When is a ‘free school’ not so ‘free’?

Answer: when Michael Gove is telling free schools to teach the importance of marriage and avoid ‘inappropriate teaching materials’ or they won’t get funding.

Previously on this blog I have explored the way in which the rhetoric around free schools and academies set up local authority oversight as a ‘straw man’ of red tape to be demolished by the heroic Conservatives, while doing nothing to address the effect of direct central government diktat in stifling creativity, creating bureaucracy and instilling anxiety in educators. Today’s revelations show how this has been taken a stage further. Having allowed schools to opt out of the ‘oppression’ of having their funding allocated by their local authority, Gove is now making them jump through ideologically loaded hoops in order to collect their money from the Department of Education, such as by stipulating that children should be ‘protected from inappropriate teaching materials and learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up children’ in the model funding agreements for academies and free schools.

Aside from the debate about the specifics of this, it is a complete contradiction of Gove’s previous arguments on free schools and academies. In a speech at an event organised by the Policy Exchange think tank in June, he says ‘We want a school system in which teachers have more power and in which they are more accountable to parents – not politicians’. He quotes a recent OECD survey which concluded that ‘in countries where schools have greater autonomy over what is taught and how students are assessed, students tend to perform better’ – just one of fifteen uses of ‘autonomy’ or ‘autonomous’ in the speech. He even emphasises, without irony, the safeguards against prospective school providers ‘whose ideology runs counter to the UK’s democratic values’ – it’ll be interesting to see what happens if a free school democratically decides that it actually wants to teach children to explore issues of relationships and sexuality, rather than propagandising.

A Lib Dem vision of educational decentralisation could look quite different. In September Nick Clegg placed on record several caveats for his support for free schools. Lib Dems at Conference went further, passing a motion reasserting the importance of local authority involvement and oversight. Meanwhile, the wrangling between Lib Dems and Conservatives in Government over local government finance made me proud to remain a Lib Dem. The ability for local authorities to take control over their own finances and raise additional revenues from, for example, taxes on pollution might well result in additional resources being allocated to one of the most visible and important front-line services that local authorities provide – schools. It’s interesting to note as well that the Lib Dems don’t have a minister with a say over secondary schools, with Sarah Teather having been given the broader children and families brief.

I will be writing to my Lib Dem MP to ask whether there is any hope of putting Gove back in his box.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me at majeed@cantab.net, find me on Twitter @majeedneky or on LinkedIn at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.

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Two truths about the pension strike

1) It’s not about the value of the pensions or whether they are deserved.

There has been much argument over the size of local government pensions, which are argued to be lavish by the right and meagre by the left. While an important debate about living standards more generally, this is missing the immediate point, which was the fact that the Government is unilaterally changing the contracted terms and conditions of a group of workers when they have already signed a contract on those terms and conditions. This is dishonest and in bad faith. If the Local Government Pension Scheme needs to be put on a more sustainable footing in the long term, then acting to change, transparently and openly, conditions for new entrants to the scheme – while still rightly very controversial – would be more morally defensible. Update: Owen at The Third Estate has pulled together some figures that present a strong challenge to the ‘pensions are an unaffordable luxury’ rhetoric.

 

2) It’s not about public vs. private.

Given this unilateral action by the Government, bickering about how public sector workers are layabouts with gold-plated pensions and private sector workers are money-grabbing, mercenary pinstripers is playing into the hands of those who want to deflect attention from the real issue. A very large employer, in this case the collective public sector, has effectively breached a contract with a group of workers. No sane employee of any sort of organisation should be in favour of this: it sets a dangerous precedent and will drive down conditions across the board, because the average market rate for workers is reduced. To have a chance of stopping this happening, private sector workers need to be unionised – as they are for example at Unilever.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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We need central data collection to make localism work

The Coalition Government has taken pride – rightly – in its reforms to open up access to public data. While the emphasis has fallen on spending, with the phrase ‘armchair auditor‘ floating about in the media for about two days, the release of datasets acrosss a range of subjects, including crime and senior pay (cue ‘witty’ joke about how senior pay IS a crime) demonstrates a recognition of the potential for data to help make things happen: to help highlight problems, catalyse action and inspire innovative responses. It’s too boring sounding to be cast as a populist move, and it’s one that will cause central government departments, local government and other public bodies some considerable hassle – the Government is doing it because it’s the right thing to do.

