention, especially from anyone who has an interest in the politics of place or – less abstractly – in the public realm in the area where they live (parks, cycle lanes, community events). In villages and towns across England, this is where the more dynamic parish councils have an impact: managing recreation grounds and village halls, upgrading play areas. In recent years, they have also stepped in to fill gaps created by cuts, funding youth services and developing projects connected with housing and public health.
With the power to charge a precept from residents that is, unlike other local taxes, uncapped, combined with a strongly voluntaristic ethos (since councillors are unpaid, and staffing levels tend to the minimalist), parishes are an interesting intersection between the third sector and the state. Unsurprisingly, given their strength in rural areas (although only half of parish councils are run along party political lines), they have more often attracted the interest of Tory politicians. Boosting parishes was an idea associated with the “big society” (85 new ones have been created since 2013), and it has recently returned in proposals by the backbencher Danny Kruger, and the Onward thinktank.
Just as it was under David Cameron, the notion that nice neighbours can make up for the deliberate cruelty of underfunded public services is a dangerous myth. Such wishful thinking deserves to be squashed. But the democratic institutions of civil society should be respected for their potential, and not dismissed. Raymond Williams wrote of the long struggle to craft an inclusive English culture, and drew a contrast between the “bourgeois model” of public service and “working-class ethic of solidarity”. Handforth may not have offered the best advertisement. But as the struggle Williams described goes on, parish councils should be counted among the settings where what he called the “hard, detailed inquiry and negotiation” of our shared problems can be done.
