Note from a network discussion: What could a national communities strategy look like?
Notes of a Better Way discussion on 26 November 2019, Euston, London
We brought together people from the public, voluntary and community, social enterprise and cooperative sectors to talk about what a future Government communities strategy might look like. This was against a background of an election, different proposals in manifestos and, in July 2019, the publication by the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) of a communities strategy, ‘By deeds and their results: strengthening our communities and nation’. Participants came up with a range of ideas for future community strategies, which are listed at the end of this note.
Introduction
Introducing the discussion, one participant, coming from a public sector perspective and having looked at the manifestos, said he thought the following issues needed to be considered when thinking about future strategies:
Size of the state: in the past public services have been subject to large scale privatisation, often with unhappy results. But what is the alternative? Should more resources flow out of the public sector towards community-led wealth building and co-operative endeavours, or should the state reverse direction and bring externally delivered services back-in house?
Boundaries of the state: should we expect more to be done by citizens themselves, and if so what forms of public participation in service design and delivery can achieve this?
Balance of power: should central government take the lead through national directly-funded programmes, or should local government and local communities have greater rights to deploy resources and take action on their own terms? It was notable that all the manifestos promised a big shift in power to a more local level.
Lessons from the past
In our discussion we noted that various aspects of a national community agenda have had some success across the country over the last decade or so. Government-funded programmes, and in some cases enabling legislation, have encouraged the transfer of land and buildings to community ownership, helped people take over and run their local pubs, trained local community organisers, and helped local communities establish a neighbourhood plan, for example. The Lottery’s Big Local programme has devolved resources and decision making to neighbourhood levels, over a ten year period. However, some promising experiments, such as the Our Place programme (which encouraged cross sector collaboration and pooled budgets at neighbourhood level) were not followed through.
For successive governments community policy has been problematic. It has often been tentative, with major spending departments regarding community development activities as peripheral or ‘soft’. A top-down, command and control approach to delivering the Big Society had, for example, often caused damage to the fragile eco-system of existing voluntary, community and social enterprise activity. The National Citizens Service was set up at a time when youth services experienced major cuts, for example. Competition for contracts had undermined local collaborations. The recent devolution agenda has shifted some power in favour of city regions and city mayors, but devolution is not decentralisation as far as local communities are concerned, and these arrangements continue to disempower people, who have little or no ability to influence behaviour at regional levels. The new Communities Strategy had been generally welcomed as a positive statement of intent, but some felt that the proposed actions lacked ambition.
Involvement, participation, power
In future, ways needed to be found to give communities more power, including influence over key decisions and genuine control over things that really matter. But we recognised that there were numerous challenges.
There is a baffling array of tools available. The Involve website sets out 58 different forms of public involvement: action planning, appreciative inquiry, citizens’ assemblies, co-production, conversation cafes, design charrettes, e-panels, feedback kiosks, forum theatre, participatory budgeting, planning for real, etc. Many of these are well established and can be effective, for different purposes, but if too many options are available locally that can produce confusion, and attempts to introduce new methods can undermine existing ones.
Important though engagement is, there was also some real scepticism and challenge about existing assumptions and methods from participants in this discussion. It was pointed out that we make a false assumption if we believe that everyone wants to participate or should participate in local community life. There is some evidence, eg from the Huddersfield Democracy Commission, that although people want some form of engagement they do not necessarily want participation. As one participant put it, when I go to my GP I want to be listened to, but I don’t want to participate directly in how the surgery is run. Many people feel overloaded and simply don’t have the bandwidth to take on more civic responsibility. They often feel lost and don’t understand how power works. People are experts in their own lives but rarely have expertise in the system. Sometimes engagement brought accountability without power, it was pointed out, and input could be ignored.
Indeed it is wholly unrealistic to expect full participation in every community; communities are simply too diverse, and modern life is simply too complex. Any strategy would also need to recognise that communities are rarely unified, except at times of crisis (floods for example). There are always multiple communities operating within a place, and people take part in and identify with these various communities to a greater or lesser extent at different times in their lives.
But the group thought there is nevertheless considerable value in making it much easier for people to become involved if and when they feel the need to, or believe they can make a useful contribution. Knowledge and communication are central requirements, it was pointed out. To make it work well, it was thought that we need to bring about:
A more universal understanding of how the democratic system works.
A constructive sense of entitlement which extends beyond the educated middle classes.
Investment in capacity building.
Easier access to associational activities, in new and revitalised forms.
We also need to understand that the journey of engagement often starts at a very low level, and that once someone is on that journey there needs to be the encouragement and support to take them on a trajectory where they can do more. Formal structures can get in the way – too often informal associations are required to incorporate as soon as they need even very small amounts of funding and that needs to change.
Community action could also end up in a quagmire of funding and admin, rather than creating real change.
We discussed some methods which can, potentially, help citizens challenge the power of large institutions, and take some power and control themselves.
Citizens’ assemblies are receiving attention at the moment, even if they have not always proved as influential as hoped for. Moreover, there we some in the group who thought that there were risks that these could actually undermine existing democratic systems by bypassing them and one said they thought they were tokenistic.