However – as per usual on this blog – this positive story masks a far more ambivalent attitude to the value of data and to central government’s role in collecting data. Budget cuts have seen evidence collection slashed across departments and at the Office for National Statistics at precisely the time when targeting public money wisely, where it will make a real difference, is paramount. And rhetoric about freeing local government from central targets, again with good reason as local government should primarily be accountable to its own electors, has become entangled with an implication that any collection of data at all, and any coordination of data collection at central government level, is burdensome and has no benefit.

Two examples of data collections which have been scrapped stand out from my own professional experience. The axing of the Place Survey on the basis that it was used to assess councils against targets ignored the often innovative uses to which councils around the country put the data in order to improve their standards and approaches in the areas that local residents cared about most, and the fact that the survey recognised the crucial importance of perceptions: how residents felt about whether they belonged to their community, what they were most concerned about locally, whether they felt they could influence local decision-making. Similarly, the removal of questions on school travel from the school census – which is still going to be conducted, meaning that the marginal savings from removing a couple of questions are likely to be minuscule – has been condemned by the very same councils supposedly ‘freed’ from this ‘oppressive’ requirement, because it removes some of the clearest data available on travel patterns in their local area, which had been useful for improving life for residents in areas ranging from infrastructure planning to congestion reduction.

Of course councils who wish to can continue collecting any data they feel will help improve outcomes for local people. But the Government’s removal, in many areas of work, of the ability for councils and communities to compare like with like across the country, in common with many elements of the much-discussed Localism Bill, is a centralist impulse disguised with localist rhetoric. If different areas are to be given genuine power – including, as we perennially discuss, financial power – to do things differently and make their own decisions without government diktat, one of the biggest things they are going to want to do is to learn from what works elsewhere: not what somebody in Whitehall has thought up, but what is demonstrably working on the ground in other parts of the country and improving the lives of local people.

Being able to see clearly what works and what doesn’t work requires hard, robust data which can only be collected at a national level. Making sure that these data are available is among the most obvious roles of a national government operating within a localist system. So why are we seeing the availability of those data steadily being eroded by the Government? Perhaps they haven’t realised its importance, but perhaps they just think it doesn’t matter much, seeing as they’re not giving councils much power to change things anyway.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Brian Blessed

I was privileged to be able to go to Cambridge and vote for the new Chancellor at the Senate House yesterday – the first time the election has been contested at a  poll since 1847, when a rival candidate stood against Prince Albert. It was a really pleasant occasion with alumni coming back who hadn’t been back for years.

A proud moment

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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‘I work hard and pay my taxes’: we need a new model citizen

Superficially at least, party conference season brings out a propensity in party elites to seek to draw ‘dividing lines’ between themselves and their opponents, and this year was no exception. David Cameron’s upbeat speech sought to paint Ed Miliband as a pessimist and Labour as economically incompetent, while Nick Clegg’s took on Miliband’s perceived lack of either vision or pragmatism. Miliband, meanwhile, placed Cameron and Clegg firmly within the ‘closed circles of Britain’, vested interests that he was the man to challenge. But one key area of rhetoric saw a cosy consensus between Government and opposition.

It’s been well documented that Cameron and Miliband in particular are trying to claim the language of rights and responsibilities, with both competing to take on the mission of ending the ‘something for nothing’ culture. Miliband went first:

When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be made.

Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t?

My answer is no.

Our first duty should be to help the person who shows responsibility.

And I say every council should recognise the contribution that people are making.

Miliband’s idea on housing allocations is already happening in many areas, but his initial idea – where people who volunteer were also prioritised – seems to have been dropped: Housing Minister Grant Shapps made no reference to community contributions when he said ‘Local authorities of all political persuasions are introducing measures to ensure that people who work hard, play by the rules and are responsible, get fair access to housing in this country.’

An obvious difficulty is one of style over substance: given that ‘the dole’ is now called ‘jobseekers’ allowance’, aren’t all recipients categorised as looking for work? The practical implications are worse: does anyone really think that homelessness is an advantage in the job market? But a deeper problem with this kind of talk, and this kind of policy, is its implication that going to work and paying one’s taxes makes one a model citizen. In reality, anyone who has ever had any sort of job knows that though it may be more or less satisfying in itself, we work because we have to.

