Bristol public still lack trust in council

Having a directly elected mayor in Bristol has led to a big increase in the numbers of people who believe the city has more visible leadership.

But the independent study carried out by the city’s two universities finds that public trust in Bristol City Council remains very low.

Dr David Sweeting at the University of Bristol said the results would give a “considerable boost” to those who argued for the introduction of a directly elected mayor.

But he admitted the study, the first of its kind to study the impact a directly elected mayor can have on local government, showed the introduction of a mayor revealed that enhanced visibility of the mayor was not “translating into across-the-board improvements in perceptions of Bristol’s governance”.

The results revealed that:

• In 2012, 24.1 per cent of those questioned said Bristol had “visible leadership”. That rose to 68.6 per cent earlier this year;
• Only 18.5 per cent said they trusted the council to make good decisions in 2012, with just a meagre rise to 22.7 per cent this year;
• And just 22.5 per cent said their needs were well represented in decision making in the city this year, up a small way from 16.2 per cent in 2012.

The figures come from the Bristol Civic Leadership Project – an independent study of leadership in the city carried out by local democracy experts at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).

Researchers collected the views of Bristol residents, third sector organisations, the business community, local councillors, council officers and public servants. Public opinion surveys, carried out in September 2012 and January 2014, attracted responses from 658 and 648 citizens respectively.

The findings are being presented in a document which aims to influence national policy on city leadership. 

Dr Sweeting said: “This striking increase in the public profile of city leadership is a considerable boost to those who argued for the introduction of a directly elected mayor to lead the city.

“They will see this increase as evidence that the mayoral model can stimulate public interest in civic affairs. We have yet to see, however, evidence that enhanced visibility is translating into across-the-board improvements in perceptions of Bristol’s governance.”

Robin Hambleton, professor of city leadership at UWE Bristol, also co-author of the policy briefing, added: “The exciting thing about this project is that, as well as generating benefits for Bristol, there is potential to feed lessons from our city into the national debates about how to develop the capacity of our cities to govern themselves.

“This is especially important just now because there is growing recognition that devolution from Whitehall can deliver better outcomes than our current over centralised system.”