Localism

Memorandum from North Dorset District Council (LOCO 69)

The submitter of evidence

North Dorset is a rural area with a population of 64,000 dispersed over a large geographical area including four market towns and many villages. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, poor access to services, below average incomes, poor transport links and an economy based on agriculture and micro businesses. North Dorset District Council has one of the lowest district council tax rates in the country at £105 per annum for a Band D property. The Council’s make up is 17 Conservative, 13 Liberal Democrat and 3 Independent Members. Localism has been delivered over the last four years by cross party co-operation.

The localism approach is based on the core principle that people who live locally know best what is needed to build sustainability. Community partnerships and partners are given the money, trust and autonomy to commission projects and influence policy. They are engaged as partners in the process. The Community Partnership Executive for North Dorset is a ‘partnership of partnerships’, an executive group led by the community. It co-ordinates community partnership activity across the district with the input of the Association of Town and Parish Councils and the third sector partner, Dorset Community Action.

Localism is transforming the face of North Dorset. Our community partnerships and parish councils representing their market towns and surrounding areas come together to decide what services are important and take responsibility for safeguarding those services whilst improving the quality of the service and reducing the cost to the tax payer. This has been independently evaluated as the best and most coherent community planning model looking at local community, district and county level, helping the area to buck the trend of rural decline and maintain a resilient economy.

Executive Summary

· The District Council and Partnerships have a four year experience of decentralising services and enabling neighbourhoods to determine their own future. Over 12 incorporated companies or social enterprises have been set up, designed and run by local volunteers to deliver services and projects, using a variety of governance models suited to each venture.

· It has gone beyond place based budgeting to grant aiding capital to community organisations to commission and build major facilities themselves. Over 190 projects have been delivered successfully.

· District and Parish Councils have found new ways of working together with services delegated as close to the frontline as possible. Begun as a cost cutting exercise, it soon became clear that this way of working delivers high quality services and high calibre social involvement and interaction. It has proved to be far more than simply achieving efficiency savings.

· The Council seeks to build capacity in the community through the partnerships and they in turn build capacity in the Council, for example, they have attracted resources and commissioned town design statements of sufficient quality to adopt a supplementary planning document to shape the future of towns and villages.

Lessons Learned

· It takes time and commitment to set up, to win hearts and minds and to build two-way trust.

· It takes investment in the third sector to provide community development, expertise, to build project management skills and to train volunteers in business planning skills and governance.

· It takes commitment and hard work from local councillors and a willingness to spend time listening, providing information and planning together.

· It is useful to have the local knowledge and local connections of a district council and if one does not exist, that local connection must be built.

· People will volunteer if investment is made in the service to be transferred, i.e., they are not interested in run down buildings and neglected services.

· It will need continual nurturing to make links with new volunteers and sustain those already working hard in the community.

· Large community theatres and facilities can be self sustaining without subsidy if the volunteers and community are involved from the outset in establishing the vision.

· Even small projects such as new play areas, if given to the community to drive, can bring new people into the democratic process, for example, people in a local housing estate have now stood for election at the Town Council.

Recommendations for Action

· North Dorset Scrutiny Committees have done effective inquiries into access to health services but find it difficult to influence decision making in acute services and the PCT, although the resulting contacts with GP surgeries and dentists have been beneficial to a wider contribution to the neighbourhood. The local Scrutiny role could be established.

· Current VAT regulations on capital expenditure and charity legislation create barriers for community based trusts and usefully could be reviewed, e.g. introducing the planned secondary legislation to enable charitable incorporated organisations.

· ‘Competing’ initiatives from Government Departments confuse what happens in neighbourhoods: e.g. Police PACT panels were set up in a prescribed way which cut across other community forums.

· JobCentre Plus operates at too great a distance from benefits authorities and the advice voluntary sector such as the CAB. Its services could be decentralised to benefits authorities and regulated by DWP.

· A great deal of time and resource is given by local authorities and the voluntary sector to advising people about what Benefits are available and where/how to access them. The high volume of different Benefits and different criteria are confusing and create a barrier. They are also inequitable: …. two people living side by side may qualify for a different level of Housing Benefit because of the date they became eligible, even if their outgoings and situation is exactly the same. If less resource was given to managing the complexity, more resource could be given locally to return to work initiatives.

Factual Information

1. North Dorset is a rural area with a population of 64,000 dispersed over a large geographical area including five market towns and many villages. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, poor access to services, low average incomes, poor transport links and an economy based on agriculture and many very small and some highly skilled small businesses. North Dorset District Council has one of the lowest District Council Council Tax rates in the Country and smaller than many Town Councils at £105 pa.

2. What sets North Dorset’s approach to Localism apart from others is the degree to which it influences long term sustainability. The Council gives genuine power to the community to shape its own sustainable future. The partnerships deliver award winning, ambitious schemes involving people in the continuing prosperity and appearance of their towns, attracting about £15M in the last five years. The partnership model has proved its capacity to deliver and has been commended by the Local Government Chronicle/Health Service Journal: winning ‘Best Community Partnership, 2010’.

3. It is at the cutting edge of community improvements. Our partnerships have been proud to showcase their achievements as exemplars of good practice to other Councils.

