Who exactly runs the North-East?

Although the traditional view of the region being ruled by a small cabal of Labour henchmen is no longer entirely true, researchers were quite shocked by how women and younger people in general were not being given the chance to have an input into how their lives were being run.

"The dominance of middle-aged, middle-class men might not come as a great surprise, but I was very surprised by the scale of the dominance. It is comprehensive," says one of the report's authors, Dr Keith Shaw of the University of Northumbria.

"Although the region has undergone massive economic and social change, the political system has remained the same. Women, younger people, ethnic groups, people with disabilities - their voices are not being heard.

The report looks at all areas of government in the North-East: MPs, councils, health, education, training and economic regeneration. Its findings include:

l l 76 per cent of councillors are men;

l l 73 per cent of police authority members are men;

l l 65 per cent of Training and Enterprise Council members are men;

l l 87 per cent of the North-East's MPs are men;

l l 88 per cent of the North-East Regional Assembly members are men;

l l 74 per cent of members of housing associations are men, with three of the largest having no women at all on their boards;

l l 66 per cent of Northern Arts board members are men.

The statistics could roll on and on telling the same old story. For example, ten of the 13 board members of the newly-formed One NorthEast regional development agency are men.

Only in the health service is there a different tale. The North-East has six health authorities on whose boards there are 33 non-executive members. Twenty of these are women, because the NHS follows "some of the best procedures for appointing people to its local quangos", according to the report.

However, examination of the make-up of the North-East NHS reveals another interesting statistic. There are 98 non-executive members of the 17 NHS Trusts in the region. Of these, 44 said they had political affiliations - 38 to the Labour Party. This, says the report, has led to allegations of cronyism that are difficult to deny.

Further examination of the NHS highlights another pecularity: there are only two members of trust boards in the region who are disabled. Yet the disabled are likely to require a greater say in the way the NHS is run than any other section of society.

And there are no disabled people serving on police authorities anywhere to the north of the River Tees.

There is another striking factor about the composition of the boards which oversee our police. In Durham, there are only two members under the age of 45; in Cleveland, there is just one.

"Those sections of the community most likely to have had direct experience of being policed, especially younger working class people, are hardly represented among the members of the region's police authorities," says the report.

But this age question is all too familiar across all the bodies in the North-East. For example, the average age of councillors is 56. Only three per cent of them are under 35. Again, this raises the question of how an organisation can be truly respresentative of the community it serves - or responsive to its needs - if it is run by predominantly middle-aged people. Particularly if that narrow age range is almost exclusively taken from one gender.

Yet the authors of the report feel that this small band of rulers is large enough to prevent the North-East from becoming a dictatorship. There are, for example, 1,200 councillors and hundreds of school governors in the region - too many for a middle-aged, middle-class male Labour cabal to control.

"It is always said that the North-East is run by the usual suspects, and there are still key players on more than two or three organisations," says Dr Shaw. "But government in the region has become so fragmented with so many organisations and quangos, that many more people are involved."

He, and his co-author Dr Fred Robinson of Durham University, believe that these few people who wear many caps are actually assisting the "joined-up government" of the region.

Indeed, many members of this ruling elite should be congratulated for their civic involvement, for giving up their free time to ensure schools and hospitals are well run.

Yet there is a problem with them: they are not especially popular. Because of the narrow clique from which they are drawn, members of the public regard them as the "usual suspects".

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the local councils, the democratically-elected base which feeds so many members into the quangos that control health, law and order, education and the arts. In an area of Sunderland, voter apathy is such that just 12 per cent of people bothered to vote recently. In Gateshead it was 16 per cent; in Bishop Auckland 19 per cent. In most places it barely rose above 25 per cent.

"Local councils and political parties should be seeking ways of increasing interest in local affairs and politics, widening the range of candidates and raising turnout," concludes the report. "So far, their efforts have been half-hearted.

"Moreover, it has to be said that some of them are hardly encouraging participation by deciding to establish cabinet meetings behind closed doors, nor do they win public respect for local government by proposing big rises in councillors' allowances."

Similarly, the report argues, quangos should not stuff themselves full of suits if they, too, are to become more relevant to - and more representative of - their communities.

Yet local government has to be reinvigorated first - and before the North-East can even think about electing its own regional government.

"A regional assembly could be vital in co-ordinating and monitoring all these disparate agencies," says Dr Shaw. "We desperately need that.

"But, at a time when there is voter apathy and low civic involvement, is there any desire for another tier of government?

"There is a cynicism towards some councillors and decision-makers, and people will have to be convinced that it isn't just the same people who they feel haven't made a very good job of managing local government switching to managing the region."

Dr Robinson says: "If regional government is going to mean anything at all, it hasn't got to be the just the 'usual suspects' of middle-class, middle-aged men."

l Who Runs the North-East Now? A Review and Assessment of Governance in North-East England by Dr Fred Robinson, Dr Keith Shaw, Jill Dutton, Paul Grainger, Bill Hopwood and Sarah Williams. Financed by the Millfield House Foundation, Newcastle. Published by the Universities of Durham and Northumbria.