Last week, Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles announced two measures to progress the implementation of the critical Kerslake report’s recommendations for Birmingham City Council: the membership of the minister’s improvement panel, and the introduction from 2017 of four-yearly all-out council elections.

The Post understandably concentrated on the panel – the genuine news item and the more important, given that these four progress-chasers could, as Jonathan Walker put it, hold the fate of the whole city council in their hands. Elections are important too, though, and they’re our concern this week.

Although Pickles’ announcement apparently took some councillors by surprise, it had been pretty clearly signalled.

The Kerslake report found that Birmingham’s “large number of councillors means the council is difficult to run and has encouraged individual councillors to micro-manage services.

“The size of wards means some councillors struggle to connect their communities with the council.

“The current pattern of elections by thirds has not helped the council’s ability to take strategic decisions.”

From which followed its Recommendation 4: “The Secretary of State should move Birmingham City Council to all-out elections, replacing the current election by thirds ... The Local Government Boundary Commission should conduct an Electoral Review … It should aim to complete its work to enable elections by May 2017.”

Having indicated at the time his ‘firm approval’, Secretary of State Pickles did last week precisely what Kerslake recommended.

It may look like yet another ministerial intervention in what should be a council decision.

But electoral cycles, I’d suggest, are a rare exception, where we could do with more centralist standardisation rather than less.

From a voter’s perspective, the present non-system – a mix of whole council elections, elections by thirds, or even by halves, with unitary and shire district councils having the choice – is alienating and bewildering.

If you accept the case for greater uniformity, the question becomes which system: by thirds, as we’re used to in Birmingham, or all-out?

All-out elections produce clear-cut results and, by giving councils a breathing space between elections, they may encourage policy consistency, forward planning, and reduce the temptation to defer politically difficult decisions such as tax increases, planning approvals, or school and leisure facility closures.

They can, though, lead to dramatic swings in political control, produce large influxes of inexperienced councillors, and reduce the accountability that comes from politicians having to explain and justify their policies regularly to electors.

There’s no right or wrong answer, but personally I’ll prefer being able to judge the record not just of one of my three councillors, but of the whole council over four years, and then, to quote the old American phrase, to throw the rascals out – all the rascals in one go.

However, as I’ve said, this decision was effectively taken weeks ago – by Sir Bob Kerslake and Eric Pickles. So, like it or not, let’s get over it – because everything else electoral is still open to influence.

The so-called statutory instrument that Pickles laid before Parliament last week specifies only whole council elections every four years, starting in 2017.

It says nothing about councillor numbers or even single-member wards, because they’re the business of the Local Government Boundary Commission.

The commission conducts loads of electoral reviews, most either to reduce exceptionally high levels of inequality between wards and divisions within an authority, or to address the size of a council – number of councillors – at the request of authorities themselves.

In these latter cases recent recommendations have generally been for significant reductions in councillor numbers – partly because that’s what the councils themselves appeared to favour.

West Midlands cases include Bromsgrove, reduced from 39 to 31 members, Stratford-on-Avon 53 to 36, and Wyre Forest 42 to 33.

Some of these reviews also involve moves towards whole council elections and more or wholly single-member wards – as will Birmingham’s.

Birmingham’s big difference is the reference by a minister, following a critical independent report asserting strongly that the council’s present size of 120 councillors is “unsustainable” and actually suggesting a preferred number: “100 mainly single-member wards”.

But, if the Kerslake report’s assertions are strong and explicit, its evidence base on council size is close to non-existent. Internationally, it limited itself to a brief description of France’s second city, Lyon (population 500,000), and its two-tier system of city council (73 members) and nine municipal arrondissement councils (148 additional councillors).

The report suggests that a similar member/resident ratio would give Birmingham 318 councillors – its main objections to which would seem to be costs (unspecified) and officer workloads, with any potential democratic benefits simply unmentioned.

For the record, Birmingham’s other two main European partner cities also have two-tier systems and consequently much higher total numbers of councillors.

Frankfurt (pop: 700,000) has a 93-member city council and 16 local district councils with an additional 274 members; Milan (pop: 1.3 million) has a 48-member city council and 9 borough councils with 369 councillors.

Do you sense a kind of pattern emerging – of large cities with elective democratic devolution, rather than Birmingham’s unwieldy, district-based administrative devolution?

The problem is that the Boundary Commissioners basically couldn’t care less about such comparisons – or about the population-based or elector-based formulae used in many European countries to determine council sizes.

In Sweden, for example, municipalities with under 12,000 electors have 31 councillors, 41 if between 12,000 and 24,000, and so on up to Stockholm’s 101 for its 900,000 population.

Here, Leeds’ 750,000 population merits just three councillors more (99) than Manchester’s 511,000 (96); Coventry’s 330,000 residents get 54 councillors, Wigan’s 318,000 get 75. These kinds of electoral inequality simply don’t concern the commission.

And that’s just one of Birmingham’s dilemmas. If it wants to make a case for a certain size of council – or for any multi-member wards – it has to do it specifically in terms of the roles, responsibilities, workloads and residents’ expectations of councillors in Birmingham, not by comparisons with other councils, either at home or abroad.

Such cases wouldn’t be easy, but at least, unlike all-out elections, the key decisions are still to be made.