BIG SOCIETY PRESENTS RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES

First comes the prime minister extolling the virtues of the Big Society, then politicians and thinkers of all political persuasions weigh in with their views, but the evidence about all of this was thin on the ground.

Recently, LCR Online, www.lcronline.org.uk and LGC (Local Government Chronicle) (www.lgcplus.com) published a survey looking at the attitudes of principal (county, borough, district and unitary) authorities, local (parish and town) councils and the third sector (charity and voluntary organisations) to the Big Society. The conclusions reached were one where local councils more optimistic than other groups about the potential of the Big Society and a lack of agreement on who should be included in the Big Society.

Now the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) has published the results of its analysis of over 70 submissions of evidence from civil society organisations and other public sector bodies on the economic aspects of the government’s Big Society agenda. The report, Economic conditions for organisations contributing to the Big Society in rural England is available at: http://ruralcommunities.gov.uk/2010/10/15/big-society-risks-and-opportunities/

The CRC drew on these submissions to prepare a report to Defra’s secretary of state. This report, Rural Economies Intelligence Report: The Big Society is available here:
http://ruralcommunities.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ruraleconbigsociety.pdf

The report shows that the principles of the Big Society are already well embedded and supported in much of rural England. But that many civil society organisations have significant fears that the current funding climate will significantly damage further progress in delivering the Big Society’s objectives. Moreover, demand for many of their services is growing at a time when resources are reducing.

There is also a fear that rural communities may be disproportionately affected by the forthcoming spending cuts.

There are fears that local authorities and others may set up new delivery organisations that start competing with existing voluntary organisations of various types.

There is a view that in future, local rural communities may have to depend more on actions from their local parish and town councils.

The respondents call for more clarity from central and local government and others on what the practical impacts and consequences of the Big Society approach will be. There is a feeling that there is little hard information available about the Big Society agenda.

The civil society organisations that gave evidence were clear that with the right support and encouragement there is much more that they could do to help rural communities and particularly vulnerable people within our rural communities.

ARE COUNCIL NEWSPAPERS DESTROYING THE INDEPENDENT LOCAL PRESS?

So is Eric Pickles, the erstwhile secretary of state for communities and local government (CLG), at it again? CLG has announced a consultation on a draft revised Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity.

Is it a case of using a ‘hammer to crack a nut’? Even in opposition, the Conservative Party has long held a view that local council newspapers create an unfair advantage in the local media market and distorts it. Further to this, the Conservatives argued this was why local newspapers were being binned by publishers – this has continued now they are in power.

According to the CLG: “In recent years there has been a marked growth in the frequency and scope of council publicity techniques funded by taxpayers’ money, while local papers have struggled in a saturated news environment.”

Key elements of the suggested revisions to the Code in relations to newspapers are:

· new central principles that will "make sure", for example, that council publicity is lawful, cost effective, objective, even-handed and appropriate;

· a new rule that councils should not publish newspapers in direct competition to local press, and that these council publications should not appear more than quarterly (and should only include material directly related to council services).

Mr Pickles, adds: "An independent local press is an essential part of our open democracy helping local people scrutinise and hold elected councillors to account.

“The rules around council publicity have been too weak for too long, allowing public money to be spent on wasteful town hall papers that have left many local newspapers looking over the abyss.

"The proposals I am publishing will close off these inappropriate practices and encourage councils to focus taxpayers’ money on where it should be spent – protecting frontline services.”

It looks like lobbying from the Society of Editors (the member organisation that includes local newspapers’ editors) is succeeding with its campaign that says the main reason for the decline of independent local newspapers can be laid at the door of local council newspapers. The evidence to prove this, I would argue, is sketchy at best.

To counter that, David Holdstock, national chair of LGcommunications, the professional body for council communicators, said: "These proposals will limit councils' ability to communicate in the most appropriate and cost-effective way about local issues that matter to people. As restrictions are placed on council publications and local newspaper circulations continue to fall, residents will have less and less access to information about their local public services."

