Royal Mail permitting, council leader Sir Albert Bore should by now have received a letter from Kevin Davis, Conservative leader of the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames Council, urging Birmingham and all other major English local authorities to follow Kingston's lead in introducing a system of councillor recall.

It's hardly a new idea. We hear it almost whenever a councillor is found guilty of, for example, not declaring a significant financial interest, tweeting death threats against a public figure, or physically assaulting a publican or constituent – yes, these things do happen – or simply fails persistently to attend council meetings.

It has slowly come to the boil in Kingston, though, after a Liberal Democrat councillor was dismissed from his party group over allegations of falsely claiming more than £3,600 in council tax benefit.

He was eventually convicted but in the long meantime he continued to sit as a councillor and claim his £7,500 annual allowance. Moreover, if re-elected, he could have continued doing so even after his conviction, given that the offences carried a maximum tariff of less than a three-month prison sentence.

Understandably, many constituents were angry that, under existing rules, there was nothing they could do. In future, though, there may be.

Kingston Council will vote next month on innovative proposals to give voters the power to sack their local councillor. Several suggested scenarios could trigger a petition calling for a by-election.

They include a councillor's attendance at meetings over a municipal year falling below 20 per cent, conviction of a crime resulting in any prison sentence, and moving their main residence outside the Royal Borough.

If any of these criteria are met, the council's monitoring officer would decide whether a petition should be launched on the council website calling for the councillor's resignation.

Ward electors would have three months to sign the petition and, if more than a third do so, the councillor would be expected to resign, triggering a by-election.

The 'expected to resign' formula obviously reflects the voluntary nature of the procedure at this stage, even if it is adopted. But Councillor Davis sees it as a potentially far-reaching first step that he hopes will be taken up across local government and eventually embodied in legislation.

My guess, though, is that Ministers, however fondly they may currently be feeling towards the electorate, are likely to be pretty suspicious. For this 'let's trust the voters' business is just the kind of dangerous democratic populism that they stamped on in the last parliament in relation to MPs' recall.

Some members – like, as it happens, the two local Kingston MPs, Zac Goldsmith and James Berry – argued for a genuinely voter-initiated recall process, with, if anything, a more open-ended list of triggering scenarios than that proposed for councillors.

Instead, we had the Coalition's half-hearted and unconvincing concession that voters would only get even a chance to remove their MP if s/he was actually jailed or fellow MPs gave their permission first.

It was a promising opportunity cynically wasted so it's encouraging the recall principle is being kept in the public eye by this Kingston initiative.

However, if we're looking at local government, while being able to instigate the recall of councillors is undoubtedly important, it's surely even more vital to have a robust procedure in place to remove, if necessary, those with serious executive power – like elected mayors, police and crime commissioners, and, soon, metro-mayors.

I made a similar suggestion at the end of my Post article last week, and probably seemed to be taking the arrival of more metro-mayors as a given, the only show in the town, as it were – and in a way I am.

I don't believe elected executive mayors constitute the only, or necessarily the best, model of city or county regional leadership and accountability. I wish this and previous governments had cared enough to compare and consider models deployed effectively in other European cities: leaders' boards, elected and unelected assemblies, standing conferences of key stakeholders. But that's not how UK governments work, of any political colour.

They use parliamentary majorities backed by a quarter of the registered electorate to enact dogma-driven rather than evidence-based policy.

This administration's devolution dogma is metro-mayors, at least for city regions. They were in the manifesto, so we have to try to make the best of them, and that should mean including in the legislation an electoral recall procedure.

That's what Germany did in the early 1990s. After decades of different local government systems in each of the four Allied occupational zones, and following the country's reunification, there was throughout the Länder (states) what one commentator described as a "bushfire-like spread [Buschfeuer artigen Ausbreitung] of the direct election of mayors", driven by concerns about performance and democratic deficits.

Bushfires tend not to consult much before they spread and neither did the Länder governments. They legislated and imposed. BUT, as a quid pro quo, all the newly mayoral Länder also legislated procedures whereby a sitting mayor could be removed from office through a local referendum – a direct democratic instrument to hold the mayor politically accountable.

It was obviously inspired by the recall mechanism used widely in the US, though, with all mayoral municipalities having elected councils, in some Länder the actual referendum is triggered by, say, a two-thirds majority vote of councillors, rather than by a citizen petition.

In the week when Tower Hamlets voters elect a mayor to replace one they themselves played no direct part in removing, it is worth emphasising the importance of both the existence and accessibility of these recall mechanisms in easing German citizens' early acceptance of what for most was an alien institution.

They had their teething problems – in Brandenburg, for instance, whose voters were so taken by their new democratic power that mayoral recall became for a time a new popular sport: 'Burgermeisterkegeln' or playing bowling with the mayors.

Generally, though, the prominence given to recall proved both good politics and good government – as surely it would be here.

Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham