Localism

Memorandum from Commission for Rural Communities (LOCO 49)

Communities and Local Government Committee inquiry into Localism

1. About the Commission for Rural Communities

1.1 The Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) was established in April 2005 and became an independent body on 1 October 2006, following the enactment of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act, 2006.

1.2 The Commission has the following three roles:

1. Listening to and representing the views of rural communities

2. Giving expert advice

3. Acting as an independent watchdog

1.3 We have a statutory responsibility to act as an advocate for rural communities and businesses and provide independent advice to government and others to help ensure that policies and programmes reflect the needs of people living, working and doing business in rural England. We have a particular focus on tackling disadvantage and economic under-performance.

1.4 Although in June the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced the abolition of the CRC as an independent arms length organisation, she also announced that our work would continue through the formation of new Rural Communities Policy Unit within Defra. The details of this new Unit are being developed at the time of writing.

2. Summary of key points

2.1 The CRC is supportive of many of the principles surrounding localism and decentralisation of public services.

2.2 The Government needs to ensure that the devolution of power and responsibility away from central government takes proper account of, and builds on the strengths and good practice present in many rural communities, including the network of around 8,000 parish and town councils in England.

2.3 A real commitment to community led planning should be included within the Government’s plans for localism and decentralisation.

2.4 The Government should make greater use of Participatory Budgeting as it is proven to make a positive contribution to many communities, in particular in rural areas.

2.5 When taking forward plans for placed-based budgeting, the Government should be minded that as rural places are often governed by geographically large and remote units of local government, place based budgeting needs to occur at a small enough special scale to be of relevance and benefit to people in smaller, more rural communities.

2.6 It is important that public resource allocations between different places are fair and are seen to be fair. This is so that, for universal services, all citizens receive broadly similar services. It is also necessary so that targeted services, for example to disadvantaged people, reach those targeted people and groups wherever they live.

2.7 Concerning the Government’s plans for the Revenue Support Grant, the improvement agenda for parish and town councils should be included in the scope of the purpose for which top-sliced resources should be used. At present, they receive no revenue support grant and it is time that central government supported some of their improvement and development requirements.

2.8 Concerning changes to local performance management, it is important that any revised process is meaningful to local people and to local councillors (of all tiers) in the neighbourhoods, towns and villages where they live (and not just at the level of administrative delivery bodies).

3. General comments

3.1 It is clear that the Government’s plans for localism and decentralisation of public services are not just about giving power back to local government, but pushing power downwards and outwards to community level – the Government has indicated that it wants to make sure people can take control and responsibility in their local areas and communities.

3.2 Rural communities have traditionally used many innovative approaches to engaging communities, supported by high levels of volunteering effort, and there is much evidence that these efforts produce a wealth of good practice.

3.3 The CRC published its State of the Countryside report [1] 2010 on 6th July. One of the themes drawn out is the evidence that rural people are in a strong position to respond positively to the localism agenda. The data we have gathered and analysed demonstrates that people living in rural areas are more likely than urban dwellers to feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood. They are more likely to report that they have been involved in local decisions (although interestingly around the same proportion of rural and urban people feel that that they are able to influence local decisions – below 30%). And people living in rural areas are more likely to volunteer than those in urban areas – taking an average across all rural districts, nearly 30% of residents reported that they had given unpaid voluntary help at least monthly over the past year.

4. Town and Parish Councils

4.1 Community and neighbourhood level power and influence is central to the Government’s ambitions. Strong and active Parish and Town Councils provide a ready-made route through which people living in rural communities can work together and express their views.

4.2 The Government needs to ensure that the devolution of power and responsibility away from central government takes proper account of the role of parish and town councils.

4.3 In February 2007 the CRC began a national inquiry into the role of rural local councillors [2] , and how this role could be strengthened. Our inquiry explored the opportunities and challenges for rural councillors in bringing decision-making closer to their communities.