There is strong evidence that council newspapers are critical to the reputation of local councils. A report on LGcommunications' own research into the impact of council publications can be found at:

http://www.lgcomms.org.uk/documents/PrvngCommsWrks-ImptOfcnclPubs.pdf

It is easy to argue that local council publications are only distributed a handful of times a year and cannot be seen as competitors for advertising revenue, news and information for local newspapers. And the arguments put forward by the coalition government and other supporters of this initiative comes slightly unstuck here in terms of advertising; the Conservatives recently said that all local council recruitment advertising should be placed on council websites and no where else to save taxpayer money. So this possible area of where advertising could be placed in local commercial newspapers is being recommended, only for it not to be.

Local council newsletters keep residents informed about what the council does and can do for them. Whether it is by providing a telephone number to report opening hours of playgrounds, allotments, burial grounds or libraries, or even letting the public know what time the library is open or when and how you can meet your local police community support officer, these are the services that only local council publications can do.

No one would argue that local councils want some sort of totalitarian state system where there is only one source of news, what they want to see is a successful and vibrant local media. It is essential for local democracy that the workings of local councils are scrutinised and elected representatives held to account.

For more on the consultation please visit the CLG at: www.communities.gov.uk

I am writing in this in personal capacity and it in no way reflects the position of the National Association of Local Councils; which will be responding to this consultation shortly.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIBRARIES?

Where can you go to reduce your fear of crime, have a massage, ring a church bell, get some information about council tax and engage in some heavy petting without being told off? Answer – a library of course.

But the latest survey on library attendances suggests the point of them is a diminishing one. Clearly people are voting with their feet because library attendances nationally are dropping.

The number of adults visiting libraries in England has fallen steadily over the last five years. In 2005, 16.4% of adults attended their local library once a month. New research indicates that the figure dropped to 12.8% last year. However, children's visits remained steady during the five-year period with around 70% using the service once a week.

Overall, 39.4% of adults surveyed said they had visited a public library at least once in the last year, compared with 48.2% in 2005.
The figures were published in a report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS).

So libraries appear to be another British institution that many people love, but hardly anyone uses anymore.

And this becomes all the more crucial with the Comprehensive Spending Review coming in a couple of weeks, which will state the exact extent of the spending cuts being imposed on the public sector. We know that local government is likely to be one of the hardest areas hit and that means principal (county, borough, district and unitary) councils will have a lot less money to spend and public libraries are going to be in the firing line.

But is all lost? Not for some.

Communities in Suffolk are being given the chance to run their local library as part of a pilot scheme.

The countywide network of book loaning would remain, but groups could set local opening hours and choose events.

Suffolk County Council says grants would be provided to the groups, who would then employ the library staff.

"We want to make sure that the services are as efficient as possible and as close to the community as possible," said Guenever Pachent, Suffolk County Council's service director for culture information inclusion and learning.

The scheme is one of ten projects in the country for the government's Future Libraries Programme.

Mr Pachent says the scheme is already underway and that four groups have expressed an interest in being involved.

"We would be interested in any organisation that might want to run [a library]," she said. "There would be a minimum service that they would need to provide in exchange for a grant.

"They would need to be part of the network, so that they can circulate their books around Suffolk.

"The local parish council or other social enterprise running it would be able to make other changes themselves, so if there was room in the library they might bring in other activities.

"I think we'd set minimum opening hours, but I think people might extend opening hours."

In David Cameron’s much heralded vision of the ‘Big Society’, libraries are often held up as an area where local authorities can work with the public to maintain services in the face of shrinking resources.

But in Dorset, this approach has been successfully developing for a number of years, with local communities providing volunteers, management and even money to help protect and sustain their branch library.

As is often the case, necessity was the mother of invention. In 2006, Dorset County Council was facing a shortfall of £850,000 in its library service budget.

Initial proposals to close 13 of its 34 branch libraries were met with widespread public disapproval and eventually dropped.

To help make the savings, cuts had to be made to the book fund and the number of qualified staff, while core opening hours were reduced across all libraries. But crucially, the council also gave local communities the opportunity to add ‘extra’ hours – either by providing volunteers, trained by the council, or by paying for library staff to extend opening times. And to support this approach – self-service facilities were introduced across all libraries.