Many jobs are not socially useful or are useful only in a tenuous, marginal way, justified by the fact that they keep a particular system afloat so that somewhere, at a few removes, something good can happen. The same applies to job creation. Some new jobs feed overconsumption or threaten workers’ mental health with their tedium – sometimes both at the same time. Many, increasingly, can be done by machines. Creating these kinds of jobs is not, overall, a good idea. The reason that some people still advocate it is because the benefits of innovation – like automating a previously manual process – are not, currently, shared out across society. If the economic system was capable, and its participants willing, there’s no particular reason that life couldn’t be more like ‘Hey, Jethro’s just invented the seed drill – let’s all knock off work seven minutes early from now on’.

Other jobs are ‘regrettable necessities’ that a good society would not need and that we should, in the long term – and even if we never manage it – aspire to eliminate, like jobs associated with policing, say, or insurance. I once heard an interesting anecdote from a consultant who had worked with police forces in both Britain and Australia. Asked to imagine ideal and worst case scenarios in a professional context, the Australian force put ‘no police’ in their ‘heaven’ corner – job done – but the British police had the same point as their ‘hell’. The Australians, of course, had it right: we probably won’t ever get there, but our aspiration should be for a world where no police are needed, and the scale of our commitment to education, rehabilitation and community justice should reflect that aspiration.

Meanwhile, back in the present, our progress isn’t aided by politicians’ rhetorical fallacies. The idea that living on benefits, if there are jobs available and you are capable of working, is wrong because it is unfair to your fellow citizens is one which I think most people in the country would agree with on some level. But it does not automatically imply a converse, inherent nobility or fairness in working. Depending on what you’re actually working at, it’s not necessarily ‘making the right choices’ or exhibiting ‘good behaviour’: we work because we have to, and it would be nice if our politicians could occasionally admit that.

The rhetoric that defines people by their jobs, equally problematic on both the trade union left and the free-market right, never acknowledges any of this. Perhaps because he steered his course even further away from any policy substance, David Cameron may have got a slight edge on Miliband in presenting a more rounded view of the model citizen:

‘I have been saying for five years that if you put into society you should get out of society,’ he said. ‘If you do the right thing, bring up your children, work hard and try to take a role in your community, you should be able to look back on a life and say ‘I did the right thing and it was worth it’.

‘The tragedy in our country today is too many people who do the right thing think it’s not worth it because actually they get punished for that good behaviour, rather than rewarded.’

Cameron’s seemingly holistic vision of rights and responsibilities, encompassing family and community as well as work, was undermined slightly by the fact that it was in the context of an interview about tightening up restrictions on jobseekers’ allowance. It seems that though there’s time for warm words about ‘doing the right thing’, when it comes down to it it’s just about having a job and paying your taxes.

On both the left and the right of the mainstream political spectrum, building community and holding down employment are being yoked together in rhetoric in a way that they never are in policy – and it’s a link that sorely needs to be made in reality. One crucial problem is that there is not enough overlap between ‘trying to take a role in your community’ and being seen to engage in economically productive activity. The two are very often physically separated by a commute and conceptually separated into ‘work’ and ‘not work’ by the need to earn enough money to eat. Another, more straightforward problem is that most people don’t feel that there are enough hours in the day to bridge this gap, and this applies equally to those who do participate in community activity as to those who don’t. I’m going to quote my dissertation now, just because it’s there:

May (2007) posits a ‘triangle of engagement’ whereby the greater the time, resources and responsibility demanded, the fewer people will commit to a particular mode of participation, and the more dominant those few will become in local decision-making. Whilst this may be inevitable, the broader concern is that it is glossed over, rather than confronted. Skidmore et al (2006) suggest that social capital ‘is attractive to policymakers because it holds out the possibility of improving social outcomes more effectively, through means that are more legitimate and cheaper than traditional public service delivery alone’ (p.viii) but cite theoretical and practical evidence that, in reality, ‘What social capital is created by opening up governance to community involvement tends to be concentrated in the hands of this small group [of insiders]. There is no guarantee that the wider community feels the benefit of this social capital, because formal governance structures are often not embedded in everyday community life’ (p.xi).

