Since the end of December, by central government edict, every English council has had to "provide every councillor with the option to have an easy-to-manage set of public web pages". Most authorities claim to have met the target in theory. In spirit, however, it has been missed by a mile.
Paul Evans, head of the Councillor.info scheme to provide elected members with a web presence, says only a tiny percentage of councillors use their sites to do anything more than list contact details. In an era when blogging is commonplace in public life, this disengagement by local democracy is an anomaly.
One reason is a rule banning local authority sites from carrying material that could be deemed political. Councillors wanting to do anything adventurous with the web have to set up personal sites, which are often at least four clicks from the council's home page.
Deterrent
Lewisham councillor Andrew Brown, who this week celebrates two years of blogging from his site www.20six.co.uk/cllr_andrew_brown says the ban is a deterrent. The 36-year-old charity worker created his blog on his own initiative, entirely separately from his "official" council site. "The policy means I have two sites to keep up to date. It would be nice if I just had the one, and it was the one I wanted it to be."
Brown's blog gets about 80 unique visitors a day. Significantly, more find it via Google than through the council's website, he says. The visitors are "a bit different to the usual people who contact me. Some are officers, some are political opponents hoping I'll slip up, but I keep coming across local people." Overall his blogging experience has been "almost entirely positive".
Legal guidelines on blogs published by the local e-democracy project, sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, say that a council could technically get into trouble even by linking to a personal site containing political content. "The government's code of recommended practice on local authority publicity states that council resources should not be used to publicise individual councillors." However, the guidelines say that as creating a link involves only a minimal use of resources, so long as a council offers links even-handedly to the blogging pages of every individual council member who wants them, then this is unlikely to infringe the rules, "although there is no clear guidance or case law on this point".
Brown says he has shown the guidelines to his council's lawyers , but they are taking a fairly cautious line. "They're waiting for what the government has to say rather than what the national project has to say," he says.
London borough of Kingston councillor Mary Reid, who chairs the e-democracy project - and runs her own blog at www.maryreid.org.uk - says that councils should not worry about links, provided there's a disclaimer. "They're already linking to MPs, why not to their councillors?," she asks. Kingston already has six blogging councillors, from all three parties.
Evans says that most councillors need a great deal of hand-holding before they get to this stage. Councillor.info, a service offered by the internet cooperative Poptel, has done deals with 21 English authorities to give them facilities to create a basic web presence.
"The only way to get councillors to run good sites is to remove all the obstacles and give them as much advice, help and encouragement as they need," says Evans. Councillor.info has launched a new mentoring service to help councillors get on the web.
A new study on the benefits of e-democracy carried out for the national project finds that if just one councillor at each local authority blogged, between 350,000 and 2.5m citizens would read a councillor blog each month.
Business case
The report, produced by the Improvement and Development Agency, claims there is a clear business case for e-democracy, which it defines as any application of e-technology that enables or enhances the interaction between government and its stakeholders with the goal of raising engagement and participation in democratic processes.
E-democracy's paybacks include helping councils meet the demands of central government's comprehensive performance assessment in areas such as safer and stronger communities, sustainable communities and transport, healthier communities, and children and young people.
There are also cash savings. The report says Bristol conducted 12 consultations in 10 months using e-panels at a cost of £40,000. "To do this by conventional means would have cost a total of £96,000," says the report.
Elections pose a new challenge for councillor bloggers. The legal guidelines warn that resources spent on the web may count towards total limits on election expenditure: "Even if the limits on such expenditure are not exceeded by a councillor there may be a separate obligation on local authorities that should exercise caution in providing links to party political blogging pages during a pre-election period. Such links might be treated as donations that are not permitted under the legislation or may unlawfully confer a benefit on candidates who are sitting councillors, over other councillors."
A new study, Political Blogs - Craze or Convention? published by the Hansard Society charity, says that blogs are a potent new force, but advises politicians not to get carried away. "Politicians, who are used to shouting through megaphones and broadcasting through microphones, will not find it easy to adjust to a communicative ecology where the stage belongs to everybody," it warns.
"The problem facing politicians who blog is that they are professionally implicated in the very culture that blogging seeks to transcend," says the report. "Blogging politicians are always going to be seen as a little bit like those old Communist apparatchiks who had to sit in the front row at rock concerts and pretend to swing to the beat."
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