Last week, a delegation from JLGC went to Germany. The trip had a number of purposes – one was to look at recent developments in Hamburg. The German ‘city states’ Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have powers which both Japanese and UK councils can only dream about – under the highly devolved German system they are federal state and local authority at the same time. This gives them the right to a constitution and legislative powers, while providing services to their citizens as other municipalities do. In Hamburg, this works by dividing the city in seven districts with their own directly elected councils; however they are fiscally controlled by the city and their powers are mostly consultative, although recent reforms have given the councils (called Bezirksversammlung) more competences.
The other aim of the trip was the strengthening of co-operation with German organisations – namely the German Institute of Urban Affairs (DIfU) in Berlin and the Institute of Local Government (KWI) at Potsdam University, in the run-up to the big project of updating our publication on local government in Germany.
