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.

http://localismclub.wordpress.com

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.

Who puts the ‘community’ in community ownership?

This post was originally posted at the ResPublica blog, The Disraeli Room.

The decision by a community-based organisation to take over the management of a building is a declaration of hope that the future can be better than the past. That hope can spread throughout the neighbourhood and community. The building and activities that take place within in it become a focus for local energy and the building becomes the practical vehicle through which a vision of a better future can be achieved.

So said the academic Stephen Thake in 2006. It’s quite a claim – and one that accompanied the rapid rise of community asset transfer up the political agenda, from the change of rules in 2003 to allow local authorities to sell assets to community groups at less than their market value, to the Coalition’s current Community Right to Buy.

The tangible benefits of asset transfer – better services, better use of land, opportunities for communities to develop skills, good value for public bodies – have long been highlighted. But these arguments are consistently accompanied by appeals to a grander vision. Citing Thake’s paper, Labour’s 2006 Strong and Prosperous Communities White Paper commissioned a formal review of asset transfer policy, the Quirk Review, which exalted ‘A new civic spirit… galvanising communities to harness their energies for the wider public good’ and asserted that ‘optimising the use of public assets is not the primary objective: the over-riding goal is community empowerment’ (p.3). 2008’s Communities in Control White Paper, announcing the establishment of an Asset Transfer Unit, continued the theme: ‘Where local asset management and ownership works well, it can create a new cadre of active citizens’ (p.118).

The Conservatives have kicked this rhetoric up a notch. David Cameron’s landmark Big Society / ‘the era of big government is over’ speech in 2009 highlighted the need to ‘build up strong local institutions… where people – literally – come together to meet and mingle’. In 2010, he emotively previewed the Community Right to Buy:

Today, all people can do is rage when a far-off bureaucrat decided to close a well-loved library because it wasn’t making enough money.

And when a local pub closes, and a developer wants to turn that building into a block of flats for executives, the community is powerless to do anything about it.

In the post-bureaucratic age, the future of that library and that local pub will be in the people’s hands.

There’s not much between the Labour and Conservative rhetoric – but the stakes are now far higher. The Coalition has staked its reputation on the emergence of a ‘new cadre of active citizens’ – volunteering, holding street parties, creating neighbourhood plans and even running services. If transferring buildings and land to the community really can play a part, it’s time to unleash the potential.

But it’s a big ‘if’. Research has generally found that community organisations are motivated to acquire assets primarily to improve their provision of specific services or to attain financial independence, rather than to become focal points for wider community engagement. The limiting of the Community Right to Buy to extra time for community groups to bid – rather than a right of first refusal as in Scotland – seems likely to limit uptake to richer, more influential community groups. And where the management and legal ownership of an asset is confined to a small committee or board – quite likely composed of the same six people who volunteer for everything –asset transfer is more obviously a leg-up for existing community activists, rather than a catalyst for more to come forward.

Community ownership can mean any number of things to different people – a point reinforced by responses to my survey so far – and ‘wider participation is not guaranteed’. As Steve Wyler and Phillip Blond’s ‘To Buy, To Bid, To Build’ report pointed out, the more that community assets are owned and managed in ways that directly engage large numbers of local people, the greater the likelihood of a positive social and economic asset effect’ (p.24).

As neighbourhood planning and other localist initiatives come on stream – alongside unprecedented public sector asset sell-offs, high commercial property vacancy rates nationwide and a backdrop of cuts – what else is needed to make community assets fulfil their potential to get more people involved in shaping the future of their locality? I hope that my research can shed more light on the views of both community groups and the wider public and offer some useful conclusions.

Majeed Neky blogs occasionally at http://localismclub.wordpress.com. Please participate in his quick research survey on community asset transfer at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/communityassets.

The Community Right to Challenge is a potentially dangerous red herring

I was going to blog on this but as I suspected everyone else has already done it, probably better. Just Google ‘community right to challenge privatisation’

In a nutshell the ‘Community Right to Challenge’ in the Localism Bill is framed as helping local groups and social enterprises run things. But actually if such an organisation successfully ‘challenges’ the way a service is run, it doesn’t get given to them, but goes out to tender, where Capita or their depersonalised, large-scale third sector equivalent will probably snap it up.