4. The core principle is the belief that people who live and work in the area know best what is needed to build a sustainable future. By giving power to local residents and putting them in the driving seat, the Council has ample proof that this approach can succeed.

• The role of local government in a decentralised model of local public service delivery, and the extent to which localism can and should extend to other local agents;

5. North Dorset believes that our community partnerships are our eyes and ears and are best placed to ensure that the public sector really takes on board what matters most to our communities. The Community Partnership Executive for North Dorset (CPEND) is the partnership of partnership made up of four community partnerships, representatives from the County Council, Town and Parish, the Dorset Strategic Partnership and Dorset Community Action.

6. There are four community partnerships which cover all parts of North Dorset district centred on the four largest towns of Shaftesbury, Blandford Forum, Gillingham and Sturminster Newton. The objectives of the partnerships are:

· To involve as many local people and community or voluntary groups as possible in the towns and the surrounding villages to plan the future of their market town areas

· To commission developments to regenerate the towns

· To deliver social, economic or environmental projects, involving volunteers, that enhance and care for the towns and villages and their local communities’ well-being.

· To create opportunity to take community ideas up into strategic levels.

7. Dorset Community Action (DCA) supports the four community partnerships and, with dedicated funding and support from the District Council, employs a small team of community resource workers that are based in each of the market towns, working directly with the community partnerships to define priorities, strategies and action plans, achieve the partnerships’ work programmes, identify and secure funding opportunities and implement projects.

8. The involvement of DCA is a key element, which enables the District Council to support the partnerships both with officer time and specialist knowledge but also financially (through an annual grant), whilst at the same time DCA providing independent advice and support to the partnerships, a step removed from the local authority.

9. Working in partnership, the community, local Town and Parish Councils and the District Council have secured over £3M per annum of savings whilst safeguarding those services that are critically important to the community. We believe that our approach provides one blueprint for Localism and shows how Councils can successfully work differently to improve the quality of local services, engender greater community responsibility and become more efficient.

10. The District Council’s Tough Choices Programme was an instrumental part of achieving Localism in North Dorset, which involved all North Dorset community partnerships and local councils. Tough Choices also enabled the District Council to respond to the financial pressures of having its Council Tax increases "capped" in 2006.

11. Tough Choices built on the Vision for North Dorset [1] with the aim of safeguarding services that were decided by the local community to be important, improving the quality of service and improving cost effectiveness. The Programme focused on three areas: Local Delivery, Focused Resources and Business Transformation [2] . The District Council achieved a 25% reduction on its net revenue budget between 2006-09.

12. The services that were included within Local Delivery included leisure centres, public conveniences, funding for the Citizens Advice Centre, Countryside management service, sports development, arts grants, tourism promotion, maintenance of public open space, car parks, markets and street cleansing. Local Town and Parish Councils and the community partnerships were consulted and asked which of these services were important to their communities and, if important, would they be prepared to work with the District Council to safeguard their future provision.

13. The relationship of the unelected people that constitute the community partnerships and the elected District, Town and Parish Councillors is critically important. The elected Councillor role is critical for community leadership, which we believe is best provided at district level. Of course all these people are to a lesser or greater degree, volunteers. North Dorset now has a significant number of volunteers, a strength that has been deliberately encouraged and expanded through:

· putting volunteers and local Councillors at the centre of decision making;

· taking responsibility for services; and

· providing resources: revenue and capital funding, transferring assets, training, technical and professional advice and skills development.

14. Relationship management has at times proved critically important to gain an understanding of each partner’s role and contribution, ensuring that existing roles and responsibilities are protected and not considered as being undermined. That requires involvement from the District Council and support from DCA including mediation and brokering agreement between organisations and individuals.

15. Community partnerships work side by side with locally elected Councillors.

16. In addition, co-ordination across public service including County, Districts, Police, Fire, health services, housing associations and the business community is achieved through officer and Member liaison.

17. The approach in North Dorset is different because it:

· is in lieu of a district wide LSP

· works across local authority boundaries (into Wiltshire, for example)

· Influences policy and strategy and informs Council service business plans

· Engages in decision making on which services considered important locally and should be retained through new working arrangements

· Has experience and track record in engagement in the delivery of substantial programmes and projects

· Goes beyond participatory budgeting towards trust and managed risk. Substantial budgets are passed to partnerships to deliver large schemes with technical support and financial risk management from the Council

· Has CPEND representatives on various steering and working groups in the council

· Included the vision for each community partnership and the priorities identified through CPEND in the Draft Core Strategy of the Local Development Framework (LDF)

· Provided training to support partnerships and professional resource through the Community Development Workers (CDW) and administration team, who are employed independently by the Third Sector on behalf of the partnerships, funded by the Council and partners e.g. training on legal implications of the roles and responsibilities of directors in partnerships, trusts and charities, and on project development and management principles.

· Proper engagement, devolution and trust. The partnerships have a tremendous track record – we believe they will deliver and give them the tools to do the job.

18. The North Dorset approach has enabled the District Council to improve whilst at the same time achieving its financial challenges and improving the quality of service.

