Examination of Witnesses (Questions 201-219)
MS ALISON
SEABROOKE AND
MS MELANIE
BOWLES
22 APRIL 2008
Q201 Chair: Thank you for coming. Can
I start off by probing the sort of work that you do within communities
to improve community cohesion and ask you under what circumstances
you think that increasing the contact between people from different
backgrounds actually supports community cohesion?
Ms Bowles: Our role as a non-departmental
public body is as a support organisation for people working in
communities. It is not our physical work in communities; we are
an umbrella body for neighbourhood workers and community development
workers. The work that we have done is around running and evaluating
community development projects, running and evaluating funding
programmes for community-based organisations and helping practitioners
to reflect on and learn from their practice in community development
to learn lessons, so we are an umbrella body. In terms of what
community development does for cohesion, it helps to maintain
and grow cohesion by reaching marginalised people in communities,
identifying what people have in common as well as acknowledging
differences between people in communities, accepting that tensions,
even conflicts, will be inevitable in communities, but working
to channel challenges into positive outcomes. Community development
also helps to overcome barriers to participation, partnership,
collective working and works to sustain cohesion, so it is not
just a one-off event or a knee-jerk reaction to a disturbance.
Those are the kind of things that community development does to
maintain and grow cohesion. Interaction between groups is a major
part of cohesion practice in the UK, I would say, and community
development works to create opportunities for the interaction,
help the dialogue to be meaningful in those spaces for interaction
and to work to mediate the tensions and try to channel them into
positive outcomes.
Q202 Chair: What we would be interested
in is specific examples and, in particular, evidence that individual
projects have actually improved community cohesion.
Ms Bowles: In relation to new
migrants and cohesion, for example, community development enables
new migrants to become integral members of communities, so specifically
and practically helping people to form self-help groups. Community
development workers would help with finding other people who shared
your issues, setting up the group, anything around the constitution,
funding, the actual mechanics of running a group.
Q203 Chair: Have you measured whether
that has been effective in specific places?
Ms Seabrooke: We have an example
here from the North West, for example, which included local visioning
events, workshops to highlight the positive outcomes of working
together across different communities of interest and identifying
issues and looking at the particular solutions. The issues were
defined by the communities themselves and so they were more willing
and prepared to engage in the discussions that ensued and broke
down some of those tensions and barriers. All the agencies signed
up to the activities that were considered as objectives of joint
bringing people together. As a result of that it is a trust-building
process. There are significant one-to-one activities that then
took place between the local agencies and the communities that
were identified. It is about overcoming the tensions between the
public bodies and some of the difficulties of engaging in those
communities.
Q204 Chair: We are still not getting
there. When you were in Burnley there were lots of these sorts
of activities going on and the criticism that was made to us was
it is all the same people; that it goes on at this level and it
does not touch the majority of the community underneath. The second
criticism—which was a different one that was made in Barking
and Dagenham by the residents' groups—was that all the funding
went to migrant groups and there was no funding for what they
would class as community groups like a residents' association
and therefore it was really difficult for those residents' associations
to get their capacity up and to attract in members of all the
different communities that were in the locality. How do you answer
those sorts of questions? Instead of just measuring activity,
how do you measure whether all this activity has had any effect
on community cohesion?
Ms Bowles: We see cohesion as
very much linked to empowerment. The questions about participation
and representation, and you say it is the same people who turn
up to every event or the events are only reaching a certain tried
and trusted cohort perhaps, community development does work to
reach marginalised people. Perhaps if you have a Local Strategic
Partnership (LSP) structure wanting to do consultation, because
of the drive of partnership working to work with people you can
get on with, they might tend to work with a tried and trusted
cohort, but community development workers will seek to broaden
participation. Community empowerment is the first and foremost
aim of community development.
Q205 Mr Olner: I think you are missing
the point here. It is a question I wanted to ask as well because,
yes, you have all the agencies on board—the CAB, the local
authority and so on—how do you get the people on board?
It seems to me singly lacking in getting the people on board so
that their groups can really interact with other groups.
Ms Seabrooke: One of the ways
that we do work and we say that community development works is
very much through the voluntary and community sector. It is not
primarily through the public sector, because the third sector
either are delivering programmes directly or they apply them as
a portal and that specific local knowledge that is needed to get
below the surface.
Q206 Mr Olner: How do you explain
the fact that my local CAB ran for three evenings running some
courses to encourage Polish migrants to come along and to discuss
benefits or whatever and nobody turned up?