The consultation on this provision is ongoing until Tuesday at the CLG website and is worth commenting on if you have time. Whilst the Community Right to Buy will be at best helpful and at worst benignly irrelevant, the Right to Challenge is, potentially, actively antithetical to localism.

http://localismclub.wordpress.com

Why localism is important and what needs to change

This is a version of a talk I gave on Kingston Green Radio yesterday as part of a ‘Transition Hour’ series with a theme of ‘Less is More’. My subject was ‘less national government, more local power’. It’s a bit of a ramble through a fair few issues rather than a tight argument (thus more than a few links to Wikipedia) but thought I would post it up. Thank you to Sam, Jean and all at Kingston Green Radio for the opportunity!

Hi, I’m Majeed Neky from Transition Town Kingston. Thank you to Sam and Jean and Kingston Green Radio for giving me a spot on this show today to talk about my favourite subject and one that I’m starting to obsess about a bit. That subject is local democracy and in keeping with the ‘less is more’ theme of the TTK slots, I want to talk about what could be achieved socially, environmentally and economically if we had less central government and more local power.

A bit about me – I helped found Transition Town Kingston in 2008 and have been involved since, taking a bit of a step back at the moment partly to write my dissertation for my Masters in Planning at Kingston University. I work for Living Streets, a campaigning charity that campaigns for better and more pedestrian-friendly streets and neighbourhoods. We’ve just launched a campaign called Neighbourhood Heroes that’s about giving communities more power to keep essential shops and services within walking distance.

Both work and study are involving me quite a lot in thinking about localism, as it’s a hot topic at the moment. The Government is proposing a major shakeup in the way that planning and local government work, within the broader framework of the much-heralded ‘Big Society’. The main thing to watch is the Localism Bill, which has almost finished going through the House of Commons and after that will go through the House of Lords for debate and scrutiny. I’ll say a bit more later on about some of the measures in the Bill and what they might mean for Kingston, and for groups who are concerned about environmental issues.

But firstly, how does local democracy relate to Transition Towns? Well, the way I see it is that Transition is about resilience – doing more for ourselves so that we’re stronger as a community to work around trends such as a lack of fossil fuels, higher fuel prices etc. So not just relying on big corporate energy but starting to produce our own at the community level and reducing our demand, through things like the HomeZone community solar project. Not just relying on global financial structures but trying out a few other systems for exchanging resources, such as Kingston’s own Local Exchange Trading Scheme, KUTLETS. A town that’s not just relying on big corporate food but starting to put together its own solutions, some of which you’ve been hearing about during this series from people like Cath, who coordinates the Parkfields Community Garden; Anna, who runs the Kingston Orchard Project, and Stephanie, who manages the From The Ground Up veg box scheme.

I think that the need to be resilient applies just as much to our social and intellectual resources as it does to physical and environmental ones. If communities don’t have the systems and skills they need to govern themselves, it’ll be difficult to make use of the rest of the rich tapestry of resources within the community. The Transition Handbook’s definition of resilience says that three things are needed for a resilient system: diversity, modularity, and tightness of feedbacks. Diversity in this case can be related to the value of having a network of different organisations capable of community leadership, rather than just one. Modularity is about how effectively the different parts of that system are able to reorganise if something changes – so if power is distributed, a political crisis in one place won’t stop things happening anywhere else. And tightness of feedbacks is about being able to see, quickly and clearly, the consequences of our actions: the more localised the political system, the easier it is to analyse a situation and make policy in an informed way.

So what exactly do we mean by localism?

The crucial principle is the principle of subsidiarity, which essentially says that a decision should be made at the lowest possible level. It’s most often talked about in relation to the EU, as it’s included in some of the founding treaties. The EU is supposed to operate according to the principle of subsidiarity, which means it should only be doing things that can’t be done as well by its member states. Whether or not it actually does is a matter for debate!

But subsidiarity is a good principle to apply within a country as well. Consider everyday situations like being at work. Maybe somebody more senior than you makes a decision on an area that you consider your speciality, and you know that it isn’t as good as the decision you would have made, because you knew more about what was needed in the situation. It’s the same with government. Central government isn’t going to know as much about an area and its needs as a councillor or council officer from that area – and in turn, a council officer often isn’t going to know as much as a resident who’s lived there all their life. A related principle – more of a soundbite really – is the idea that there should be ‘no decision about me, without me’. People should be involved in the decisions that affect them and their area.