4.4 The aim of the inquiry was to help rural communities have greater influence over local decisions, by supporting local councillors to become better democratic champions in acting on behalf of their communities. We collected evidence from local authorities and local councillors at all levels; and held over 35 hearings with business groups, local authority officers, local councillors, voluntary and community groups, formal partnerships and campaigning organisations.

4.5 Throughout the inquiry, we found much that is right and healthy in our local democracy in rural England; with examples of strong local leadership, proactive town and parish councils, and effective community voices.

4.6 The inquiry made 10 recommendations for action, which were published at the beginning of 2008. The recommendations included the need to allocate neighbourhood budgets to local councillors; supporting parish councils to become fully elected representative bodies (and addressing the problems caused by the costs of elections); developing and maintaining strong links and trust between principal authorities and town and parish councils; and the need for a central and local government commitment to supporting very local community plans.

4.7 Alongside the National Association for Local Councils (NALC), the CRC have also conducted research and good practice [3] into service delegations; into the relationships between the parish sector and principal authorities, particularly unitary authorities and into parish clustering.

4.8 The government has also announced its intention to bring in a number of measures to encourage volunteering and involvement in social action and train a new generation of community organisers. We need to ensure that these measures build on the strengths and good practice that are already present in so many rural communities.

5. Community led planning

5.1 The CRC would also like to see community led planning included within the Government’s plans for localism and decentralisation.

5.2 Community Led Planning is a step-by-step structured process, taken on by local community activists, to create a vision for a community and an action plan to achieve it.  What makes Community Led Planning distinctive is that, done well, it involves building the relationship between service providers and local communities as part of the plan development itself.  Because it is made up of actions to be taken on by local volunteers, community groups, local government and other service providers, it produces more impressive results than can be achieved through a top-down approach to consultation by local government to feed their own strategic plans. A community led plan challenges local people to say what part they can play in improving their own local neighbourhood and builds the capacity of local community groups to respond. Additional benefits are that the proposed actions and solutions have already been tested out and are more likely to be realistic and achievable by all partners working together. [4]

5.3 There are wide spread examples of community-led planning processes being used to engage whole neighbourhoods in a discussion about their needs, priorities and ambitions, including Parish and Village Plans and Market Town Plans. These have been used to engage local communities on local needs, priorities and ambitions and much positive action has resulted from this process.

5.4 The CRC, alongside partners in Devon, has developed a Sustainable Rural Communities Toolkit [5] to assist in planning policy development. The toolkit is relevant across a range of spatial levels and highlights the strengths rural communities can bring to overall planning policy development.

5.5 The Government has announced plans to give financial incentives to principal authorities to encourage the creation of local plans which allow development of land for housing and employment. It is crucial that the local authorities’ plans use community/parish plans as their starting point. There is a danger otherwise of the needs of rural communities in particular being overlooked. Alongside this sits the risk that a small group of residents will find it easier to block affordable housing or other schemes that the majority of the community have decided are crucial to maintain a thriving, vibrant community.

5.6 Proposals for the creation of new Local Housing Trusts also need to ensure mechanisms are developed to enable communities to take the lead and retain control, but with support and with some of the bureaucracy carried out by others.

5.7 The CRC would also commend to the committee the Rural Coalition’s recently published report ‘The rural challenge. Achieving sustainable rural communities for the 21st century’ [6] , which addresses in more detail many of the above issues.

6. Participatory budgeting

6.1 The CRC would also commend to the committee the positive contribution that Participatory Budgeting (PB) can make to communities. It is a method by which local people decide how to allocate part of a public budget, and it directly involves local people in making decisions on the spending and priorities for a defined public budget. It can be applied very flexibly and typically it works with (mainstream) local annual revenue budgets or supplementary revenue streams or regeneration budgets.

6.2 PB can create a range of benefits for local people, including:

· Bringing communities together;

· Encouraging local people to stand for election as local councillors;

· Helping to raise people‘s understanding of the complexities of public budget setting and deciding between competing priorities;

· Improvements in the way local people and elected councillors and council officials work together; and

· Services being better tailored to local circumstances (often resulting in improved resident satisfaction).