Newham has bucked the national trend. Recorded visits to its libraries have increased by 8% in just one year.

Sir Robin Wales, elected mayor of Newham, says: “Libraries impact on Newham residents’ quality of life every day through their activities and services. We make a difference by identifying new audiences while satisfying the established customer base. This is achieved through the delivery of the highest standards of facilities, services and customer care.

"We believe libraries need to be more of a one-stop experience. Rather than taking library services into pubs or supermarkets, we’re looking at bringing more services into libraries so our residents can get more of what they need from us in one place.”

Meanwhile, culture minister, Ed Vaizey MP, says: "A strong library service, based around the needs of local people, can play a key role in our ambitions to build the Big Society by providing safe and inclusive spaces for people to read, learn and access a range of community services.”
He said he wants people to think, "imaginatively, about where libraries could be".

So you there you have it. There is a future for the public library service but it is going to be run, managed and delivered in a very different style to what we are use to.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

So the phoney war is at last over with regards to public sector spending cuts. Last month's emergency budget outlined plans for 25% spending cuts in ministerial departments.

But as ever, it is not as simple as that. We have also recently learned that we could soon be witnessing 'a mexican stand-off' between government departments because the Treasury is allegedly asking them to draw up plans of 40% worth of cuts.

However, is was all clarified by Phillip Hammond MP, secretary of state for transport, who said that the average cuts in departments will be 25% but some departments will be asked to make no cuts, such as Health and International Development, while others will have less cuts, like Education (10–15%), and therefore some other departments will be asked to make more than the 25% cuts.

So it will be stand off between departments to see who ‘blinks first' and opts for a greater cut than 25%. Which department is voluntarily going to take on this mission impossible?

And so it seems departments that work closely with local government will be forced to make cuts greater than 25%. But we are going to have to wait to the autumn's Comprehensive Spending Review for the final results. We already know that Communities and Local Government (CLG) is initially being asked to make £1.2bn a year in expenditure savings.

But what about the people in all this? We know that from surveys that people don’t want to have cuts to services such as litter and bin collections, parks and leisure facilities, and street and road cleaning. Clearly these ‘quality of life’ and ‘feel good’ factors are important to people. But these are the areas likely to be most threatened by principal councils (county, district, borough and unitary councils).

So who will be listening to people’s opinions. One answer is communities themselves – if they are allowed to.

As Simon Jenkins, columnist and former editor of The Times, says across cities and towns: “Communal services are still divided into national silos, prevented from the sort of local collaboration that should be natural, and save money.”

He goes to say that we need: “more freedom for a neighbourhood authority, even as small as wards, to be allowed to ‘tax-and-spend’ for services such as parks, crèches, clinics and job centres, with ‘micro-mayors’ to tackle litter and antisocial behaviour.”
For more information on this please visit: http://bit.ly/9UID46

The government and others in power, like principal councils, need to allow real localism in action give people the chance to have more control and say over local services. Set up more local (parish and town) councils, I say.

How local are you?

While the true test of how much this general election has captured the public imagination is measured by the voter turn out at the ‘only poll that matters’. Undoubtedly, with the race so close and the TV debates it has been fascinating to watch from all angles.

While all three main political parties produced weighty tomes of manifestos (no concern about the environment here) and talked about championing localism, there was a contradiction in that there was no detailed role outlined in for very local government (parish and town councils) or indeed principal local government in place-shaping and bringing greater coherence to local plans and priorities.

Now we know the Conservative Party has won the race for power. What does that mean actually for localism? We are not going to know the details straightaway. But we can draw some clues from their policy papers of this year and last year combined with their general election manifesto.

The new Conservatives – as I call them – are like the old Conservatives and like the Republicans in the US and think that central government is too big and has taken too much power to the centre. So that should be brilliant news for localism and people power right? Well maybe.

The Conservative’s Big Society ideas are a welcome suggestion to strengthen local community activity but it needed to recognise the important contribution local government will make in citizen renewal and engagement.