Recognising that the principle is a sound one, governments have been talking for years about giving communities more power. Yet we remain, on most measures, one of the most centralized countries in Europe. What’s gone wrong?

The first thing is the size of our administrative units. The average local authority in England typically represents over 150,000 people. Of course this is divided up into wards of several thousand people each, but these are essentially just for voting: the actual decisions are made at the level of the whole council. Parish and town councils do exist below this, but only in some places, and they have very limited powers. Kingston’s system of ‘neighbourhoods’ does help bring decisions closer to the public, but a neighbourhood still covers tens of thousands of people. Compare this to almost any European country, where the vast majority of the population live in political areas which are a factor of ten or twenty times smaller than our council areas. The sheer size of jurisdictions make local government more remote from the interests of the people it serves, and make it more difficult and less rewarding for people to get meaningfully involved in local democratic processes. Even if it’s not the fully participatory democracy that we might want, in most places in Europe, you’ll at least know someone who knows someone who’s on the local council. Here, that’s not the case.

Secondly, there is a lack of freedom. How many times, when you hear people moaning about the Council or read a local paper, do you notice people commenting along the lines of ‘Why can’t they just… etc.’ Well, in the UK local authorities are forbidden by law to do anything which is not expressly permitted by Parliament. In France the Mayor and council of the smallest commune have much the same powers as the authorities in Paris. Local councils here have to apply to the Secretary of State to do anything out of the ordinary, even if their citizens want it. Again the effect is to create distance between local government and the people it serves, as people don’t understand the constraints that local government is under, and local government gets frustrated because people don’t understand.

The most significant constraint, thirdly, is that there is no freedom for money to be raised, spent and allocated at the local level. Again, councils are forbidden to raise any taxes not specifically permitted by Parliament. The bulk of money spent by local government comes from central government, and much of it is allocated for specific purposes. This severely limits the ability of local government to respond to both the concerns and the aspirations of its citizens.

This means that councils are left with archaic, unfair and unpopular systems of collecting money, such as council tax. As this accounts for only a small proportion of council revenues – the bulk being fixed by central government – a small increase in local spending has to be funded by a large increase in council tax, making it even more unpopular. Even worse, local government is just the tax collector for some taxes, such as business rates. The rates are set by the national government, collected by councils and sent back to central government, from where they are redistributed around the country by a fiendishly complicated formula. The rates that businesses pay thus have almost no relation to the services or support they receive from the council, causing resentment between councils and businesses. Until recently, a similar thing happened with rents from council housing.

People who want to see local government finance more localised are sometimes painted as being reckless, wanting to remove checks and balances that are there for a reason, and sometimes as being in favour of extra taxes above and beyond what people already have to pay. On the contrary, though, there are three huge reasons why we need a more localised system.

Firstly, it is fundamental to true democracy. Not that many people vote in council elections – the average turnout was just 41% between 1979 and 1996, according to the Local Government Association. Those of us who do vote in council elections might be under the impression that we are the main influence on how our services are run and how our council tax is spent. In reality the lack of financial flexibility, combined with the huge number of statutory duties on local government, means that we have very little influence on what our councils do. One of the most famous phrases that came from the American Revolution was ‘No taxation without representation.’ In the UK we have the opposite problem – representation with very little control over taxation. Localising finance wouldn’t be about adding to taxes – it would be about shifting the tax burden from the national to the local level. Ideally we should be paying national taxes for national expenditures – like foreign policy, defence, justice and nationally important physical and virtual infrastructure – and local taxes for everything else, holding the national Government responsible for what we pay it to do, and the same with the local.

Secondly, it’s wrong to say that moving towards more local financial power would lead to waste. A huge amount of waste is currently created by having decisions made up in Whitehall and second-guessed at local level. I was astounded to learn recently that this Parliament has marked the first time that staff in some central government departments have had to undergo interviews for their own posts, while Kingston Council has been forced into massive restructuring about three times in the last ten years alone and doesn’t have much fat left to trim!