This account focuses on how people outside the ‘usual suspects’ are crowded out of the political and civic process. The irony is that, notwithstanding some individuals who become entrenched vested interests in local civic life, most of the ‘insiders’ are crying out for people to join them. My own experience – helping run Transition Town Kingston, standing as a councillor, being a school governor and doing occasional other bits of campaigning or activism all in the same year while working part time and studying for an MA – showed me how quickly people can burn out by taking on too much with, they feel, too few people sharing the burden. If Cameron had a particular meaning to his point on being ‘punished for good behaviour’ – other than rolling community work glibly in with paid work – then maybe this was it.

These are bread and butter issues in community development and have been for many, many years. But until politicians, and the rest of us, make a concerted effort to address the nature of work, the ever-declining work-life balance, the length of the working day and week, the failure to share the fruits of labour-saving to release community energy and the way in which our society both defines and supports those who it holds up as model citizens, there’s only so far we’ll be able to go in solving them.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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The bin collection row shows the rotten state of our politics

Eric Pickles’s decision to set up a support fund to help local authorities collect landfill waste once a week has been raising controversy today, and rightly so. It makes a complete mockery of his localist pretensions and, some argue, will put at risk landfill waste reductions that occurred in response to the widespread moves to fortnightly collection – such as this example in Kingston.

There are a few debates to be had. Is Pickles’s project localist or not? (A very short argument: it obviously isn’t). Would weekly collections have negative repercussions? (A slightly longer argument: there are examples on both sides of the debate on whether this would result in more waste going to landfill, but even if not, the cost of returning to weekly bin collections everywhere is quoted at £500m over 4 years by Government-commissioned research). But the tone of this policy announcement and the subsequent debate may well be more important than its content.

Pickles’ first target is councils. His claim that ‘For most people, the only visible service that they get from the council is the removal of refuse’ reinforces the myth that councils take council tax and do practically nothing with it. Firstly, a Secretary of State of a localist government should be drawing attention to the huge range of things that councils spend money on (nicely illustrated by Northamptonshire County Council here for the benefit of their residents) and putting the framework in place for communities to have more of a say on how the money is spent. Secondly, this dog-whistle to the ‘Why should I have to put up with this recycling malarkey, I pay my taxes’ brigade tacitly reinforces the commonly held idea that council taxes are how councils get their funding – which they aren’t. (See page 2 of this Government document for a very clear illustration.) A cheap moment of populism has just put another obstacle between local people and a clear understanding of how Government works, an understanding that is crucial for people to be able to direct their energies to change things they want changed.

Pickles, ludicrously, describes weekly bin collection as a ‘basic right’: absolutist language which stops dissenters dead in their tracks, unable to relate the measure either to Britain’s mounting waste crisis or to the question of what other budgets will have to take the strain of the costly switch to weekly collections. His extension of the idea of every Englishman’s ‘right’ to throw huge amounts of material into a non-existent place called ‘away’ culminates in what he calls the ‘chicken tikka masala test’: the idea that ‘the nation’s favourite meal can be consumed on Friday night safe from the worry that two weeks later its remains will still be rotting in the bottom of the bin’. There’s two beautiful Picklesish moments here for the price of one: the attempt to be jocular and matey by talking about the great British tradition of the takeaway curry, and the complete obliviousness to the fact that most sane people, rather than chucking this culinary treat away, would tend to, y’know, eat it. I’m not sure which is more cringeworthy. What do you reckon? Tell me when you’re done with the cringing. Take your time, I know it might be a while.

Close readings of the nation’s favourite everyman orator aside, though, the hard fact is that this is going to cost money – both directly and, potentially, in increased landfill taxes. That’s fine – services do tend to cost money. But rather than let communities make their own hard choices about how to raise and spend that money, our Government finds £250m down the back of CLG’s sofa and set up a ringfenced fund. It’s the British way.

The debate is narrow to the point of absurdity – cast in terms of ‘Do you want weekly or fortnightly collections?’ rather than asking the real questions: ‘What do you want your local area to be like?’ and ‘What are the different bits that make up that area worth to you’? If there’s £250m available, local communities should be able to decide whether they want to spend that money on weekly bin collections or something that they consider more important: maybe improving schools, or fixing potholes, or keeping libraries open, whatever’s their priority.

