I went to ffice:smarttags" />Manchester on Thursday afternoon to look at some cows. Then on Friday I went to an event hosted by the IDeA, considering councillor development. What may at first seem a very introspective activity is in fact really important for improving the quality of how things happen in everyones locally.

Getting good quality candidates and councillors in local government, drawing on a wider pool of people from different backgrounds and being clear about what is required from councillors is all part of building better local democracy.

Obviously how we bring more people into the process of elective decision making is affected by lots of different things, improving the level of active local community, more responsive neighbourhood working and encouraging / supporting people who decide they would like to move from improving their immediate local community to improving whole wards or towns (I wonder what does make people decide that?).

What ever brings people to want to be councillors, being clear about the core skills required can only be helpful. And if councils are then able to use this information to improve support for those in post, being a councillor appears much more as something anyone with the opportunity can learn rather than the preserve of those who believe they are born to govern.fficeffice" />

Today is skim and bin day because I am drowning in back copies of Inside Housing and Local Government First, which need attending to now.

Some years ago I borrowed a book from the local library called Taming the Paper Tiger. While it sounds like something produced very cheaply in the 1970s by Peeking Press it is actually about how to survive in a world where being well informed as a councillor has become equated to the tonnage of paper which people can arrange to have pushed through your door.

The first piece of really useful advice in Taming the Paper Tiger was to get a big waste paper bin. Not wanting to be under resourced I wisely went out and bought one of those large rectangular Addis laundry baskets, into which now goes almost all the paper I get sent. Then once every two weeks I put the whole lot into one of those black recycling boxes and send it all back to the council to help with our recycling performance targets!

All the old CDs end up on the allotment where they are used to frighten pigeons off my cabbage plants :-)

“Hello Councillor, can you make PRP for Org Dev 2 on Aug 5th” said the voice on the phone

fficeffice" /> 

“I’m very sorry but I don’t have the slighffice:smarttags" />test idea what you are talking about” I replied.

“Sorry, we all talk like that, it’s the performance review panel for the second half of the organisational development portfolio”

“Oh I see, well in that case, yes I can” I said.

I appreciate that it isn’t at the point where the public actually meet the service and different disciplines do need to apply, but it still grates with me when I have to grapple with management lingo (or should I say restricted linguistic repertoire) for the convenience of others. While every trade has its trade talk, sometimes the amount of TLAs in local government make even the simplest concepts completely unfathomable (TLAs are three letter acronyms by the way). Grrrr

Up to London again today for a Management Assembly Meeting of the Local Government Information Unit (and to avoid the witty contributions, the meeting are not held at the fire station, its just a picture I took on the way to help break up the text).

I have to attend the scrutiny committee today and provide a report on progress with work around housing, neighbourhood renewal and community development.

This is the first scrutiny session of the new municipal year (lots of new councillors) so it will be interesting to see what impact that has on how searching and focussed  the questionning will be.