Can we now have a referendum in Liverpool?

This pathetic apology of a letter was Liverpool’s way of consulting about governance in the City. Now there are calls for a referendum but are they practical?

The recent disgraceful consultation run by Liverpool City Council has encouraged people to push for a legally binding petition to have a referendum. I welcome the fact that people like Stephen Yip and Liam Fogarty are wanting to engage in the debate but there are many problems with this approach.

The first is the need to have wording which conforms to the legal requirement. The law says that to trigger a referendum the petition must name two alternatives one of which must be the present method of governance, i.e., a Mayor. This is why we did not press for a referendum in January because Labour made it clear that they would support the two questions being Mayor or Leader and not the option of a committee system which was the preferred change option.

This would mean that RESET would need to decide which of the alternative options they would press for. There is a further complication.

It is likely that in July the Council will vote to change the system and move to a Cabinet model from May 2023. However. the law says that you need to present the current system as one of the choices. So, although the council will have voted to remove the Mayoralty the petition will still need to say Mayoral system or……!  I am not sure how easy that will be to explain to people to encourage them to sign the petition.

The next problem is that it is not just a question of what is on the petition but how the petition is collected. Getting 16,500 on a printed petition is not easy but there are further complications:

• The person must be a Liverpool registered voter
• The name on the form must match the name on the electoral register so that it can be verified. So, if my name were Richard James Kemp but I always called myself James and put my name down as James Kemp on the petition it would be invalid if the name on the register was Richard James Kemp.
• I have collected information on petitions on many occasions. My experience is that at least 15% of them are illegible and unusable.
• This is not a simple yes/no issue. In many cases people will need to have the options explained to them.

For all these reasons just putting a petition out and hoping people fill it in correctly is not enough. There needs to be, at minimum, explanation notes to go with it for the people who are canvassing for names.

Lastly, there is a question of timing. To come into effect for the May elections next year I give the approximate timetable below. If this timetable is not adhered to and, say the referendum called were to take place on election day next year or thereafter the new system would be in place until May 2027 even if the referendum moved for change.

• The petition would need to be submitted to the Council by the end of October.
• It will take 3 weeks to verify it. This takes us to the end of November
• A Council needs to be called if the required names are successful. This means mid-November.
• The council then needs to formally move a referendum which would probably take place in December or Mid-January.
• The referendum would need to be held effectively by the end of February at the latest to allow the statutory notices to be put in place to call the elections in the right format.

This is doable but tight. In Bristol, which required a lot less names, it took a year.

So, a referendum must clear three hurdles:

1. What does the petition call for?
2. How can this mass collection of correct names be organised?
3. Can it be done in a relevant time scale given that you cannot really start doing this until July 21^st and then you are right into the holiday period?

All of this ignores the stresses and strains within the Council when our relevant staff are trying to organise the change from 30 wards to approximately 70 with all sorts of details having to be statutorily pursued. Extra staff would need to eb brought in and that

Cllr Kris Brown and I have suggested a meeting with Liam Fogarty and Stephen Yip of RESET to discuss an alternative or a complementary way to channel the anger felt by many people at the way the Council is behaving. If and when we have had that discussion we can move forward.

The people of Liverpool are being short changed by a Labour-led Council who always think that they know best. RESET wants to change things and involve the people much more in thinking through the future of the City and so do I. So do many people. The question for RESET and me and all those others is, “how we create a partnership of the willing to provide a vision and to change our centralised and bureaucratic system?”