“My view is this goes beyond bins – it’s about a question of trust between politicians and the public” says Pickles. Spot on. But trust is hardly going to be engendered by the dispiriting spectacle of councillors pathetically chasing pots of central government funding in an admission of their lack of power and consequence. When a councillor stands up and says ‘We’re having to make cuts in social care because the big bad Government didn’t give us as much money as they used to. But hey – we’re going to be able to bring back your weekly bin collection, thanks to that lovely Mr. Pickles’, you don’t exactly put your faith in their ability to drive positive change in your area.

It’s pretty impressive to manage to infantilise councils, the public and the whole nature of British political discourse with one announcement. “If councils want to have a fortnightly collection and are supported by their populations, then fair enough” says Pickles, sounding reasonable, but the fact remains that there is extra money and warm words for those who comply with his staggeringly irrelevant crusade, and wrath from on high for those that don’t. Artificially rigged, falsely binary ‘choices’, deliberately narrowed ‘policy’ debates and yet more centralism: signs are getting steadily clearer that the ‘Invitation to Join the Government of Britain‘ has been rescinded.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Vernon-Jackson: warning over local planning ‘illusion’

This is an article published at www.planningresource.co.uk and written by Jamie Carpenter. Any problems with me reposting, just drop me an email at majeed@cantab.net and will sort it out straight away.

Warning over local planning ‘illusion’

By Jamie Carpenter Friday, 23 September 2011

The most senior Liberal Democrat in local government has warned that the coalition government’s neighbourhood planning reforms give the “illusion” of local involvement in planning “without the reality of it”.

Councillor Gerald Vernon-Jackson, leader of the Local Government Association’s Liberal Democrat group and leader of Portsmouth City Council, told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat party conference in Birmingham: “We shouldn’t lie to people. That’s a bad thing for politicians to be doing.”

Under provisions in the Localism Bill, local groups would be able to produce neighbourhood-level plans and grant blanket planning permission for certain types of development.

But Vernon-Jackson said that there is a mismatch between what local people will articulate a desire for through the new neighbourhood planning system and the degree of control over development that residents will actually be able to exert. He pointed out that new neighbourhood plans would be required to be consistent with national planning policy and conform to the strategic elements of local plans.

Senior coalition ministers have sought to rebuff critics of the controversial draft National Planning Policy Framework by saying that the reforms would put local communities in charge of planning. In a joint letter to the Financial Times last month, chancellor George Osborne and communities secretary Eric Pickles wrote: “Communities will soon have the chance to say where they want new shops, homes and businesses to go, and what they should look like.”

But Vernon-Jackson told the fringe meeting, organised by campaign groups Friends of the Earth, Living Streets and Localise West Midlands: “This gives the illusion of local involvement in planning. My worry is that we are giving the illusion to people that they can control the environment, without actually the reality of it.”

He added: “In my ward, I think if we went and asked people what they wanted in a plan for that local ward, there would be three things that would come out of it. Number one, there shall be no development ever here full stop. Number two, there shall be no subdivision of houses into flats. And number three, if we have to have any development or subdivision, there should be at least three off-street parking spaces provided for each one. That’s clearly impossible, but that’s what local people will articulate a desire for through this process.”

Majeed Neky, people and places campaign coordinator at Living Streets, said: “There’s a fundamental mismatch between the expectations about what local people are going to get out of this bill and the amount of power that government is prepared to cede to them.”

Light at the end of the legislative tunnel?

From being steeped in the commentary about the government’s localism agenda – and even just looking back through old posts on this blog – there’s a growing sense of disillusionment at the gap between the Department of Commmunities and Local Government’s soaring rhetoric and the reality of the power being extended to local authorities and communities. Councils are given a power of general competence – but the Secretary of State retains a veto. Community groups can suggest ways in which services can be better run – but probably won’t get to make the improvements a reality. Organisations will have a bit more time to bid for buildings and land under the Community Right to Buy – but won’t have a right of first refusal or, necessarily, the money to bid.

This discrepancy between localist rhetoric and reality is most notable in planning, where it is feared that the new National Planning Policy Framework’s ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ will make it difficult for local authorities to take account of local concerns for fear of appeals, and that liberalisation of how changes of use are dealt with will make it impossible even to attach conditions to development to ensure it is of a high standard and either mitigates or pays for any negative externalities it causes. Neighbourhood planning, says Greg Clark, will allow communities to ‘wield real power‘ – but it’s clear that this only applies as long as that power is used to promote more development.