6.3 PB can also create benefits for Councils and other service providers, including:

· Better decisions: local decisions based on local knowledge and needs;

· Helping local people understand the complexities, compromises and trade-offs involved in local authority decision making; and

· Providing a strong community leadership role for councillors.

6.4 The CRC, alongside CLG’s Participatory Budgeting Unit, have produced a short report [7] on PB in rural England, which we commend to the committee.

7. Local Government structures

7.1 In many rural areas four tier systems of local government exist including county councils, district councils, parish and town councils; and National Park Authorities, as well as a multiplicity of Local Strategic Partnerships and other partnerships.

7.2 The issue of the complexity of these structures was a feature of our participation inquiry. As such one of our recommendations called for a structure of powerful new unitary authorities serving their communities, working closely with a renewed structure of empowered and influential parish and town councils. We believe that unitary authorities strengthen and clarify local democracy and local accountability. They should help shire local government ‘punch its weight’ with more urban dominated structures such as city regions.

7.3 Whilst the CRC acknowledges the reasoning behind the halting of local government reorganisation, we also continue to have uncertainties over the sustainability of the remaining two-tier structure and there may be a case for the establishment of virtual unitaries. We view recent examples of shared Directors and shared Chief Executives between district councils and between district and county councils as an encouraging development.

8. Place-based budgeting

8.1 The CRC is supportive of the principle of place-based approaches to allocating and spending budgets, as it gives local areas an opportunity to consider and address the key priorities for specific communities.

8.2 Ultimately, a place based approach may lead to local authorities having control over entire budgets for areas, and decisions on allocating such resources may come under a single management structure.

8.3 In order to tackle specific issues, this approach may result in budgets being taken away from some organisations / areas and handed to others.

8.4 As part of this process, it will be important that rural stakeholders are fully engaged with this process. Furthermore, those charged with making decisions on the allocation of resources should ensure that proper consideration is given to the knock on effects to rural communities that may result from the prioritisation of particular spending. This will be of particular importance where direct rural representation at the decision making level is not present.

8.5 Furthermore, as rural places are often governed by geographically large and remote units of local government, place-based budgeting needs to occur at a small enough special scale to be of relevance and benefit to people in smaller, more rural communities.

9. Resource allocation

9.1 It is important that public resource allocations between different places are fair and are seen to be fair. This is so that, for universal services, all citizens receive broadly similar services. It is also necessary so that targeted services, for example to disadvantaged people, reach those targeted people and groups wherever they live.

9.2 This is notwithstanding the fact that local democracy, decision making and choice can also lead to variations in the levels of some services, as well as in levels of local taxation. The CRC recognises that there are often complex trade-offs, both implicit and explicit, involved in rural service delivery: between access to services, quality of service, cost of service, cost of accessing the service, local tax and charging levies, eligibility criteria and so on. Some services may cost more to deliver in urban areas and some may cost more to deliver in rural areas. There may also be different expectations about service delivery, with rural citizens not always expecting the same levels of service delivery as urban citizens.

9.3 Service providers also need to continue to be keenly involved in delivering continuous improvements and efficiencies in service delivery to rural communities. Alongside fair resource allocations must be placed efficiency, different ways of service delivering (when appropriate) and also a commitment to innovation and testing new approaches to service delivery.

9.4 The CRC has prepared a position paper [8] on this subject, which we commend to the committee.

10. Revenue Support Grant

10.1 The CRC welcomed CLG’s recent consultation on revenue support grant top-slice for improvement services to local authorities. The CRC generally supports the principles outlined and agrees that a single specified body should be the recipient of all top-sliced funding, and that it should decide how best to use this funding to deliver objectives and outcomes agreed with the CLG Secretary of State.

