Political View: Nobody has the number to govern, so we all need to come together

I am in the difficult position of writing something days before being published, and you’re reading it the day before we have an extraordinary full council meeting to decide on a new leader for Peterborough City Council. It means my words may not be applicable to a very fast-changing environment, but I will try and guide the readers through it!

The council has 60 councillors, and we have a cabinet and leader system for governance. A cabinet system runs like a central government model, where everyone has a part to play in meetings and scrutiny’s, the main decision making is done through the cabinet system. Key decisions and the direction of the city mostly come through the cabinet process, with members being able to ‘call-in’ decisions that elected members don’t agree with. This system works well when a political party has a majority: in our chamber of 60, that is 31 members. A political group in this position, which with 31 plus members has met the public test and approval for their vision and manifesto, and gets on with key business as elected to do so.

In Peterborough, our politics has become very fragmented the last 2 years, and that means that no one group has a working majority. Even some of the 2 or 3 of the groups together doesn’t stack up to a majority. Why is this important? Because a lot of key business comes to the chamber, notably the budget being the biggest one, and without a majority these items can fall. As we saw with this year’s budget, the vote was a knife-edge vote.

Out of the 60 elected members, there are now 15 Labour group members, 11 Conservatives, 11 Peterborough First, 10 independents, 8 Liberal Democrats and 5 Greens. This political balance is best suited to a committee system rather than a cabinet system, but central government are removing this option from the suite of governance that a local authority can use. So here we are, ‘without a paddle’ springs to mind.

What’s next? You may yet see Labour continue until May 2026 (the next local elections) with some support. They already have an administration; they are at time of going to print the largest group in the chamber. But with only 15 of them it will be hard to give out the cabinet roles, it is nowhere near the working majority and therein lies the problem and their weakness to another ‘vote of no confidence’ as we saw a few months ago. You may yet set some iteration of administration from the movers of the vote of no confidence. Again, this wouldn’t give the 31 needed for a working majority, although of course they will hope that some sympathetic and collaborative independents come with them. With all the movements of members leaving groups etc, this option looks less sturdy now than it even did a few months ago.

So, is there any other option? Going back to my view of the committee system being best suited to the political numbers we have, but not an option on the table, we perhaps need to make our own version of a committee system. The vote of no confidence damaged already fraught relationships, and drew even harder battle lines politically, but we must be practical here-we can’t change the political numbers till May, and then the public will decide, we are where we are. A cabinet of the willing, and chairs of the willing, a proportional setup based on the political numbers everyone or most of us have, sounds like the most sensible way forward. The best representatives of each group, working together for the sake of the city and then let’s see what May 2026 brings. A crisis cabinet in affect. Would the public approve of us trying? They may well prefer this to any perceived power grab, because again the numbers dictate that nobody has the right to govern, so let’s all earn the right and steer this council through this tough period. The Conservative group as always will play its part; we can be a constructive partner and equally we can give effective opposition too. Next week’s column I will give my view on the outcome, so stay tuned.