There is a disconnect here because the party has already acknowledged the important part, say local (parish and town), councils can play in housing and planning, but surely they are not excluded from other parts of the civic society.

When considering how we renew our neighbourhoods and communities, it is vital to recognise the role that local (parish and town) councils and their army of community leaders play. They are the closest layer of representation to people and they are already demonstrating real localism in action.

The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) continues to work with all the political parties to ensure that the needs and contribution of grass roots, community-led local government are fully understood and addressed.

Finally, is all this talk of devolution and more power to the citizens just a cost-cutting exercise, which is not really the point of localism?

Calling time on pub closures

So, the government is apparently going to call time on the number of pubs closing down in our villages, towns and cities.

The government, via the wonderfully titled pubs minister (somehow I don’t think he spends his time on one long pub crawl), John Healey MP, has produced an action plan to help community pubs. At the moment around 40 pubs are closing every week, which results in job losses, millions of pounds lost to the economy and the focal points of communities being ripped out.

Principal councils will now be given new powers through the planning system to intervene before a pub is demolished. This measure aims to create a ‘pause in the system’ for the local community to have their say on any proposed demolition. Restrictions preventing premises continuing as pubs once they have been sold will be also banned.

And planning laws will allow pubs to branch out the business without planning permission into new commercial ventures. This could see pubs operate gift shops and books shops, without the additional expense and time of seeking council approval.

Landlords will be able to access specialist, tailored business advice through Pub is the Hub, www.pubisthehub.org, currently a voluntary support service for community pubs.

Local (parish and town) councils up and down the country are striving hard to save pubs and possibly turn them into multi-use centres. These councils can now use the power of well-being to save pubs as community centres in a local area.

The White Horse Pub in Hitcham, Suffolk, was a dilapidated pub, which, through the support of the local parish council, local principal authority and Pub is the Hub, turned it into a highly-regarded food-led business.

The Dykes End pub in Reach, Cambridegshire, is now a community-owned one. The pub was known as The Kings, which was the last remaining amenity in this small village. It fell into hard times and then the owner applied for a change of use to residential. A local action group, assisted by the local parish council, fought this very hard and won its battle; with East Cambridgeshrie District Council saying the move contravened its local plans. The local action group changed themselves into a company and bought the pub for community gain. So a considerable number of villagers are now shareholders in the pub.

The village of Stratton in Bude, Cornwall, lost its post office in 2006. However, local owners of the Tree Inn pub saw an opportunity for multi-use of the pub if they were able to extend. So Stratton Parish Council and Pub is the Hub, along with the planning authority and South West Regional Development Agency got together to assist their proposals of a multi-use centre for the village. The pub now runs post office services, free broadband internet services, catering and accommodation businesses.

Not everyone is happy with the government’s proposals. The Tory Party has attacked Labour for allowing supermarkets to continue to ‘engage’ in loss leading on alcohol, leaving pubs less competitive.

Caroline Spelman MP, shadow Communities and Local Government minister, said: “Under Labour there has been a surge in alcohol-fuelled violence in our high streets, while local community pubs go to the wall. Conservatives will stand up for local community pubs and give residents new rights to protect them, while giving police and councils strong powers to tackle the binge drinking violence that ruins our towns at night.”

But aside from this political squabbling between the two main parties, it is important to note that given the power and influence, local people can really make difference to improve lives and well being of communities.

Will localism win in the end?

People are getting more and more disenchanted and disenfranchised with the political process, so they are voting with their feet and increasingly not turning up at polling day.

 But why is this? There has been much research and analysis in this area but there does not appear to be any conclusive evidence in one direction or another. It is generally felt that people feel that politics does not try to make any connections with them and they feel so distant from the key decisions of those in power.

So is localism the answer, especially in the way that promotes ideas of people and communities being part of the decision-making process on local public services that are delivered in their area? But will the dark forces of centralism and the state allow this?

