20 June 2003
The rise of reality television offers 'important lessons' in the battle to re-engage the public with politics and encourage people to vote, Nick Raynsford said this week.
The local government minister said the popularity of programmes such as Pop Idol and Big Brother, where viewers get to vote on which contestants should be evicted, showed that people were willing to vote if they believed it was worthwhile.
'There are important lessons to learn and we ignore them at our peril,' Raynsford said. 'People do tend to vote for things they feel concern them.'
Applying this logic to councils, he argued that local authority residents were 'grabbed by local issues that have an impact on their lives'.
The minister, speaking at a conference staged by the Centre for Public Scrutiny on June 17, said ease of voting was another lesson that could be drawn from reality television.
He announced that a £2m e-democracy fund would be launched next month: local authorities will be able to bid for the money and use it to develop ways of electronic voting to increase turnout.
He said the decision to set up the fund had been taken in the wake of the May local elections, where e-voting pilots led to higher turnouts.
Raynsford said the drive to lure voters back to the polls would be boosted further by the structural reforms, which introduced Cabinet government, that had led to more transparent decision-making and greater scrutiny of decisions by members.
'We are at the beginning of a pretty fundamental change in the way that local government works. This will have a huge effect on re-energising local democracy,' he said.
PFjun2003
