Can councils and residents collaborate meaningfully?

Northfleet Big Local group installing community artwork

What will it take to get public services and communities working together to achieve lasting change? Local Trust – which runs the Big Local programme – gives New Start an exclusive insight into what works and what doesn’t

‘Power should not rest with public services.’ In some circles this challenge to the decision–making power of police authorities, health services, town hall bureaucrats and their ilk would be prelude to a fight. Here, in the company of people committed to helping communities play their part in shaping public services, it is a mission.

Sitting around the table at the Royal Society of Arts in central London, home of ‘enlightened thinking and collaborative action’, are a group of people brought together by Local Trust with the support of New Start. They include several people directly involved in the Big Local programme at national and community level, an academic, a former councillor turned consultant, a researcher, a council resident involvement manager, a civil servant, a representative from the Big Lottery Fund and people who have spent their working lives in the service of community development.

What are the real chances of a lasting and happy union between beleaguered

public services and people more comfortable as passive recipients of public services?

For the last four years Local Trust has been working in 150 Big Local communities in England to show what time (15 years), money (at least £1m for each area), hard work and creative thinking can achieve. In order to succeed they will need to convince beleaguered public services, battening down the hatches against the onslaught of funding cuts inflicted by a government ideologically opposed to their size and scope, that partnership with communities will help create better places to live.

Strong support for collaboration between councils and residents
A new survey commissioned by Local Trust and New Start found strong support for this kind of collaboration, with 81% of local authorities, 89% of charities and more than 97% of residents saying that their community could be improved through greater input from residents. A majority, including 60% of local authorities, went even further and said a collaborative, resident-led approach would be feasible in their area. Working with residents was seen as the best response to dealing with challenges raised by cuts to public services and 95% of local authorities said they valued working with local communities highly or very highly.

But what are the real chances of a lasting and happy union between beleaguered public services and people who may be more comfortable as passive recipients of public services? And what would such a union look like?

From the opening remarks, it’s clear that this gathering doesn’t want residents to just run the local library or decide how to furnish the local park, they want to see ordinary folk having strategic discussions with local authorities and joint control over services. As one contributor put it ‘it’s not just a question of where money is cut, it’s about how it is spent.’

‘They saw us as pink and fluffy and naïve.

They don’t see us like that anymore.’

If it all goes to plan many more of us will be au fait with the inner workings of central and local government. We will have access to a wealth of information that allow us to make our case with greater authority. The passive will be active and the disenfranchised will be engaged. Tory hearts will soar as big government becomes big society, left wingers will find virtue in a ‘publicisation’ of services that gives power to the people, and everyone in between will celebrate the cultural shift that finally blurs the lines between them and us.

Big Local Conniburrow knitting group

It is already started to happen. The chair of one Big Local group has, over the past 18 months, enjoyed regular meetings with regeneration officers, councillors, police and the fire service. In that short space of time, she says, trust has grown and the relationship has come a long way.

‘There was initially quite a lot of suspicion. The police role was to keep nice people in and nasty people out and they saw us as pink and fluffy and naïve. They don’t see us like that anymore.’ Nowadays they even apologise when they neglect to ask the group for their opinions on the décor in the new public toilets. She is involved as a resident, but she is the first to admit that her background as a senior local authority officer has greased the wheels: it helps if you know who’s who and what’s what.

Catton Grove Big Local youth group

Building community capacity and political literacy

Knowledge is key to making these relationships work. In Leeds, Bristol and London information is being collected and made freely available so that people can understand more about where they live. Potentially, residents can use the data to open an informed and constructive dialogue with commissioners and providers on how to do things.

At national level, the Big Lottery Fund has recently appointed a new director for knowledge and learning and is preparing to release a vast amount of information in an effort to spread learning more widely. Still, information only becomes knowledge when it is accessed, understood and acted upon. People don’t act because they have lots of information at their fingertips. They act because they care about something enough to stick their necks out, whether it’s the withdrawal of the caretaker service or the threatened closure of a school or library. As one contributor puts it, ‘You act when you need to act because you have the capability to act.’

Capability is a moot point. Strong partnerships require strong, committed partners. Right now, residents aren’t strong because few have ever had the opportunity to participate at strategic level and services that could help build their capacity have been cut. A community finance leader illustrates this point with the story of a senior figure within the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) who insisted the government would ‘spend money empowering people to know their rights. Very soon afterwards they slashed the legal aid budget, the very definition of resourcing that helps people know their rights.’

‘All these waves of “doing it together” have only

been done because there’s been a financial push’

Public services aren’t strong because their funding and personnel have been decimated, with more cuts to come. A consultant with extensive experience as a councillor and council leader says: ‘Local authorities have lost 40% of their budgets in the last few years and have as much to go again in the comprehensive spending review. They don’t have the capacity to build these relationships because most people are firefighting. They have very little time to do the thinking or to attend the kind of meetings the partnerships require. People move around so rapidly that if you invest in relationships they can just disappear.’

Local authorities make themselves believe that if they withdraw services communities will ‘spontaneously rise to take them over without any consultation, any conversation, any lead-in time, any investment in building capacity’. The truth is, he says, that they have no respect for communities unless those communities are doing what local authorities and central government want them to do.

The difficulties of creating lasting change

Communities can’t rise up because, despite several decades of regeneration, we rarely give them the tools to rise up. ‘One of the key lessons is about political literacy and I’m not sure that we have that centre stage,’ says a sociology and health academic who has studied regeneration initiatives going back to the 1960s. ‘All these waves of “doing it together” have only been done because there’s been a financial push and when that goes away, which it will, there’s not a lot left because people won’t have learnt to become active citizens, to become political and to ask for different kinds of change, not change in the toilets but the change in how I should live around here, what kind of public provision should we have. We have to try to achieve political literacy.’

Given the lack of capability and capacity on both sides it would be naïve to expect a smooth path to any new incarnation of the local strategic partnerships we last saw fight for breath under Tony Blair’s regime.

Tory ministers will no doubt dine out on the story of the vicar who scraped together funding to open a debt centre after a Big Local information worker found there were no debt services left in the area. What won’t hit the headlines is that centres like this are increasingly being staffed by people volunteering because they’ve lost their jobs due to the cuts.

The chair of a Big Local group in north-east England says: ‘There are lots of people no longer employed to do those jobs who are now volunteering. They are able to volunteer because they’ve learnt how to do that stuff within their paid jobs. If, ten years down the line, people are no longer capable or alive and there is no one coming through I really fear what will happen in communities because I don’t know where that skill set will come from.’ She adds, ‘A bit of me feels complicit with this by filling the gap without making that argument that this is being resourced with nothing other than good will.’

No-one mentions the private sector. It doesn’t feel relevant to a discussion about the relationship between residents and local authorities but if councils are brought to their knees and communities aren’t in a position to take control of anything more significant than the local park or new public toilets a huge opportunity opens up for the private sector, and if that happens you don’t have big society you have yet another example of privatisation by the back door.

Partnerships mean building capacity, capability and trust on both sides, resourcing both sides, mutual respect and sharing information, skills and knowledge. And that is the real challenge for public services and for Big Local.

Catton Grove Big Local community allotment

Challenges to collaborative working

• Capacity: it’s difficult to get residents to come forward on a regular basis
• Too many different interests
• Difficult to find people with the dedication, skills and commitment
• Dominance of a small number of vocal ‘representatives’
• Poor support by executive management and leading politicians
• Needs to be a variety of mechanisms for residents to be engaged
• Apathy
• Complex, overlapping communities

• Read two blogs on collaboration by Sue Miller and Kevin Sugrue