10.2 The main additional point that we recommended to the Department was that the improvement agenda for parish and town councils be included in the scope of the purposes for which top-sliced resources should be used for. This reform would provide a more equitable deployment of 'top sliced' Government funding for improvement and development in local government. At present none of this resource is spent in support of the parish and town council sector of local government. There are about 8,000 parish and town councils in England, most of them in shire and rural England, and they are served by over 80,000 councillors. They receive no revenue support grant and are therefore the most financially locally accountable tier of local government. It is time that central government supported some of their improvement and development requirements. If the Government is minded to accept this proposal then suitable objectives (including delivery of the objectives of the National Training Strategy for parish and town councils [9] ), should be agreed between CLG and the LGA and the National Association of Local Councils (representing parish and town councils).

11. Local performance management

11.1 The CRC notes that the Local Government Group has recently consulted on proposals for self improvement for councils following the abolition of the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) regime.

11.2 Our rural commentary on the first CAA reports [10] contains much that we feel is relevant to their proposals.

11.3 This short commentary on the value of the CAA regime to rural people shows a positive picture. Many rural communities are well served by their local authorities and other local public service providers. There are a significant number of excellent practice case examples that can now be taken up by others. And rural circumstances and needs were often recognised in the CAA reports.

11.4 However, the report also highlighted that there was room for improvement, both in the CAA process and in the delivery of rural public services. It highlighted:

· That the extent to which CAAs picked up on rurality was not systematic;

· That the CAA reports were at too high a level to be meaningful to most people and reporting of performance against the National Indicator Set (NIS) did not expose local rural and other differences in service standards and delivery;

· It was unclear how the views of local people had informed the assessments;

· Whether equitable service delivery across different geographies was being achieved was difficult to judge from the CAA reports.

11.5 The CRC discussed this paper with Local Government Group in spring 2010 where we emphasized that in future there would be value in the following:

· Recognition of rural circumstances and needs by local service providers at the local level. And a recognition that tackling geographical inequalities is an important role and challenge for public service delivery bodies;

· Collecting and promoting good practice solutions on addressing the challenges of public service delivery to dispersed communities; and

· Introducing performance management and local spending information that is meaningful to local people and to local councillors (of all tiers) in the neighbourhoods, towns and villages where they live (and not just at the level of administrative delivery bodies).

12. Examples of decentralised public service delivery

12.1 The CRC would like into highlight a number of examples of decentralised public service delivery in rural areas:

· Residents in Brandon, Suffolk, have limited access to health and social care services, with many located 10 miles from Brandon. Via it’s Connected Care programme [11] , Turning Point, a health and social care organisation, is training local community researchers to engage with local people to establish various services in the town, and identify what meets local needs and where gaps in provision exist.

· The Bay Broadband Co-operative provides broadband to the residents and visitors of Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire. Remote villages and farms enjoy a reliable and high quality broadband connection through a wifi mesh of up to 8 megabits. Members pay £8 a month for the service and visitors to the area also can purchase a temporary connection to the system for between £3 a day to £10 a week. The co-operative survives on its income and is currently making a sustainable profit.

· Burgess Hill Town Council, in West Sussex, delivers a range of county and district services through its Mobile Maintenance Teams, who are also contracted to service three smaller neighbouring parishes.

13. Conclusion

13.1 The CRC asks the Committee to consider:

i. How the devolution of power and responsibility away from central government will take account of the strengths and good practice present in many rural communities;

ii. Examine the Government’s commitment to community led planning and its inclusion within the Government’s plans for localism and decentralisation;

iii. Recommending to the Government the positive contribution that Participatory Budgeting can make to many communities;

iv. The fact that rural places are often governed by geographically large and remote units of local government and that place-based budgeting needs to occur at a small enough special scale to be of relevance and benefit to people in smaller communities;

v. The importance that public resource allocations between different places are fair and are seen to be fair;

vi. The possibility of including parish and town councils within the scope of plans to revise the Revenue Support Grant; and

vii. The importance that revised processes for performance management at the local level are meaningful to local people and to local councillors (of all tiers) in the neighbourhoods, towns and villages where they live (and not just at the level of administrative delivery bodies).

13.2 The CRC commends this submission to the CLG Committee inquiry into Localism and hopes that it provides helpful assistance to informing the Government’s thinking on Localism and Decentralisation.