Participation is about bringing local communities closer to decision-making about key services that affect their daily lives. It is the embodiment of direct, deliberative democracy.Participation allows the citizens of an area (neighbourhood, regeneration or local authority area) to take part in the allocation of part of the local council’s or other statutory agency's (health services, police) key decisions. The aims of participation are to increase transparency, accountability, understanding and social inclusion in local government affairs.

However, local people need to be empowered with information to enable them to engage in a meaningful way when prioritising the needs of their neighbourhoods, proposing and debating new services and projects, and setting budgets in a democratic and transparent way.

For instance, the Conservative Party’s policy planning green paper, Open Space, proposes major changes in our beloved planning system, including giving local (parish and town) council more status and virtually a right of veto over any nearby developments. But how are the choices and the planning detail going to be disseminated to local councils? These councils are not necessarily hard wired with an in-depth knowledge of planning. Luckily, they do have good support networks via the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) and local planning authorities. But it is going to be a challenge for them.

But how does this all square with the party’s commitments for the need to build new houses and incentivise businesses leading to alleged economic growth? The points we should be raising is that what local communities want quite often is not that far removed from what central government wants. Surely people want a sustainable developing community with the right infrastructure and transports links, for example. And is this not the aim of central government. More on this can be seen at (http://www.conservatives.com) or a feature story in LCR Online (http://www.lcronline.org.uk).

Recently, NALC, the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC), Action for Rural Communities in England (ACRE) and the Participatory Budgeting Unit (PBU) worked together on a series of pilots where local councils collaborated with their citizens over what should be the councils’ budget priorities. The pilots were so successful that the organisations are recommending that all local councils should use participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting offers rural people their own say in local community investments. We now have practical examples of people deciding local priorities and allocating resources across a wide range of services, including community safety schemes, health awareness campaigns, parish footpaths and much more. This approach can bring communities together, help people understand the complexities of public budget setting and deliver public services, which better meet local needs. For more information on this project visit: http://www.nalc.gov.uk or http://www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk.

So what do you think? Do you think the examples of communities having more say in planning matters or budget setting of local councils is a step in the right direction of localism? Or is it all just window dressing?

 

From notice board to message board

Come what may, in terms of political allegiance or policy thinking, everyone is advocating that there should be more participitation from the ‘ordinary’ citizens in the matters of the state.

I must admit, I dislike the term ‘ordinary’ citizen, it smack of elitism from the political classes who swim in the shark infested waters of the Westminster village. Rather randomly, it is like the phrase coined by the so-called actress Liz Hurley about non-celebrities, she called them ‘civilians’.

In a recent edition of LGC, www.lgcplus.com, there was an interesting piece by Leo Boland, chief executive of the Greater London Authority, and Emer Coleman, London Alliances project director of the Greater London Authority, on managing public services. 

At the heart of it they coined a rather management school term of  ‘communicative governance’. Now don’t let that put you off and switch off. It is the meaning of the term that is important. They argue, as countless others have, that public service delivery has to move from the position of communicating in a top-down somewhat Stalinist style to one of proper engagement with the end users of these services – local people.

If you look at the example of local (parish and town) councils, now I know they are by no means major public service delivery agents, but they run a wide range of services from environmental to transport to leisure and tourism, they are following this trend. Traditionally, and in the past the only forms of public participation they engaged in was a flyer on a notice board to inform residents of a meeting and a parish newsletter. But as Boland and Coleman say for true public participation we need to move from ‘broadcast’ to ‘dialogue’.

And this is where social media has a role to play with interesting opportunities; where people exchange views, share, rate and rank in real time on a daily basis. You only to have to visit Cllr Tweeps’s, website, www.cllrtweeps.com, to see that many parish and town councilors are engaging in a meaningful way with social media and this is a significant step change.

But all of these different forms of communications can actually lead to lower levels of satisfaction among residents because their expectations become much higher, as research from the University of Exeter has shown. So, although it might appear to be a negative, councils that wish to have higher levels of satisfaction are those who dampen down expectations or manage them better. 

Will all this different methods of communications lead to a ‘communicative governance’ utopian model contract between the state and the citizen? I think it is a wait and see game.