Ms Bowles: The example that Alison
gave shows the difference between how things are done has a difference
on its impact. The same event—a visioning event or an open
day type event—can be really successfully or unsuccessful,
depending on how it is approached. The successful community development
practice will deal with people one-to-one; it will follow up if
a phone call is not returned what the particular issue is with
somebody. A kind of "providing they will come" meeting
approach is not going to work but that is not community development.
Q207 Anne Main: I do think from what
we have heard from Barking and Dagenham and Peterborough—I
did not go to Burnley but I gather the issues are the same—is
I do think you are somewhat missing the point. It came out very
clearly in Barking and Dagenham that people said they were fed
up with things being done to them and being offered to them when
actually what they wanted was for the communities to mix completely
instead of—the Chair touched on it—little groups being
targeted with tick boxes because they filled them getting funding
and getting things done and as a result they felt this was increasing
the divides within communities rather than bringing communities
together. I would quite like you to address that. How much research
have you done to find out the best way forward? I am hearing a
lot of meaningful comments from you but I have not heard anything
that has made me feel that the empowerment you talked about is
actually empowerment of the whole community rather than maybe
disadvantaged individuals that you were talking about, so the
whole community being brought together, not just bits of it being
targeted to make them have a bit of a voice.
Ms Bowles: The point I wanted
to make to carry on was that community development is not just
about cohesion, it is about strengthening communities. Our organisation
has a 40-year history; community development has a history of
around a century. One of the mainstream examples of successful
community development is through tenants and residents participation
where tenants drive up certain standards because they are encouraged
to participate, they are supported to participate and they expect
their participation to have a difference because of that positive
experience.
Q208 Anne Main: We were told that
tenants and residents groups struggle to find diverse ethnic minority
community representatives on those groups because they just did
not engage. How much are you doing to, instead of setting up separate
groups, make sure that all parts of the communities engage, for
example, in tenants and residents groups?
Ms Bowles: Community development
we are saying is effective in maintaining and growing cohesion.
It is effective in increasing empowerment and in supporting engagement
and participation.
Q209 Anne Main: Why are you saying
that? What proof do you have for saying that?
Ms Bowles: What I wanted to go
on to say was its deployment and implementation in the UK is patchy.
There is no national strategy for community development. It works
in small pockets on local projects.
Q210 Anne Main: Is it driven by what
local people think is the right approach? People locally decide
the best approach for community development.
Ms Bowles: Community development
is an occupation but it is about supporting autonomous collective
action.
Q211 Anne Main: There is no strategy.
Ms Bowles: There is no national
strategy of community development. It is deployed through Lottery
funding projects in some places and it is deployed through health
and social care departments in local authorities.
Q212 Anne Main: What are you saying
should happen or are you happy with that?
Ms Bowles: No, we think it should
be more strategic and there should be more recognition by central
government, local government and other agencies of the contribution
of community development to the kind of aims that CLG has and
we think that the profession also needs to raise its sights and
better evidence its successes.
Q213 Mr Dobbin: I think you have
just hit on what we wanted to hear. I remember in my early days
as a local government member that there was a strategy for community
development but unfortunately it was time-expired. You had individuals
in the community who were actually doing that work. From what
you have just said we have never replaced that other than through
projects like renewal for communities and one thing and another,
those kinds of funding projects, which are patchy across the country.
That is what I wanted to clarify because you are telling us that
we have never actually replaced that initial way of reaching communities
by having specific workers out there in the field.
Ms Seabrooke: That is absolutely
right. One of the things that we have been trying to do is identify
across the lead agencies in terms of voluntary community sector
organisations that do community development either as a very specific
occupation practice, or through their particular ways of working
with their constituent membership groups is to identify the very
specific elements that weaken community development practice nationally.
You are quite right, much of it is around community development
practitioners being employed on a project or programme basis,
so the funding is very short term. Community development work
tends to be long term but it is not always finite because it is
very much about trust-building and bridge-building. It is about
working with people rather than doing things to people and also
the measurement that was mentioned earlier on, it has been very
difficult to encapsulate the measurement because there tend to
be very subjective outcomes. There can be some very clear specific
areas of activity that might succeed in terms of delivering projects
or programmes at a very local level, but the nature of the work
is much more to do with softer skills. Certainly we have found
that over the last couple of years the empowerment we have said
is actually articulating what community development is. It is
quite difficult to describe what community development is per
se, but it is around participation, facilitation, consultation,
conflict resolution, preparing public and third sector organisations
and local communities for the influx of the different challenges
that we are currently seeing. We are very keen to see a cross-government
strategy which looks at those very particular skills, not just
within the third sector or with the community development practitioners,
but within frontline community practitioners within public bodies.
