Voting is fundamental to the health and vibrancy of our democracy. And by these measures we have some way to go. National turnout in the May 2008 local election is estimated to have been at around 35 per cent. Nearly two thirds of people living in areas with elections chose not to pass judgment on their local representatives.

Moreover, many of the issues debated – police, post offices and the 10p income tax rate – were either national to start with or presented by the media in such a way as to lose all sense of local significance.

This matters because voting is at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state. It is the most powerful weapon of the individual citizen, and confers upon councillors a legitimacy to shape local services in accordance with local needs and aspirations.

The anchor of local accountability is in the ballot box. Public disillusionment with political processes is a natural consequence of barriers the system puts on people’s ability to change things. But councils want citizens to exercise real power when they vote.

The LGA’s local democracy campaign aims to create a new politics, where citizens positively engage with an exciting, relevant and vibrant local democracy; one where people believe voting in local elections is the best way to influence what happens to them, their neighbours and their community.

To make this happen we need the state to push power, funding and responsibility out and down to the lowest possible level. At the moment people in England, on average, pay £5,500 in national income tax each year while having a local vote over how only £1,000 or so of council tax gets spent. This means that there is no local control over the vast majority of tax people pay – it goes straight to Whitehall where national politicians decide how to spend it, even though most of it is spent on local services like schools, hospitals or the police.

Redressing this imbalance between national and local decision-making is a vital first step in meeting the broader challenge of reconnecting state and citizen, and putting the “local” back into local democracy.

Paul Coen is the chief executive of the Local Government Association

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