Submission to the COSLA Commission on Local Democracy

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities are currently running a commission on Strengthening Local Democracy. I have made a submission based on my experience promoting the value of community development and the devolution of civic powers to the lowest appropriate level. You can make your own submission by 29 Nov 2013 here http://www.cosla.gov.uk/commission-strengthening-local-democracy-call-evidence

Submission to the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy

November 2013

Introduction

My evidence is informed by a 4 decade career in community development, working in a variety of local authority posts, including neighbourhood community worker, Community Learning & Development Team Leader, and policy and strategy officer. Across all of those posts I have been able to observe local democracy at different levels.

Main recommendations

Based on my professional experience, I believe there are a number of ways in which we can easily begin to Strengthen Local Democracy. All of the following measures would bring decision making closer to local communities, give citizens a greater stake in their own community and make democratic structures more accountable to voters.

1.    Commit to the provision of an effective community development service properly equipped, to support communities in need, to follow their own agenda.

2.    Engage more citizens in community development, through tackling social inequality and alienation, by providing sustainable resourcing for community initiatives in communities of greatest need.

3.    Review and allocate powers to all levels of government so that decisions are taken at the lowest level needed to ensure locally responsive and locally accountable public services. This particularly means clarifying the division of responsibility between local and national government; devolving limited local powers to Community Councils; and reducing the geographic size of local authorities.

4.    Creating a very much stronger link between tax payers and public service provision to enhance public accountability.

5.    Creating a legal right, for communities, to participate in decision-making.

6.    Strengthen Community Planning legislation to enhance the requirement for collaboration between communities,  and the public, voluntary and private sectors; and creating a greater emphasis on 'place'.

What is Community Development?

Community Development (although often used as a 'spray on' label to make any initiative appear community orientated) is a professional discipline with expertise in working alongside local communities to connect local people, identify local issues, strengthen local voices, and to build community spirit, organisations, and leadership. Such an increase in community capacity enables communities to engage with public services, to seek effective improvements in living conditions, through action ranging from self help, more responsive local services, and collaborative community planning.

Community development, if it allows local people to stay in control, can have positive outcomes in terms of community cohesion, citizen participation, more effective use of public resources and enhanced interest and engagement in democratic processes.

Reflections on past initiatives

Community development initiatives: There have been many successful community development initiatives over the past 40 years but there has been a consistent failure to sustain, replicate and mainstream their advances. A representative selection of successful Scottish community projects that I am aware of includes: the community buy-outs in Eigg and Assynt, Cranhill Credit Union, Canongate Youth Project, Drumchapel Men's Health Project, West Whitlawburn Housing Cooperative, Edinburgh Tenants Federation, and many other lower profile projects. They have all demonstrated that local people can identify local needs and then work together, negotiate with public services, and provide local services.  What many projects have failed to do in the long term is continue to sustain the community development process, of local people organising around the issues that most concern them. Many have either ceased or have drifted into service provision, which whilst worthy in itself, does not engage people in the democratic process.

Many projects fail to sustain community engagement because local people are overwhelmed by bigger issues including poverty, unemployment, poor health, drug misuse, etc. The first step in improving citizen and community engagement is to work at more fundamental improvements to social equality.

Many projects also fail because they have no secure funding stream. Temporary funding initiatives and interminable fund raising eventually sapping the ideas and enthusiasm that had showed such promise.

Most of all projects have been deflected away from local political decision making  into service provision and/or towards priorities set outwith local communities.

 As a result local and national government have helped demonstrate successful community development approaches and then consistently failed to mainstream them. We have a well developed Community Learning and Development infrastructure but there are two problems with the provision of community development workers. Firstly Local Authority CLD services have been run down during this period of austerity. Secondly CLD workers employed by Local Authorities tend to face a conflict of interest in that the communities they are supporting are negotiating, challenging, and/or disagreeing with their employers. Perhaps the most successful situation is where communities are funded by bodies outwith local government to employ their own community development workers.

Initiatives to enhance local democracy

In addition to 'bottom up' community development there have been many initiatives introduced by successive governments and local authorities to enhance citizen and  community engagement in political processes.

These have included Community Councils, Decentralisation Schemes, Public Consultation processes, Community Planning, and many others targeted at specific sections of the community (such as ethnic minorities, women, older people, young people, disabled people). I have worked on implementing all of these and in each case found that conditions and attitudes militated against progress.

Community Councils are caught in a catch 22 position. They are not representative or well supported and so Local Authority councillors consider them to be an annoyance. Consequently the Local Authority do not adequately fund or encourage Community Councils and so local people perceive them to be of little value in democratic processes and so they are not representative.

 The Council I worked for agreed to a process of gradually empowering community councils but would not actually implement it. Community Councils need to be given more powers and influence in order to attract greater support from their constituents. This seems to work in England where Parish Councils have a budget and specific appropriate powers. If Scottish Community Councils were given a very small proportion of Council Tax income and responsibility for some very local provisions and services they would become more accountable to and of more interest to the people living in their area. They would engage more people in the democratic process

The Decentralisation Scheme was introduced soon after local government reorganisation. It was meant to encourage the devolution of powers to the lowest appropriate level from National to Local to Community levels. In fact each level of Government was more interested in retaining or even recovering powers from the lower levels. All of these schemes consequently fizzled out.