More importantly, though, local control of finance is the simplest way to get people to take ownership of local decisions and get involved in making tough choices. In the last two years, seeing which way the wind was blowing, a lot of councils have been running consultations, asking people what they wouldn’t mind having cut. The answer, unsurprisingly, was nothing. Everyone valued the services they used most – so collectively, there was no service that could be cut without inconveniencing, impoverishing or otherwise hurting some section of society. Localising budgets would give people the freedom, but also the responsibility, to get together and prioritise what they most needed, rather than passing on these tough choices to the Council and then complaining about the results. Crucially, though, if a community couldn’t afford to run a service, and they decided it was essential, they would be able to consider new ways of funding it. Unlike in Whitehall, in these circumstances it’s unlikely that anything the community saw as ‘waste’ would be allowed to survive for very long.

Thirdly, the way in which authorities raise and spend money isn’t just about finding enough to run services – it’s also about setting up incentives to help push an area in the right direction. This would make a clear difference to the environmental agenda. If councils were able to levy a local tax on polluting activities or high energy usage, for example, it could reduce carbon emissions and improve air and water quality as well as being able to fund more activities or cut taxes elsewhere – perhaps cutting business rates, so that businesses who stayed in the area and provided jobs whilst improving their environmental performance would see an overall tax cut. Similar examples could apply to waste generation and water usage.

Another really topical example locally is about plastic bags. The Richmond and Kingston based Greener upon Thames – where Marilyn Mason, who you heard earlier in the week on the subject of transport, is a trustee – is campaigning for a plastic bag free Kingston, London and UK, concentrating at the moment on campaigning for the 2012 Olympics to be plastic bag free. According to the group, over 17 billion plastic bags are handed out in Britain every year, and used for an average of just 12 minutes each before disposal.

I was having a discussion with Marilyn the other day and we both thought that under the current system, ridiculously, the campaign probably has more chance of getting a nationwide ban on plastic bags than it does of achieving this just in the Kingston area. Councils have no power to set a bag tax or to influence supermarkets not to use them. Again, control of business rates would be crucial to give the council a basis on which to negotiate. Giving money off taxes is a powerful positive incentive, and it’s not all about tax and spend. Maybe a community could enter a profit sharing arrangement for a local renewable energy facility, channelling money back into the area to be allocated by local people. More freedom would stimulate people’s creativity in the way they think about local funding and help to break down a culture that sometimes focuses on what we can’t do, rather than what we can.

There has been a great deal of thought and experiment that has gone into the problem of how to get communities to come together and make decisions. Neighbourhood forums, where councillors come along and help present issues to the community. Participatory budgeting sessions where local residents come along and vote on how to spend a pot of money on their area, sometimes just a few thousand pounds which would make some inroads into getting the pavements fixed or the trees pruned, but not much else. Boards of community representatives who influence the local partnership. But a lot of people don’t get involved. Maybe they think there’s no point, because they’ve been involved in consultations before and not seen any change. Maybe they’re too busy and have other things to worry about. Maybe they just don’t think they’re the sort of people who should get involved in these things – because it almost always is the same sorts of people who turn up.

I don’t have all the answers but I argue that it’s the most pressing problem that’s facing this country, and also that it’s chicken and egg. Do you realistically have a chance of getting people involved in an institution which is large, remote, tied down and unable to finance most initiatives beyond its statutory responsibilities? Instead, establish smaller administrative units, give them the freedom to do anything that isn’t illegal, and see what happens.

This is a massive cultural shift as well as a constitutional one, and is massively easier said than done, as the Government is finding out at the moment. The key document, the Localism Bill, is a mammoth document with over 30 provisions on different subjects, from holding referendums to create more elected mayors in cities to abolishing the regional planning strategies that were established under Labour and best known for imposing rigid targets for the number of houses that regions had to build. There are some key points though that communities should know about.

The Government has carried out a few quick measures to address parts of what I’ve been discussing. A ban on councils being able to generate and sell energy has also been lifted, and the situation of councils having to return council housing rents to government to redistribute them is being ended. ‘Ring fences’ around grants to local authorities have been removed across departments – for example, the Department for Transport has consolidated 26 funding streams down to 4, giving councils a lot more flexibility in how they spend the money. This creates room for meaningful community involvement, because less of the money available has been pre-allocated to a particular expenditure.

The Localism Bill aims to build on this by giving councils a ‘general power of competence’. This is billed as giving them the freedom to do anything that isn’t illegal. However, governments are like software programmers – they have a tendency to build in a back door to a system that enables them to keep control. So whilst the fear of courts challenging councils for overstepping their remit is gone, the Secretary of State is now able to veto a council’s actions as a last resort. Hopefully councils will not be too afraid of this safeguard and will still do some innovative and useful things.

