Lambeth Council: Learning lessons in co-operation

An empty shop in south London is helping Lambeth council workers change the way they do their jobs. Clare Goff visits the ‘co-operative council’ and finds a changed conversation taking place

‘Sitting in the town hall, the idea of the co-operative council was theoretical. Being here in the shop I’ve found an appetite for doing things differently’, says Rohini Anand-Pal, policy, equalities and performance officer at Lambeth Council, who now spends three days of her working week sitting in an empty shop on the high street in West Norwood, a residential area in the south of the borough.

Her colleagues Rachel Clark and Dorian Gray concur. ‘It’s been eye-opening. I’ve learned so much from being able to chat to residents’, says Rachel.

Since February, the colleagues have left their office in the town hall to spend three days a week chatting to local residents who come through the door, and helping them get ideas off the ground.

So far they have set up a Trade School project, in which local people run skill-sharing sessions on a barter basis, and a Great Cook group. They are helping a local man get his fitness business off the ground and a young local entrepreneur to help other young residents set up businesses. There’s now a bee friendly garden outisde the local bus garage and a celebration of local projects to emerge through the scheme is taking place later this month.

Much of the work of Rohini and her team involves making links with local organisations and helping them connect both with each other and with local residents. A sewing café has emerged as a result of collaboration between a local maker group and disability charity L’arche, and unused kitchen spaces in community centres and on estates are being brought back into use for community cooking.

The co-operative council vision stemmed from the idea that

communities themselves are often better placed to solve their own problems

The project is called Open Works and is part of Lambeth’s Co-operative Council programme, aimed at building a more collaborative relationship between the council and its citizens. The project is a bold step to take in straitened times; it is testing the idea that boosting social capital by bringing local people together will impact on a number of wider social issues, from loneliness to unemployment.

One of a number of prototype projects being run in the borough, its funding is in place until March 2015, after which its value – both socially and financially – will be assessed.

What is also being assessed – through this and all co-operative council projects – is the ability of the council to change the way it works.

‘Internal culture change is the hardest part of this’, says Anna Randle, head of strategy at the council. ‘It’s a long term process but we have the building blocks in place to help council staff understand the changes we are making’.

The co-operative council vision – first articulated by former leader of Lambeth Council Steve Reed back in 2010 – stemmed from the idea that communities themselves are often better placed to solve their own problems, and that by working more collaboratively, the council could be more impactful and, ultimately, spend shrinking public budgets more effectively.

It may have been rolled out in the middle of austerity cuts but Randle says that the co-operative vision is not about the council stepping back from its duties but, rather, an attempt to change a system that for a long time has not been working.

‘It’s not about a transfer of power but about facilitating collaboration within and with the community. It’s about finding the strengths in communities and bringing them to bear’, she says. ‘The way we worked in the past was a problem. Even when there was a lot of investment going in, there were still big social challenges.’

Residents in Streatham work together on their new communal garden

From citizen involvement to co-production

The first stages of the co-operative vision revolved around encouraging more citizen involvement in projects – as snow wardens for example – while the rest of the council carried on as normal.

The team soon realised that systemic change was needed and set about plans for the council to make the shift from service provider to ‘collaborator’.

The key change has been the introduction of co-operative commissioning, an attempt to put citizens at the centre of the commissioning model. Successful service delivery is now focused on the outcomes of services rather than the numbers of people attending. ‘Once you start thinking about the outcomes you want to achieve it helps you think differently about how you could achieve those outcomes,’ Randle says.

Open Works is part of a series of projects looking at more localised community-led commissioning.

But making such radical shifts to the way a bureaucratic institution has worked for many years is not always easy.

‘A more collaborative approach between citizens

and council needs to involve the public in difficult choices too’

One early project to open up commissioning to young people revealed the challenges that new approaches to commissioning can pose to existing service provision. Young people developed a different set of priorities to those that had been in place for youth services, and the council has since worked with providers to help them implement the ideas put forward by the young people and embed co-production in their services.

A very public dispute between the council and a local housing coop has damaged the co-operative brand.

Randle says that putting in place a more collaborative approach between citizens and council needs to involve the public in difficult choices too. ‘The co-operative council is not about letting everyone do what they want’, she says. ‘It’s not soft and fluffy but it is about involving the public in very hard choices. We can’t abnegate our responsibility.’

Change on this scale will inevitably create conflict. As Rohini and her team at Open Works are learning, once you open up your doors to the public you give up a certain level of control.

As Tessy Britton, co-founder of Civic Systems Lab, who is working with Lambeth Council on the Open Works project said: ‘We had an idea of how things would pan out but it’s been totally different to how we expected’.

The results so far are positive, with participants relishing the chance to co-build with their neighbours, and council staff learning to work in a new way. By stepping into the unknown and exploring new ways of collaboration, Lambeth Council is learning to have a deeper conversation with its citizens.

The co-operative council: some achievements so far

The Made in Lambeth team in action

Made in Lambeth is a volunteer group of local people that comes together to work on projects to improve their area. Since 2012 they have worked with local organisations on projects including the design of a new website for a youth group, the creation of a new brand for the Brixton Pound and a programme to improve digital access across the borough.

The Young Lambeth Co-operative was set up to give young people a say in the services commissioned for them. A partnership between young people, the council and community members, it is open to young people over the age of 11.

Co-operative commissioning is an approach that puts citizens and outcomes at the centre of commissioning. It looks beyond cost and ‘value for money’ to put greater emphasis on the social costs and benefits of different ways to run services.

Community-managed parks: Lambeth Council maintains ownership of its parks and open spaces but in some cases community groups have taken on a level of management. Myatt’s Field Park is one such example.