Any move to Strengthen Local Democracy must tackle the allocation of powers to the lowest appropriate level across all levels of government from the the Scottish Parliament, through Local Authorities and other public services, to Community Councils and communities in general.

The powers of Local Authorities are also greatly undermined by the small proportion of income which they collect for themselves (ie 20% of Council Tax is retained by local councils). There should be a much clearer link between tax payers and government al services. Tax for each level of government should go directly to that level.

Community Planning is meant to make local governance more joined up and therefore more effective. It is meant to respond to community priorities and to facilitate collaborative work. Very little of this actually happens because public sector partners are hamstrung by the nature of their own accountability to the Scottish Government, National Management Structures, and inflexible funding streams.

This produces scenarios where for example NHS Boards would support community planning initiatives that remove responsibilities for a provision from themselves to the Local Authority but not vice versa, or where Local Authority Education Departments will participate only in initiatives that will directly impact on their own targets. These positions of course obstruct the development of preventative initiatives and of establishing the most appropriate form of service.

For Community Planning to facilitate collaborative service provision and the development of preventative social measures the partners must have a greater level of accountability to the Community Planning Partnership. This in turn would also require a greater level of democratic accountability to be built into Community Planning Partnerships.

Public Consultation. Frankly, I was hitting my head off the proverbial brick wall trying to encourage councillors and service managers to adopt more effective public consultation. Whilst public consultation became a requirement and whilst it  increased in frequency, and in some cases improved its methods, it did not increase public influence on decision making.

A simple two pronged approach would improve the situation. Firstly, to do less public consultation and to only consult where some influence was on offer and to demonstrate how that influence was exercised. This could avoid the public cynicism that prevails about public consultation - that it has no meaningful influence on decision-making. Secondly, to give communities the right to participate in local decision-making, making it a legal requirement for organisations to respond, so that local people themselves could decide which issues they wish to be involved in

Summary

My main conclusion is that, in spite of many well intentioned policy developments, little progress has been made in strengthening local democracy because of a continual failure to allocate power and responsibility at the appropriate level. Consequently the most important aspect of any drive to strengthen local democracy, is the devolution of powers to different levels, including national government, local government and communities; supported by a community development input to communities in need.  I believe that once resources and responsibilities have been properly allocated by government a community based approach can deliver growing citizen and community engagement in civil society. I believe this could be done by adopting the recommendations I have outlined above.

Change in Community Development

I'm currently participating in a MOOC entitled 'Managing and Surviving Change in CLD'

Change manifests itself in many different ways within community development:

• the change communities want to achieve
• the changes that are imposed upon communities
• personal development through experiential learning
• general changes in society
• change in the way learning and education services are delivered
• change in community development practice

All of these changes impact on us as practitioners but at the heart of our practice is a belief that community development can contribute to a change to a fairer and more equal society. The role of the community development worker is to facilitate change but not to direct it. This is why learning is key.  We know that formal education perpetuates divisions but we have seen community development methods bring changes for individuals and communities in terms of increased self determination, and collaborative action but the kind of real change we seek still eludes us.

Learning is the key to bigger changes. This means finding ways: to engage those failed by the formal system, giving access to knowledge  enabling peer to peer learning; create opportunities for experiential learning; and so on.

The MOOC is asking us to consider whether an "on-line learning environment is similar to learning in a CLD context".

My first thoughts are yes...

• poverty limits access
• it is difficult to engage people
• participants have to overcome the feelings of failure from their formal education experience
• there is a need for facilitation

But, there may be new opportunities. Once on-line and engaged the possibilities for self directed learning, networking and collaborative working are hugely enhanced and it follows the power of collective action can be magnified.

I'm looking forward to exploring these issues and others in the MOOC over the next few weeks.

Mini MOOC review

Overall the Community Empowerment MiniMOOC was a positive experience. It showed how a variety of programmes and applications can be used to support learning on-line. As a result I've now used Twitter, Google+, Skype and Disqus as well as previous use of Facebook. The format was to run weekly webinars with an input from a variety of practitioners followed by threaded discussion and in between each weekly session an individual task to complete.

The main challenges were getting used to the technicalities (some people had difficulty connecting due to unfamiliarity, poor waveband, employer's firewall, etc) and encouraging people to actively participate. For me this last point is the crunch issue. There were up to 40 individuals participating across all the MOOC sessions but in any one session only a handful moved from' lurking' to active participation. It is difficult to get many people to commit themselves to commenting in discussion threads and there is clearly a need to develop strategies for supporting, provoking and facilitating participation. This is an issue requiring ongoing consideration and I want to use this blog to follow progress.

The MOOC concluded with a face to face seminar which brought together a number of the active participants and the university staff. There was more input, group exercises and discussion around community empowerment CLD practice. This was enjoyable, instructive and consolidated the group amongst those who attended. But for me, this was ultimately an opportunity missed, as attention now turns to a new MOOC on a different subject, whilst this meeting could have been used as the springboard for an ongoing virtual network of  community empowerment practitioners, strengthened by the face to face contact, and contributing to CPD outcomes. However that, it seems, is not what The North Alliance want.

So I think my main attention will now turn to my work with Footprints Connect... see my next post.