A full review of local government finance is supposed to report later in the year. However, the start of the review was delayed, reportedly by wrangling in government between Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles. Clegg wants councils to have far more financial flexibility along the lines that I’ve been talking about, while Pickles wants to confine the review largely to reforming business rates and avoid opening the can of worms that is reforming council tax. Looking at the fine detail, again there are disappointments. Though there will now be local referendums to enable local people to veto ‘excessive’ council tax rises, it will still be for the Secretary of State to decide what ‘excessive’ means. It has also been hinted that though local councils will be able to retain business rates, avoiding the hassle and expense of seeing them redistributed and allowing some councils to fund themselves without any central government funding at all, they will not actually be allowed to set or vary the rates locally, almost completely undermining the new power and ruling out many of the ways that I mentioned before in which councils and communities could help shape their local areas for the better.

The elements that have captured most mainstream media attention are the idea of ‘Neighbourhood Planning’ and the associated community rights to buy and to build. Under the proposals, a parish or town council would be able to prepare a neighbourhood plan, at whatever level of detail suits them, that sets out aspirations and conditions for development in a small local area, such as a council ward or even smaller. Subject to this passing a professional inspector and getting a majority of votes in a local referendum, it becomes official local planning policy and has to be taken into account when planning decisions are being made in the area. Alongside the neighbourhood plan, neighbourhood development orders can be created, which allow some types of development to be permitted at neighbourhood level with minimal involvement from the full Council. Similarly, the Community Right to Build allows development supported by the community to proceed with minimal planning control if it receives a large majority in a referendum.

Amidst concerns that this would be a ‘NIMBY’s charter’, it was announced that neighbourhood plans would have to conform with wider local plans in terms of things like the number of houses to be built – a neighbourhood could plump for more housing, but not less. A new incentive called the New Homes Bonus has also been announced, whereby the Government will match the council tax for six years on every additional home that is built or brought back into use. The Community Infrastructure Levy, which allows councils to set out a scale of charges for developers to contribute towards infrastructure costs caused by new development, will also be partly allocated to community groups.

Most urban areas don’t have parish councils. Here, community groups of at least 20 members will be allowed to apply for designation as ‘neighbourhood forums’ which would then have the same plan making powers. There are a lot of community groups and residents associations in Kingston who might be interested to do this and it could be a good chance to push particular agendas – for example, by stating higher than normal sustainability standards for housing insulation or the ease of getting around a neighbourhood by sustainable transport.

Whilst it’s an opportunity, though, there are dangers. Though it still has to pass a referendum, a community group drawing up a neighbourhood plan hasn’t been elected and doesn’t necessarily represent the whole community, or have the resources to consult them properly. Local authorities will be obliged to help with technical expertise and resources, but it’s unclear what form this might actually take. There is a danger that the perception of ‘us and them’ won’t break down, it’s just that the people who are regarded as ‘them’ will be sitting in a church hall or a pub somewhere, rather than in the Guildhall – more accessible, but just as seemingly intimidating to someone unsure of themselves but wanting to get involved.

The ‘community right to buy’, which allows local people to nominate any local buildings and land for a list of ‘assets of community value’ and then allows community groups extra time to put together a bid for any of these if they come up for sale, is a useful measure but a far cry from the mechanisms available in Scotland, where community groups have the right of first refusal on assets being sold. The ‘community right to challenge’, however, is potentially a far more worrying provision. Under this right, community groups with a proven local connection will be able to submit an expression of interest to run any Council service, specifying how they would do it better. But if that expression of interest is not accepted, the group won’t necessarily get to run the service – it will be put out to tender in accordance with procurement law, allowing large private companies to come in and bid. With a better formal track record and more chance of achieving economies of scale, there’s every chance that for many services, they will succeed. The debate can be had over the effects on efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery, but it’s of dubious value for local democracy. Consultation is still open for people to express their views.

I haven’t even touched on the changes to education and health, which are being branded as part of the same agenda but which again are fraught with difficulty. But it is clear that this agenda, whilst promising, is watered down in places and lacks safeguards in others, and does not go anything like far enough to give genuine power to communities and revitalize grassroots democracy. Until local governance is on a much smaller scale and has the freedom it needs, there will always be an element of ‘us and them’ about it. At the crux of it, that’s what we need to change. To reduce mistrust but also to accept responsibility for our areas, we should work towards there being no ‘us and them’ in local government, but only ‘us’.

