Column: Talking Politics with Coun James Baker (Calderdale Lib Dem Group leader)

When it comes to local elections voters get a choice over who they want to represent them on the council.

People vote for candidates that promise to be able to do different things for them and change things for the better.

Voters expect those councillors to be accountable to their decisions. However, the way our local democracy functions has major flaws.

Although Calderdale Council has 51 councillors only seven of those councillors have any real decision-making powers.

These councillors make up the cabinet of the council. They are appointed to these roles by the leader of the council that gets elected every year at annual council.

Recently residents of Sheffield voted to ditch this undemocratic style of local government and return the old committee system. Under this system decisions are made in committees with councillors from all Wards regardless of political allegiance can come together to make decisions for the betterment of the community.

Other local authorities then form ‘local area committees’ where councillors representing clusters of local wards come together to make decisions about things that impact their local area. This then provides for a clear link between the person people vote for in the ballot box and the decisions that are taken about their local community.

Even for the councillors sitting on the cabinet there is not so much power as there at first seems.

This is largely because Government has cut the amount of money the authority gains as a grant (your local council tax bill does not nearly cover the cost of services).

This means in order to get almost anything new done the local authority has to bid into centralised pots of funding created by Ministers and civil servants down in Whitehall.

It's this kind of funding mechanism that often results in large amounts of money being spent on things in the Borough that the people of the Borough never really asked for or demanded.

So instead of getting things like our potholes fixed, drains cleared or local people having a say we get grand schemes imposed upon local communities. What happens is not the result of elected representatives deciding it, but rather what officers of the council were able to successfully bid from Government to get funded.

This is a somewhat complex situation to explain to people, often when doing so it sounds like you are just ‘making excuses’ for why something hasn’t been done.

But if we are to change things so local people get an actual say, and power is in the hands of Borough’s like Calderdale we need to understand where the funding and system in Local Government are failing.

So here is our solution. Give local authorities grants to allow them to make their own local decisions. Scrap the cabinet system and return to the committee system, setup areas committees so elected representatives can make a difference to the communities that elect them. These three simple steps might help to feel their vote makes a difference.