Actually, it's not that straightforward. You have to ensure that the cleaner understands about paperwork; one councillor expressed a view that he and his house mate, a branch secretary and general activist needed a cleaner less than a PA. I found the cleaning to be a cinch once I have sorted the paperwork.
More seriously, Featherstone was trying to make a serious point and doing it incredibly clumsily.
The Ham and High reports thus :
Hornsey and Wood Green MP Lynne Featherstone has hit back at critics after saying more women should become councillors - so they could hire a cleaner.
Ms Featherstone made the remarks to an audience of women at the Lib Dem's conference in Blackpool. She told the audience that the allowance of £10,000 allowed female councillors to employ a babysitter and cleaner.
Haringey Labour councillor Richard Milner claimed the remarks showed the millionaire MP was out of touch with struggling households, unable to afford such luxuries.
But Ms Featherstone told Broadway: "Labour has no idea how hard it is for women who get left with domestic responsibilities and children to get out of the house. Out of 57 councillors only 16 are women, which is 19 per cent.
The economics are not straightforward; many councillors on low earnings have found themselves caught in a poverty trap - annual income of £10,000 is enough - I think - to lose various benefits, including cash and the passported benefits such as Housing Benefits, free school meals etc. If someone knows the precise sums better than me I will stand corrected. But there again, £10,000 is an approximation rather than a stipulated amount.
A typical councillor, especially in London, Metropolitan and other Unitary authorities, has very many evening engagements. These include formal and semi-formal council meetings, including area committees, housing forums etc. Additionally, Residents Associations, Management Committees, User Groups expect regular councillor attendance. Many councillors are also school governors or nominated representatives to or trustees of council-funded bodies. It's reasonable to assume that every Monday to Thursday evening in term time is booked, often double or triple booked. A conscientious councillor will use weekends to visit sites and small informal groups to see the issues for themselves. Additionally, there are phonecalls to be made: it's no good returning a call to a working person during weekdays. But also, no point calling most people late in the evening. Add to that casework, reading Committee papers and the incessant information and publicity from local groups, funded or not, being a thoroughly effective councillor is a fulltime job.
Because the majority have to combine it with paid work and/or family responsibilities they are less than fully effective. Sorry, but that's why, nationally, the average of councillors is so high - when I started blogging, I was a 34-year old councillor at a time when the average age nationally was 57; 86% over 45; a third over retirement age.
I firmly believe that Local Government needs seriously to rethink the status of councillors. When I started I was almost a voluntary worker, getting paid sometimes -- but not often - nearly £100 a month. In my second term, this was raised to a whopping £5000 a year, which just led to local residents' expectations rising and complaining that it was money for old rope. During both terms, my fellow ward councillors also worked fulltime, in high-powered jobs.
I don't know the national statistics for the proportion of women councillors. I don't even know the London statistics. Lambeth has 63 councillors - currently 62 and one vacancy. Of the 62, 22 are women. You do the sums.
There is an argument that the best person for the job should get the job, regardless of age or ethnicity. Trouble is, politics doesn't work like that. The entire atmosphere of Party Politics is very masculine oriented. As it happens, this has rarely bothered me, personally, but I can empathise as to how it's a real issue for many women. In my experience the women that do progress are generally ladettes, or ruthlessly ambitious, or both. In general, men create a better impression at Selection meetings, having already honed their reputation by oratory at ward and constituency meetings. On the whole, generalising, women with children are less likely to be able or inclined to do the alcohol fuelled-networking in the after-meeting pun sojourn and less likely to be able to sacrifice every evening during a live election and three hours on a Sunday afternoon during the off-season. I generalise and people behave as individuals not statistics. But a man who can network and orate won't make a better councillor than the woman who can empathise and represent.
If you attend a councillor's surgery, or a community meeting, or read a councillor's mailbag, you soon realise that Local Government is overwhelmingly a female concern. When a typical couple divides up the household responsibilities and tasks, it's usual for the woman to take on the education issues, the health (not an LA responsibility) and other dealings with bureaucracy. 90% of single parent households are headed by a woman. It's often, although again not exclusively, the middle aged or older daughter who is managing the domiciliary or residential care of elderly parent or in-law.
Many issues within a Council's remit affect men and women equally, but are seen as more women's issues. Take street lighting. I'm not sure of the statistics about unprovoked random street attacks on men. They happen and they happen a lot, but it is, in my experience, more likely to be women who complain about the lack of (working) street lights; also it's more likely to be women who complain about rat-running cars and demand traffic calming (and more likely to be men who complain with their mates about speed bumps). Again, I stress, I'm generalising. Just because you, as a man, do X,Y,Z does not mean anything statistically.
In my first term, in particular, when there were very few women councillors I used to get casework from all over the Borough. Women would travel by two buses there and two buses back to get me to help them with matters that were well outside my ward. Housing matters, in particular, especially where a problem had arisen because of relationship breakdown, especially due to Domestic Violence. Perhaps they thought that as a young woman I would understand their circumstances better. Honestly, I don't know why. The Lib Dem in my next ward, a retired teacher, told me once she got a lot of cases about HRT, not that she could do a great deal about it. She also felt confident visiting elderly women in their homes, when her young male fellow councillors would have been correct to feel reluctant. I tried to avoid home visits, except to the very housebound; even then, I preferred to go with a fellow councillor or with a housing officer etc.
The role of a councillor is to represent. I have sat in meetings filled with thrusting young ambitious types like me, thinking up grand plans that look great in theory, only for the lone black single Mum to say "Hold on! That won't work on my estate, in my ward, because..." And anyone with half a brain has thought "Aggh! Yes, good point. Bloody hell, good thing you said that." Without that black single mum we might have charged ahead making plans that were unrepresentative and not fit for purpose.
I shall conclude with a massive generalisation through which anyone can drive a Coach and Four. If you were to attempt to separate out male and female politicians, I would say, in general, men want to run the council well and deliver good services. Women want the council to be responsive to the needs of the local people in the local area. It's sweeping - I find the strategic and quasi-judicial much more interesting, some men have come up from the grassroots and have a fabulous instinct there that I lack. And there are those of either gender driven solely by Parliamentary ambition. But we'll gloss over them...
So, Lynne Featherstone should have said, "We need more women councillors; at present Haringey Council is unrepresentative of the community in Haringey. If you do become a councillor, it isn't something you do unpaid..." If I was making that speech, at Labour, not Liberal, conference, I would have directed interested people to an appropriate stall in the conference - perhpas the Association of Labour Councillors - blimey, if I had known all that in 1993 I would never had stood for election in 1994!