I wanted to finish with a poem by the American poet Carl Sandburg, simply called Government.

The Government — I heard about the Government and
I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at
it when I saw it.
Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to
the callaboose. It was the Government in action.
I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning
and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge
dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a
live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw
this was the Government, doing things.
I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of
workingmen who were trying to get other workingmen
to stay away from a shop where there was a strike
on. Government in action.
Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of
men, that Government has blood and bones, it is
many mouths whispering into many ears, sending
telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
“yes” and “no.”
Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid
away in their graves and the new Government that
comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood,
ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all,
money paid and money taken, and money covered
up and spoken of with hushed voices.
A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive
as any human sinner carrying a load of germs,
traditions and corpuscles handed down from
fathers and mothers away back.

So – people of Kingston – let’s give the Government back to the people.

Thanks for listening.

Libraries are at the heart of our neighbourhoods (via Living Streets)

This post is by Lauren Smith, a founding member of the national libraries advocacy organisation Voices for the Library. 524 libraries (463 buildings and 61 mobiles) are currently under threat or recently closed/left council control out of 4517 in the UK. In many communities, libraries are the last remaining public space, whe … Read More

via Living Streets

Forests

As you may have noticed, there is a Government consultation out on the selling off of forests currently controlled by the Forestry Commission. I’ve been following the forests debate (and signed the massive petition at 38 Degrees despite slight annoyance at their oversimplification of the issues (I’m not sure anyone is proposing that forests be ‘turned into golf courses and holiday villages’), but not yet been moved to post on here about it as it’s such a clear-cut issue. I’m in favour of local ownership of local assets, but forests aren’t like the local community hall, cooperative shop or waste-to-energy plant: they provide larger-than-local benefits and so should be owned at a larger-than-local level. Sure, it isn’t best practice to have the same body owning assets and also regulating that ownership, but this could be gotten around by creating another QUANGO – if anyone honestly thought it was that big a problem. Even before you discover that the move would result in a net loss to the Exchequer, the argument’s pretty much won.

But when I read my dad’s letter to his local MP on the subject, I wanted to post it here as I think he’s encapsulated the way in which this issue has angered – and mystified – a broader range of people than usual.

To: Stephen Williams MP, Bristol West

Mr Williams,

I am a resident of Bristol West and below are my views on the sale of Forestry Land proposed by your government.

As background, I would like you to know that although I have strong (mainly liberal) opinions on many subjects, I tend to view political policy decisions in a holistic manner. I could have written to you about many Government policies that I disagreed with, for example the government policy on tuition fees which in my opinion is short-sighted, but I give the Government the benefit of the doubt on economic grounds. The point I am trying to make is that I am not a serial activist.

Having heard and read about the proposal to sell and/or lease English Forests I cannot see any economic or environmental justification for the proposed sale. I therefore question the motive behind this proposal. My belief is that the motive is Tory ideology at best or subtle corruption at worst. In terms of public enjoyment of our heritage and the Environment it is likely to be a disaster in the long term. I have spent 30 years building and running a successful business and this experience leads me to believe that greed will undermine other considerations, probably long after you and I have gone. The simple well tested solution is to leave all Forests in public ownership. Let our Tory friends find other ways to satisfy their greed.

Your website is silent on this subject and therefore I wish you to take my view into consideration when representing Bristol West in Government and in Parliament.

As my MP, I urge you to represent my views as best you can. I will continue to oppose this proposal in every way I can.

Regards

Mehboob Neky

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 Facebook at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.

http://localismclub.wordpress.com

Localism is not ‘subsistence’

This second in the putative ‘Localism is not…’ series (for the first, see here) was inspired by the lovely people at Spiked-online.com, whose proprietors ludicrously describe themselves as ‘libertarian Marxists’ and which, a bit like chocolate-coated pretzels, is just so wrong that it ends up being quite compelling. Every time I cull the huge number of email newsletters from various organisations that I receive, theirs somehow survives, on a vague principle that I should probably not confine my reading habits to things that I agree with. So I came to see a recent piece which particularly interested me for what I saw as a wilful misinterpretation of the idea that communities could gain benefits from becoming more locally resilient.

