Can I be a Labour Councillor?

If Labour does not win a majority in the election, achieving your manifesto is obviously harder, since the ruling group will have a mandate to implement their manifesto instead. However, there are still things that Labour councillors can do on behalf of the people who voted Labour to ensure their views are represented:

• Seek to highlight the difference between the ruling group’s policies and the Labour manifesto, and the effect on local people, services, organisations and businesses
• Seek to expose the shortcomings in the ruling group's policies and promote Labour's alternative proposals through debates in full council meetings, particularly at the budget-setting meeting when you can propose an alternative Labour budget for your priorities.
• Use campaigning and press activities to get your message across to the public, including newsletters, street stalls, leaflets, campaign stunts, letters sent to residents across the local authority or street by street (direct mail) etc.
• Be a member of an overview and scrutiny committee whose responsibilities are to hold the council officers and executive and other agencies to account for the services they provide and to review policy and performance to ensure it improves for the benefit of the local community
• Seek to ensure the majority group does not control overview and scrutiny by taking all the chair positions, and use scrutiny in a non-partisan but rigorous way to hold the administration and council to account.
• Be a member of one of the regulatory committees - the planning and development control committee, licensing committee, pensions committee or any appeals committees or panels, for example with responsibility for fostering and adoption, school places appeals etc. These are important quasi-judicial committees governed by particular rules and laws and making important decisions on individual cases or developments. Since they should not operate according to party political lines, it should not make a difference whether Labour has a majority or not.
• The Labour councillors may be concentrated in one locality in the council area, giving you a chance to use neighbourhood or area committees and any devolved arrangements where you may have a majority locally, to get things done at a local level and show how you would govern if you ran the whole council. You could seek to chair such committees if the entire area covered has only Labour councillors, although the administration might want to take them.
• Use new mechanisms such as Councillor Call for Action (link: CCfA is a new tool for individual councillors to get local problems put on the agenda at overview and scrutiny committees to try and get a resolution where other channels have failed. See www.cfps.org.uk for more information) to get changes and improvements for your constituents - and make sure they know it is the Labour government who gave councillors these new powers.
• Lead local campaigns on issues that matter to local residents. Identify them through surveys that you distribute door to door or at street stalls; invite people to an event to explore the issue; let people know what action you have taken as a result; give them updates as the campaign progresses; then inform them of any successes or the reasons if the campaign did not succeed.
• Publish regular newsletters, issue leaflets and write to the press to raise your profile as a local campaigning councillor, pushing for improvements in the ward or division or exposing how administration policies let local people down.