Though the Localism Bill is entering its final stages in its passage through Parliament, the battle for localism is far from over – my view is that we need to move away from the ‘NIMBY vs growth’ debate and talk about the bigger picture of shifting meaningful financial and political power to local areas, allowing the right incentive frameworks to be set to get development done in good time, to high standards and in sufficient volume to meet local needs. In this light it was heartening to see that the Government has accepted an amendment from the Core Cities Group to allow England’s major cities to take on the same powers as the Mayor of London in the future.

This is a great example of how localist policy is not antithetical to growth – the Core Cities Group quotes research suggesting that decentralisation will help them deliver a million more jobs over the next decade.

The amendment received an excellent reception when it was introduced at Report Stage in the House of Lords: all three parties backed it. Labour’s Lord Beecham went so far as to declare ‘This is the most localist part of the entire Bill, and the Minister and her colleagues deserve to be congratulated on that…. We have had an almost biblical experience tonight’ – though expressing doubts as to how far this would be embraced across government in reality and citing the perceived lack of response of departments to the ‘community budgets‘ project intended to give local authorities more flexibility over spending: ‘one has to wonder whether other departments will, in practice, fulfil the Government’s intentions…. If they are not prepared to co-operate and pool budgets in a joint way, will they seek to devolve functions to and through local government?’

Lord Beecham’s question strikes at the heart of the matter. Yet the concern of much of the discussions around the amendment have centred not on the need to make sure that decentralisation happens, but on the opposite: how can we make sure the cities are ‘ready’ for their new responsibilities? The Core Cities briefing on their amendment takes this concern seriously, reassuring risk-averse centralists that ‘the Secretary of State would have powers in primary legislation to be able to empower these Urban Economic Growth Areas as and when they saw fit, according to evidenced achievement. If areas did not meet the criteria, they would not be able to access powers’ and ‘We are suggesting a route to ‘earned autonomy’, with initial control still being held by Government and subject to guidance and competency tests set out by the Secretary of State. It would in a real sense be minister’s initiative and their decision’.

This is a deeply patronising idea. What has central government done lately that qualifies it to sit in judgement in this way? What is to stop the Government refusing to devolve power for political reasons – noting that Liverpool, hotbed of Militancy and rejecters of the Big Society, is one of the Core Cities? It is also inconsistent: did London have to demonstrate ‘competency’ before the Greater London Authority was established, or was it simply assumed because it was London? The ultimate arbiters of whether authorities can be trusted with such powers ought to be their electorate – not the Secretary of State. The inclusion of Parliamentary approval in the process adds a democratic veneer which, though to be welcomed, cannot disguise a power imbalance more fundamental even than that between the executive and the legislature in England and Wales – namely that between the central and the local:

I confirm that final decisions over whether to approve proposals to transfer a function to one of the core cities will rest with Parliament. Any order covering the transfer of functions to a permitted authority would be subject to a superaffirmative procedure. That would require that the order be laid in draft for 60 days, during which formal representations would be made. After this the order would have to be approved by a resolution of each House before it could come into being.

(Baroness Hanham)

Given the well-publicised opposition of this government to red tape, this seems somewhat ridiculous.

The political maneuvering behind this is evident: in suggesting the principle of ‘earned autonomy’ the Core Cities Group have clearly picked up on the reluctance of Government to devolve real power and are seeking to provide reassurance. This is still a great initiative and if this concession to risk-averse centralism helped get it through, then it made tactical sense for the Core Cities Group to suggest it. But given that they were suggesting an amendment to the ‘Localism Bill’, promoted by a government that has put decentralisation at the heart of its agenda, it’s a bit of a shame they had to.

I am speaking on localism on behalf of Living Streets at an event organised by Friends of the Earth the Liberal Democrat conference fringe on Monday 19th September – 6.15pm at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Birmingham.

Please do leave a comment if this interests you. You can also email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Community ‘rights’ need to help people deliver the great neighbourhoods they want

This post was written in my professional capacity with Living Streets and first published at The Disraeli Room, the ResPublica blog.

