Calls to involve Bristol community in how city will be governed

Calls have been made to get Bristolians more involved in setting up how the city’s new committee-run council should work.

A group of 12 councillors have been meeting regularly behind closed doors to gather evidence on how Bristol City Council could be run from 2024.

In May earlier this year Bristol voted in a referendum about how the council should be run. The choice was between a mayor who is directly elected by voters, which is the current system, or several committees of councillors who would be in charge of making decisions.

But Bristol mayor Marvin Rees will remain in power until May 2024, when the city will next see local elections, and afterwards the council will be run by several committees of councillors. Until then, details of exactly how that will function are still being worked out.

Since the referendum, the committee model working group has been gathering evidence from experts, including the Local Government Association, and other councils who already use a similar system, like Sheffield and Brighton and Hove. This autumn, the working group will start to ask people in Bristol for their views, with a new webpage and email address.

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Read more: Mayor or committee: What’s the referendum about?

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Any ideas or views about the new model can be emailed to committeesystem@bristol.gov.uk. A new webpage is expected to be launched soon, explaining the changes, but this had not happened by the time of writing.

One issue is fewer than three in 10 Bristolians voted in the referendum. The council faced calls for a citizens assembly, during a council meeting on October 18, to boost public engagement in debates about how the city should be run. Meanwhile new details were revealed of future consultations in a report to overview and scrutiny management, which meets on Thursday, October 27.

During the council meeting, Suzanne Audrey said: “The result was conclusive, with 59 per cent favouring the committee system, but the turnout was 29 per cent. This was higher than the 24 per cent turnout for the 2012 referendum, but does suggest a lack of engagement with local democracy.

“The change in the governance system, and the need to consider the finer details of the new committee system, provides an opportunity to develop a more inclusive approach to understanding, and hopefully improving, Bristol’s democratic process. One way of engaging citizens is a citizens assembly: a representative group selected at random to learn about, deliberate upon, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue.”

Councillor Hellen Holland, chair of the working group, replied: “The email address for anybody in the city to say anything about what they think about the new committee system is now live. The terms of reference of the working group mean we have been able to work over the summer, and we’ve been working very hard, but those meetings have been private meetings. But we’re expecting the [overview and scrutiny management] report to trigger a great deal more conversation across the city, and we welcome that.”

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Read more: Referendum: Parties react to Bristol’s choice to ditch the mayoral model

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About four to six committees would have the powers to make decisions about council policy. A policy and resources committee would likely replace the current cabinet, responsible for the most important spending decisions. Chairs of each committee would act like cabinet members currently do, responsible for running certain parts of the council.

Further details of how the committee model could work will be published in a report to the full council in December. Then from March to May next year there will be a city-wide public consultation.

Throughout next summer the working group will then use the outcomes from the consultation to build the new committee model. That will then be followed by a further public engagement in October to December next year. Councillors will be asked in February 2024 to approve the final constitution, before the new system kicks in following the local elections in May 2024.

Alex Seabrook is a local democracy report for Bristol

Main photo: Ellie Pipe

Read next:

• Mayoral referendum: What do people in Knowle think?
• Everything you need to know about Bristol’s mayoral referendum
• Mayoral referendum: What do people in Easton think?

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