The author, Colin McInnes, condemns the idea of local resilience – promoted by the Transition Town movement and many others – from an engineering perspective. One excellent point that he does make, which I feel is very much worth considering, is that “Individuals who purchase a domestic wind turbine can certainly congratulate themselves on their apparent self-sufficiency. However, they are entirely dependent on the international semi-conductor industry for embedded power electronics in the turbine, materials manufacturers for thermo-plastic turbine blades, Chinese miners for neodymium permanent magnets, and the oil industry which fuels the container ship that imports the constituent parts.”

McInnes is, of course, right – and his argument is a compelling reason to safeguard and foster green industry in the UK. His choice of example itself, however, is quite revealing. In an article with ‘localism’ in the title, the only examples of so-called ‘localist’ action that are given are individual actions: growing food in one’s garden, putting a wind turbine on one’s house. McInnes ridicules such actions for what he sees as their impracticality and inefficiency, compared to the ‘hydrocarbon-fuelled machines’ that produce food and energy at giant, economically efficient scales for distribution to individuals via the market mechanism.

McInnes’ evident economic philosophy no doubt leads him to realise two things: people respond to incentives, and negative externalities need to be stopped or paid for. Accepting this can lead to some interesting conclusions. Taking food retail, for example, the incentives framework at the moment favours large supermarkets. Much has been written about the middle-class solipsism of some campaigners who argue against supermarkets, and I would argue that people who care about these issues should avoid painting themselves into a corner by glibly recommending, say, organic local produce without tackling the fact that this is seen as, and often is, more expensive. However, one can also argue that there are negative externalities associated with supermarkets – or, more accurately, with the dominance of supermarkets – which are not currently being paid for, and that if these were to be factored in to prices, the incentives framework could well realign towards a localist approach.

This is all very much up for debate, with the methodology of identifying and quantifying externalities being a matter of considerable controversy for a lot of people far cleverer than I am, and McInnes’ argument can certainly be acknowledged as making sense within its own closed logic. As suggested above, though, what leapt out at me given the title of the Spiked piece was its lack of any concept of a community or a locality – which, for something that purports to be an argument against localism, presents a slight problem. Not many people are seriously suggesting, as McInnes claims they are, that most or many individuals will produce a significant proportion of the food and energy they need within the bounds of their own property through their gardens and roofs. There are three points to consider which I feel lead to a more accurate and positive vision of localism as collective action, rather than simply green lifestyle activism.

The first is the practical idea of economies of scale, which McInnes wrongly seems to assume cannot be achieved outside huge corporate-based activities such as nuclear power stations and factory farms. Considering food, community gardens have the potential to produce far more than individual gardens for a far lower input – the number of people wanting to be involved means that individuals need expend only a few hours a week to see a return, there is far more scope for sharing tools and physical resources, and the positive externalities from skill sharing and the development of social capital, though not necessarily quantifiable, are potentially impressive.

With energy, this argument comes into sharp relief because of the existence of technologies that only make sense at a community level, not an individual or a nationwide level, such as the use of energy generated from waste plants to provide power in the immediate area, or of the excess heat generated by a factory to heat homes. Community ownership of such technology through mutualist schemes can create income-generating community assets – potentially providing just that little bit more money that doesn’t need to come from taxation. So far, so Spiked, surely?

Secondly, it is worth acknowledging that though this sort of activity could substantially reduce the need for a community to import resources, it would hardly be likely to eliminate it. Reducing the need to trade, furthermore, is not the same as reducing the ability to trade. McInnes’ suggestion that communities aiming for self-sufficiency cut themselves off from international trade and leave themselves open to bad weather or crop failures is disingenuous nonsense: given that we do exist in this much-vaunted globalised economy, it escapes me how the opportunity to own part of a community asset with environmental, social and financial benefits would somehow restrict an individual’s ability to buy things.

Thirdly, and closest to my heart, it is a small leap – particularly in the context of the current political discourse – from collective asset ownership to some degree of collective, local civic governance: communities working together, raising and spending local budgets and generally rolling back formal government to an enabling role.