The rights-based approach taken by the Coalition in promoting aspects of the localism agenda is a powerful rhetorical tool. The granting of a new ‘right’ is cast as a benevolent act from Government and lends the exercise an air of permanence: once given, it is difficult to take a right away without a fight. However, to be credible in the longer term, these rights have to help communities deliver on their own priorities.

Take the Community Right to Buy. This worthy measure has been scaled back from its original ambition that ‘local people and organisations will be given first refusal to take over community amenities’, as in the Scottish model. Instead, the Community Right to Buy now consists of a moratorium, perhaps as short as three months, on any asset of local value, after which the landowner can proceed to sell it at any price to any buyer. This doesn’t address the fact that many communities will simply struggle to raise the funds to make a bid for an asset at market price. Will such a right enhance the quality of many people’s lives?

Far more fundamental to most people’s experience than building or buying facilities is protecting those that are already there. Yet the Localism Bill makes no provisions for communities to safeguard the local shops and services at their heart in order to help maintain vibrant, sociable, walking-friendly neighbourhoods. Changes of use to basic local shops and services such as community pubs or banks often fall under permitted development and can therefore proceed without the need to apply for planning permission.

Some surprising changes of use can have major impacts on communities – for example, changes from a pub to a pawnbroker or a bank to a betting shop can currently occur with no voice for the local community. Planning industry technicalities can only take the argument so far: communities intuitively feel that classing banks and betting shops together is nonsensical, and 81 per cent of us think communities should have a say on changes of use in their local area.

We have the Community Rights to Buy, to Build, to Challenge – why not a Community Right to Protect? Living Streets has exposed the isolation, lack of physical activity, inequality and neighbourhood decline caused by a lack of local shops and services within walking distance. Though committed localists may wish it were otherwise, many people will care more about being able to access the services they need in their neighbourhood than about who runs them.

With the Government reviewing the rules on permitted development, providing for communities to have a say when local shops and services change use would be simple to implement legislatively. Another, more community-driven alternative would be to empower neighbourhood forums to amend these rules for their area through neighbourhood planning. Currently, neighbourhood development orders are allowed to liberalise restrictions, but not to tighten them – even if that’s what the neighbourhood community wants.

Such simple, fundamental rights as having a say on a planning application are a much-needed stepping stone to the more radical end of Big Society activity such as taking over a local amenity; without them in place, the fabric of the localism agenda, already beset by cynicism, will be strained even further.

Living Streets is a national charity working to create safe, attractive and enjoyable streets around the UK. Follow this link for further information on the campaign for a Community Right to Protect.

Dissertation over…

still another few weeks of the course to go, but might actually post occasionally from now on, here’s hoping.

In the meantime here is my dissertation abstract so you can feel some of my pain.

Can community assets help stimulate neighbourhood identity and participation in placemaking in urban areas?

Successive governments have positioned community ownership and management of land and building assets as a vehicle for community empowerment and increased civic participation, while the current government has linked these factors to neighbourhood identity through its localism agenda, particularly its reforms of the planning system.

Through a literature review, case study content analysis, survey of community organisations, councillors, professionals and members of the public and a series of interviews with community-based and professional stakeholders, this paper finds that in some cases, particularly where a threat to the community drives motivation and cohesion, community assets can be a factor in stimulating neighbourhood identity and community participation through encouraging volunteering, generating a sense of ownership and responsibility, increasing the prominence of communities of place in everyday experience and building community capacity and social capital.

However, significant difficulties exist for broadening both community control of assets and neighbourhood-based participation in placemaking: a skills gap in both public and third sectors, the possibility of divergent interests with businesses and local authorities, the need to engage people beyond their key interests and maintain momentum over long periods, a lack of financial resources and inequalities between areas, and a focus of key community stakeholders on more tangible outcomes.

Though many inspiring possibilities arose throughout, the cautions and concerns emerging through both primary and secondary research suggest that considerable additional work by central and local government and others will be required to build community capacity, ensure the presence of suitable local democratic frameworks, support the generation and fair allocation of financial resources and help communities to work together to define working neighbourhoods in order for both community asset control and localist planning initiatives to achieve mainstream success in urban areas.

The paper concludes by suggesting some possible changes to policy and practice that could help achieve this.