A new framework for local involvement

In their new book, Rethinking Community Practice, Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller set out a powerful new approach to bringing people and public services together.

We believe there can be major improvements to people’s lives, even under conditions of austerity, through a new framework to link up and boost the wide but fragmented community involvement legacy of the past twenty years.

We would like to see frontline workers in all services having around 10% of their time allocated to collaboration with new and existing community groups and with workers in the other services, to tackle joint problems and improve local conditions together.

Most frontline jobs already have community involvement written into them, but often in a narrow or vague way. Each service separately seeks to involve residents in its own issues. And participation has also shrunk through cuts in resources.

Everyone knows in principle that housing affects health, health affects employment, employment affects education – everything affects everything else. But management systems tend to hold workers tightly within professional boundaries and departmental roles. Of course, delivering specialist services must remain the primary responsibility of the respective agencies. But it should be complemented by a broader space of flexibility and a more deliberate remit for co-production.

Collaboration should be organised through a cross-sector, cross-issue neighbourhood partnership between residents and services. Previous models such as neighbourhood management should be upgraded to ensure strong resident leadership, wide participation, and serious commitment from all key service providers. Agencies should allow their workers to support community groups and take their lead from active residents, making decisions so far as possible directly on the patch.

All constructive community activity reduces crime and improves health, education and employability. This rearrangement of existing functions need have little cash cost, and would more than repay that little through increased effectiveness, by enabling residents to take greater control over the services whilst generating more mutual aid and autonomy amongst themselves, thus taking some of the pressure off the services. Objective evaluation should be built in to show the cost-benefits to the services and to maximise the methods that work best in each place.

A DEEPER RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMMUNITY AND LOCAL SERVICES
The principle of participation has been on the agenda for fifty years – why is this new proposal likely to work any better than past attempts?

We don’t disparage past experience – on the contrary, we build on it and see this idea as its natural culmination. In the twenty years up to 2008, remarkable progress was made in building community involvement into public services. This was something of a victory for advocates of community development (CD), even though the policies were not mostly called by that name. Despite its marginality, CD was an important voice urging local authorities and public services to do more to overcome poverty and inequality. Services began to acknowledge that they could not succeed without empowerment of disadvantaged communities. Regeneration programmes began to go further, linking issues in whole-neighbourhood improvement, and looking to community development expertise for help. Methods of supporting community groups were piloted in small programmes and then spread widely through what turned out to be over a thousand single regeneration budget (SRB) projects between 1993 and 1998.

The incoming New Labour government in 1997 wound down SRB, but gave an even more prominent place to community development objectives in the succeeding family of initiatives under neighbourhood renewal, with the general aim that ‘in twenty years’ time nobody will be disadvantaged by where they live’. Around 1995 New Labour made more fundamental changes: they instituted the objective of strengthening communities as a universal principle, to be effected by the new system of local strategic partnerships and accompanying indicators; and all public services were correspondingly given a duty to involve local residents in the way they were run. But CD enthusiasts were often uneasy about what they saw as the bureaucratisation of their discipline.

In 2008 New Labour seemed to lose its vision about the 20-year turnaround of inequality: the plug was pulled on several community empowerment programmes, and neighbourhood renewal was turned into working neighbourhoods, which despite its clever name was simply a job creation programme. Then came the coalition government, replacing community development and involvement with Big Society, a weak form of the same ideas which basically boils down to saying that communities should supply their own services.

There is a scattering of good neighbourhood work by Locality and others, but the biggest current resource in this field, the £600m Big Society Bank, is misguidedly trying to turn all community and voluntary organisations into small businesses. This important fund ought instead to endow a system of grants and service level agreements which the myriad of small and medium sized community groups could safely operate to back up neighbourhood partnerships. These in turn should supersede the big society neighbourhood planning groups, which are mainly about designating areas for physical development.

Who could provide leadership on the ground? The most appropriate discipline for this to come from is community development. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and some individual English local authorities, big society has made little headway, and community development is increasingly seen as part of the solution to austerity, needed even more urgently than before. Could CD practitioners lead a major reinvigoration of community involvement everywhere? The experience of the New Labour period does not bode well. There were wide opportunities and some leaps forward in particular local authorities. But there was also, in many places, an inbuilt resistance to making the transition from small scale projects and principled criticism to working out how services and authorities could design and implement large scale programmes. Ironically, community development, dedicated to empowering others, often could not empower itself. Or perhaps it preferred to stay on the sidelines of power in order to keep its utopian vision intact.

Rethinking Community Practice attempts to show how government and authorities  can support and benefit from community involvement better than in the past; and to suggest to CD enthusiasts that if they are serious about wanting to strengthen communities they have a responsibility to work out how their methods can be applied much more widely through public service systems.

• Rethinking Community Practice by Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller is published by the Policy Press