The different approaches that are required are very varied and
complex and you cannot expect everybody to be able to learn those
through simple training courses.
Q214 Chair: One of your roles is
to advise government. What advice have you actually given to government
on a national strategy?
Ms Seabrooke: We have been working
with CLG around the empowerment agenda and looking at how we can
bring different national, third sector and public sector organisations
together to look at the issues on both sides of the policy delivery
aspects. For example, as a piece of policy is being developed,
for example, "duty to involve", we have been involved
in that process in looking at the more detailed issues that might
need to be addressed in terms of local authorities being able
to meet their requirements and duties.
Q215 Chair: Have you specifically
given government advice on how to achieve more sustained activity
rather than short-term projects?
Ms Bowles: We completed a first
report called "Community Development Challenge" which
was published by CLG which was about trying to spell out challenges
for community development. Empowerment has been on the social
policy agenda for 40 years under one guise or another but there
has never been a time when it has been applied to the whole population.
We have been trying to spell out how local government and other
agencies will have to use community development more strategically
to achieve that kind of increase in the power that they are looking
for and also how the community development occupation will need
to better demonstrate its effectiveness. That is a piece of work
published by CLG.
Q216 Andrew George: Can I take you
away from the community back to you as an organisation, the CDF.
I know that the CDF, amongst a lot of the voluntary sector, are
made up of grassroots organisations which operate also at a national
level, have often seen the CDF as an arm of the Home Office in
the past and perhaps the Department of Communities and Local Government
now, and you deliver community local government programmes. I
wanted to find out how you, as an organisation, choose which communities
you are going to work in and to what extent that is something
which is the request of the local community or is advice from
government departments, or is it a decision that is taken by yourselves?
Ms Seabrooke: We do not deliver
work directly in communities. What we do is we work on helping
to develop the programmes that are delivered. We either act as
a conduit or we work with third sector partners who are working
directly with communities themselves. For example, we have been
doing quite a lot of work with cohesion and faith units and the
Race Equality Unit at CLG. We will develop programmes. We would
not just deliver a programme that was given to us to deliver.
We would say we need to identify the added value. For example,
the programmes we have developed with them we will identify those
very specific issues that need to be addressed in communities
and the approaches that could be taken have to be woven then into
the guidance criteria. It is very much an added value approach
in terms of the pre-application for support, so that some of those
marginalised communities can feel that they have some support
in terms of going through what is quite a difficult process for
the first time for very small amounts of money which will just
enable them to get on that road of working together in local communities,
and advice during the delivery period of a programme and also
obviously using the evaluation and research that is built into
delivering that activity to go back and give very specific advice
to government.
Q217 Andrew George: A lot of what
you describe as "soft skills" that are required in order
to reach the marginalised communities—clearly you hold a
lot of those skills and are able to advise local community groups.
You also administer funds on behalf of the Department. I wondered
to what extent those funds and that advice is the product of a
bidding process? Do you sit back and react to communities that
come to you and ask for money and advice, or to what extent you
go out and you target certain places or do local authorities come
to you? What happens? How do you focus your resource and on which
communities?
Ms Seabrooke: It is very much
a joint process with the sponsor department. They will obviously
be aware of their own priorities in terms of particular areas
of activity about bringing people together. We had the issue on
tackling violent extremism and we have a very different approach
in terms of how we think some of those areas could be addressed.
Q218 Andrew George: A different approach
to the department?
Ms Seabrooke: Yes, we have a complementary
approach. There will be two sides to it and we recognise the softer
through, for example, the faith programme that we have that we
have been able to build relationships with some of the community
groups that we work with and we see great opportunities in terms
of working with young people and women, in using a different approach
to identifying some of the issues that might arise in communities.
Q219 Chair: Can we just get clear,
because I don't think we are. On the Faith Communities Building
Fund, for example, and the Connecting Communities Plus, groups
apply, so the initiative comes from the groups and then you decide
which ones meet the criteria and are funded?
Ms Seabrooke: There is a criteria
established through the grant programme, jointly with CLG and
ourselves, based on our understanding through the work we do on
a practice level—there might be issues that we think need
addressing—and we have road shows around the country where
we invite groups to come on board. We use our third sector networks
to encourage people to make that secondary communication. We have
workshops around the country in each of the regions where people
can come and ask questions. We then do an assessment process which
we actually appoint the assessors through their understanding
of cohesion issues. Depending on which programme it is, they have
to have very specific skills in that particular area and there
is an assessment process that those applications undergo.
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