Community organising has also become more prominent in recent years. One key feature of community organising is that the agenda is developed by local citizens acting in informal combination, not by an institution such as local government.
Moreover, it was pointed out that we should not underestimate the importance of community spaces, at least those which provide a continuing opportunity for people from across a community to come together, to learn about each other and discover common cause, and take action together. Good community spaces can, it was said, could provide a better foundation for building community agency, and helping people take some ownership and control over the things that matter to them, than some more formal programmatic methods.
Often consultation and engagement happens to an agenda set by government, rather than being bottom up. Listening is really important. Some government guidance on how communities can best surface issues that really matter to them might be helpful.
The role of local government and the public sector
There needed to be a debate about rejuvenating good local government. Some said local authorities may not always be the best agency to lead engagement initiatives but others said they should be the convenors of this. However, they can and should develop skills to listen well. Some local authorities are working hard at developing a more collaborative style of working with their local communities. Barking and Dagenham and Wigan have received particular praise for this, but there are many other examples around the country.
Capacity within the local public sector is a problem. Often those working in the public sector feel overwhelmed, but once they start on the path they realise there is less red tape and regulations in the way of better engagement than they thought there would be. It is possible to introduce local procurement policies, for example.
Community wealth-building models have been introduced in Preston and elsewhere. In these, local anchor institutions take action to build a local supply chain and employ more local people, in order to reinvigorate the local economy,
Supporting communities versus national initiatives
Often the biggest challenge at community level is not the appetite to take action, nor the skills to do so well, but rather access to finance and many lived a precarious existence. There is therefore a good case for some national funding programmes to stimulate and strengthen community life but deployed in ways that support rather than undermine community based activity. Many new national initiatives can be spawned by eager Ministers which are put in place without any recognition of what already exists.
Some points for doing this well were suggested in the group:
Mapping should take place of existing initiatives and services before new ones are created and investment in them should be considered before replacing them with new ones.
New projects should only be funded if it can be confirmed that they are informed by real local knowledge.
Small amounts of funding should be easily accessible to large numbers of small organisations which are embedded in their community and which employ local people, with diverse backgrounds.
Trusted intermediaries should be available to provide advice, and facilitate peer learning and exchange.
Funding should be deployed wherever possible to build agency, allowing communities to do what they want to do on their own terms, and helping to build leadership from within communities themselves.
Innovative forms of grant making such as match trading grants (where funds are released according to uplift in trading income) should be considered, to incentivise and reward entrepreneurial behaviour, where there is scope for organisations to build up their earned income. Such mechanisms should be seen as an additional option, not as a replacement for traditional grant making.
Decisions about funding allocation should be made at the lowest practicable level, with involvement of people who understand the local ecosystem.
Funding should be for the longer term, ten years ideally. Funded initiatives should be given as much time as possible to develop their activities, and reshape their plans in the light of experience (as has been successfully demonstrated in the Big Local programme).
The Co-op Foundation is attempting to work in the space between grant hand-outs and commercial loans, by providing a combination of interest-free loans and grants and promoting co-operative models. It has also introduced match funding schemes with national government and lottery distributors, and has been able to play an intermediary role, acting as an advocate on behalf of communities. Perhaps there is scope to develop this type of trusted intermediary role further.
The digital world
Much of our community development practices emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, with the growth of community campaigns and pressure groups, and the spread of community-led anchor organisations, often centred on a physical space, together with forms of engagement which relied heavily on those willing to engage in often endless meetings and committees. The dramatic emergence of on-line social platforms in recent years, and access to big data, has introduced new and much faster ways to engage people, sometimes in much larger numbers, in community activities, and to plan interventions in much more targeted ways. It would be wrong to assume that a single national community strategy can fully address the opportunity this brings (as well as the associated difficulties), but our thinking must not remain confined by practices which will increasingly feel out-dated and indeed alien to a younger generation.
Proposals for a national community strategy
Some ideas which came out of the discussion for a national community strategy were:
Community impact assessments for any new development or policy initiative, similar to environmental impact assessments, which are well established and accepted. This would stimulate a positive discussion and consideration of how community harm of new national or public sector initiatives can be minimised and community benefits enhanced.
The use of national funds locally should be determined by local people.
At present allocation of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy funding can be decided by local authorities without any wider community accountability. A national strategy should introduce accountability mechanisms, perhaps including the option of participatory budgeting.
There should be investment in building the capacity of individuals and communities to engage and participate, especially where existing levels are low, including raising understanding of how democracy and local decision-making works.
Funding for community based activity should be overhauled to make it more accessible to smaller organisations and to be longer term funding.
Good local government is key and it needs to be rejuvenated, with investment in its ability to listen, and to hear what matters to people, not just to engage with them on its own agenda.
There should be further nationwide activity to support community organising, and to support communities in neighbourhood planning, and in shaping (and where desired delivering) local services.
A national strategy should promote more community wealth-building, through local procurement and supply chain development, and employment of local people.
A national strategy should include programmes to maintain momentum, and indeed accelerate, community asset transfer.
A national strategy should set out ways in which private companies are expected to engage the local community, eg commissioning community researchers in development projects.
Ideally we should seek a cross party alliance on a national community strategy which transcends party politics.