Lobbying your local council

First you'll have to choose which members of the council you want to lobby. There may be several different people who could be useful to you. Many different councillors will be involved in making decisions on particular issues. These could be:

• Your local councillor.
• Councillors who are members of committees relevant to your issue.
• The chairs of the committees that are dealing with the issue.
• The party spokespersons of a council political group.
• The chief executive or director of the relevant council department.
• The officers of the department who are dealing with the issue.
• Co-opted members of working groups or joint consultative committees.

Councillors and committees

• First point of contact should be the councillor for your ward. They are there to represent you and administer your area. If you're lobbying with a group, then each member could approach the councillor for their own area. Remember that many councils have Women's Units and Equal Opportunities Units which may be particularly interested in your argument.
• Remember to contact the chairs or vice-chairs of the committees, as they are influential in the decision-making of their committee. In 'hung' councils, you should contact the party spokespersons. They tend to be more influential than a committee chair.
• Remember that you can lobby from the top down, or bottom up. You could try to present your case to the leader of the council and the chairs of the major committees. You can also contact your local councillor, and those on committees, to get them to put pressure on their leaders to make certain decisions. If you can combine these methods, you have a better chance of success.

Officers

• You may find that the first people you encounter when lobbying local authorities are the officers, who are non-political and responsible for carrying out council policy, rather than making it. Despite these limitations, they can make useful allies.
• In some cases you may find an issue requires an administrative rather than a policy decision. In this case an officer is the best person to deal with it. For example, if your council has a policy to collect refuse fortnightly, and this is not being done, you could contact an officer. If you think there should be a weekly collection, you should contact a councillor who may make a new policy.
• If you don't know which officer deals with the issue, write to the head of the department or to the chief executive, asking for your enquiry to be referred to the relevant department, and to be informed of who will deal with it.
• Officers can make recommendations to councillors. Depending on the issue, a letter from you could be taken into account when these recommendations are made.

Find out more about other campaigning issues and examples in the In more depth section.