This probably isn’t what the Tea Party mean by smaller government. It certainly isn’t what Spiked seems to mean in its frequent diatribes against the nanny state. Taken to their logical conclusion, such rants always seem to end up handing more power to the equally unrepresentative elites of big business, precisely because – as with Jesse Norman’s critique of the Hobbesian philosophy which as he he sees it has come to dominate politics – their analysis consistently lacks a concept of community. And this need for community is why I am so uneasy about things like individual-level ‘choice’ over schools and hospitals being painted as localism by this and the previous government.

So in reality, maybe community action should be what these people mean when they talk about smaller government. Maybe they could start by campaigning, from a libertarian perspective, for the ideal of a shorter working week to give people back more of their own time to spend however they choose – including in taking an active part in running their communities.

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 Facebook at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.

http://localismclub.wordpress.com

The Big Society cannot afford the ‘war on motorists’ lie

The ‘war on motorists’ – otherwise known as the common sense attempt to protect, to the tiny extent that has been politically palatable, people’s rights to walk safe streets, breathe clean air, conserve some semblance of natural resources and a habitable environment and recoup some of society’s huge hidden subsidy to motorists – is apparently over.

The removal of national maximum parking standards for residential development, and the deletion of a few words from a national planning policy statement on the role of parking charges in restraining demand for  car travel, are so minor that they hardly justify the overblown rhetoric. As much as I disagree with their thrust, however, the changes are undoubtedly localist, and this will be evident in their varied effects. It’s obvious, for example, that for every council that reduces charges to make their town centres more competitive as Eric Pickles urges, another will hike charges as a backdoor source of revenue: despite a prohibition on this in the guidance, Pickles’ much-vaunted hands-off approach will make it difficult to interfere.

But the broader trend is built on some disturbing assumptions and viewpoints. Financially speaking, as we have seen before, the war on motorists is entirely fictitious: other modes of transport consistently cost more than driving, and the gap is widening, while the public costs of providing land to probably the least space-efficient form of transport ever invented are huge.  The taxes such as fuel duty that have seen resentment from many motorists are still present for other forms of transport, such as buses – they’re just hidden within rising ticket prices.

More insidiously, the ‘war on motorists’ lie perpetuates the idea that people have no responsibilities whatsoever – beyond getting to work on time – and can essentially do whatever they wish as long as they can pay for it. The prime example is the effort to make 2011 ‘the year of the electric car‘.  The idea that the car is here to stay, so we might as well make it as green as possible, is unbelievably myopic. Electric cars still have to be produced, at great expense, considerable environmental impact – particularly from building and disposing of batteries – and little benefit to UK manufacturing.  The electricity still has to be generated – largely from fossil fuel sources. Congestion will continue unabated – maybe even worsening as people who consider themselves ‘green’ feel vindicated in getting back on four wheels. Though the UK has a good record on road safety compared to many other European countries, over 2500 people were still killed by cars in 2009 alone.

Perhaps most tellingly for this government’s programme, the fallacy that environmental crises can be tackled through consumer choice alone will be upheld. A handy £5000 non means-tested grant from the government will bring this marvel of social change a few inches closer to the same people who’d be able to afford one anyway, leaving everyone else stranded in poorly planned, sprawling sub-American identikit suburban hells where people would literally starve within a week if it wasn’t for the out of town Tesco superstore.

Driven by the recession and the high uptake of the car scrappage scheme, 2010 was the only year since the Second World War in which the number of cars on the road has fallen, with the total now standing at over 31 million.  Traffic gridlock – whether the resultant emissions are spewed from exhausts or out of sight and mind in distant power stations – is both a social and a market failure, the absolute antithesis of a localist vision where people come together to solve their common problems, perhaps through collective decision-making on how to keep an area’s total greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions to an acceptable minimum. How quickly the freedom of the car can turn to the tyranny of the traffic jam. By pandering to a fictional tabloid vision of an elite attacking the natural liberties of motorists and thus absolving them of responsibility for their own actions, the Government has elided any concept of collective responsibility. If the Big Society is real, its proponents should be quite annoyed about this.

The Transport Secretary’s contention that ‘we can have all the convenience of the car without all the carbon that normally goes with it’ looks too good to be true, because it is. As the licenced puncturers of impossible pipe-dreams, and the  champions of personal responsibility (‘get on your bike’!), true Conservatives should consider speaking out against this red herring masquerading as a green revolution.

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 Facebook at www.facebook.com/majeedneky.

http://localismclub.wordpress.com