In this chapter, four aspects of the characteristics and behaviour of councillors are discussed. First, a distinction is drawn between ‘partyaffiliated’ and ‘Independent’ councillors, and recent trends in the numbers and territorial distribution of the latter are reviewed. Second, the demographic characteristics of councillors are analysed – focusing on their changing age, gender, and ethnic and economic activity profiles, as revealed by the large-scale surveys carried out of the councillor population in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Third, the impact of the introduction in 2001 of local cabinet government (under the terms of the 2000 Local Government Act) on the experience and motivation of non-executive members is reviewed (the experience of executive members was considered in Chapter Four), together with the potential implications for local councillors of key elements of the emergent government agenda (leadership, neighbourhoods and territorial reorganisations).

Independents and others

Most councillors stand as candidates of one of the main national political parties – Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, plus, in Scotland and Wales, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru respectively – but by no means all, even today. In any nationwide set of local elections there are likely to be around 10% of candidates standing under other political labels. Part of the purpose of Table 5.1, therefore, is to remind us of how this 10% of ‘Independents and Others’ has not changed over a period of 25 years, as a proportion of elected councillors.

Right through to the 1970s, party politicisation was predominantly an urban phenomenon. There were plenty of exceptions, but, as recently as 1971, a majority of county councils and 90% of rural district councils remained classifiable as ‘non-partisan’. The reorganisations of the early 1970s saw over 1,600 councils reduced by well over two thirds, with hundreds of smaller, more rural areas amalgamated into larger and instinctively more partisan district councils. Many Independent councillors retired; others were defeated in the 1973/74 elections to the newly created councils. Still others – those with known party sympathies – were persuaded to stand openly for the party they supported, rather than face its electoral opposition. Even so, as Rallings and Thrasher note (1997, p 141), Independents accounted in those first post-reorganisation elections for nearly half of all candidatures in the English districts, over a quarter in the counties and corresponding proportions in Scotland and Wales.