19. However, the story does not end there; we:

• have achieved the Best Community Partnership in Britain 2010 – celebrating the work of the community

• have a huge army of volunteers without whom, this journey would not have been possible

• have completed a review of the community planning model in early 2010 to further strengthen the arrangements, delivery and measurement of outcomes;

• are well placed for the future through our long track record of local community engagement and commitment to take advantage of the new Localism and Big Society agenda;

• have given community partnerships and partners the tools and trust to be autonomous; and

• have Members that demonstrate long term commitment.

• The extent to which decentralisation leads to more effective public service delivery; and what the limits are, or should be, of localism;

• The impact of decentralisation on the achievement of savings in the cost of local public services and the effective targeting of cuts to those services;

20. Local delegated services including street cleansing, tourist information centres, public conveniences, maintenance of open spaces, town markets and leisure/community centres are now operated at a lower cost to the taxpayer. This is achieved not least through lower overhead costs, use of volunteers and business rates relief. Equally important, the customer service standards have improved through the extra care and attention provided by local councils and community charitable trusts taking responsibility for the success of the local services as businesses, which are dependent for survival on customer demand.

21. Locally managed services have proved to be more responsive services to local demands and better placed to be reduce bureaucracy and processing / communication of work requests; immediately tailor the service to respond to priorities. By doing so, again efficiencies are achieved to the taxpayer and customer service is improved.

22. Working across organisations (eg local councils) and with the voluntary / community sector takes time; to win hearts and minds can take 2 to 3 years, as we found with the Local Delivery programme.

23. It is essential that local decisions (eg of Town / Parish Councils and community partnerships) need to be respected and decisions cannot be imposed, although the consequence of local decisions need to be clearly explained and understand. For example, the decision of a local community to agree that there is little importance of a leisure / community centre, is likely to lead to that service being lost to the community. Such a closure has been made with full local agreement.

• The lessons for decentralisation from Total Place, and the potential to build on the work done under that initiative, particularly through place-based budgeting;

24. There appear to be significant opportunities arising from the interventions to reduce later demand for services. For example the Dorset ‘Total Place’ study highlights early intervention through fitness / leisure activities may reduce demands on acute health services. Our experience demonstrates the difficulties in achieving this; it is unlikely that health services will be able to support fitness / leisure services, because of annual budget pressures, to provide funding of preventative measures (eg investment in leisure activities) in the short term with the expectation of longer terms health benefits and their commensurate cost reductions.

25. We agree that Total Place aims to improve services that are locally important and needed to the benefit of local people holistically. Local councils should work with other public agencies (eg Jobcentre Plus), the voluntary and business sectors (eg Federation of Small Businesses) to maintain people in work; re-organising the benefits framework; promoting voluntary work; managing debt; avoiding homelessness; promoting start-up businesses; and developing jobs growth.

• How effective and appropriate accountability can be achieved for expenditure on the delivery of local services, especially for that voted by Parliament rather than raised locally.

26. Government Grant supports part of the costs of statutory services only and locally raised income supports local decisions and services and contributes to the statutory services cost.

• What, if any, arrangements for the oversight of local authority performance will be necessary to ensure effective local public service delivery.

27. Accountability and performance should be locally decided and the locality responsible for the success or failure. Local PIs agreed and monitored by locally elected representatives (working with the community and voluntary sector) with audited accounts.

What were the Outcomes and how were they measured?

28. Practical outcomes now form a remarkably long and diverse list, from major regeneration projects to smaller ones such as a fishing platform for wheelchair users, from big community events to regular activities. Over the last 5 years the partnerships have been instrumental in attracting and delivering about £15M worth of projects in the area. Projects are "delivered in partnership", and outcomes include:

· "The Exchange", a £2.6M redevelopment of a major site in the centre of Sturminster Newton with a large and impressive community facility, health centre, supermarket and community offices. Run by volunteers, the centre has broken even in its first year of operation. It has taken on a full time manager and is attracting national performing arts to the area. It has transformed the town, generating more visits to the town and increased social activity. The Sturminster Cheese festival attracted 13,000 visitors this year and huge sales of local products. The town has also won ‘Cittaslow’ status, the first town in the South West. The SturQuest Partnership has recently been a regional winner for partnership and strategic working in the National Market Town awards.

· Newly refurbished public toilets have been transferred by the District to the Town Councils together with Town Orderlies and the District pays the Towns for keeping the town clean. We now have a multi skilled response to cutting grass, clearing litter, sweeping the streets, cleaning the toilets, removing graffiti, and the rapid removal of fly tipping. The overall look of the towns has improved hugely. The Town Councils now offer cleaning services to some of the parishes.

· In Gillingham the community partnership has taken over an old leisure centre building and is commissioning its own refurbishment to create a new leisure centre, community hub and community centre. The District has helped to train and develop expertise to do the business and project planning and has granted the partnership £4 million capital funding. The partnership has business plans to run the facility without District Council revenue funding.

· The "Exchange" community complex and the new Gillingham facilities both incorporate renewable energy sources

· A community communication: Unity.Com magazine delivered free to over 3,000 homes – not subsidised.

· In Shaftesbury and Blandford Forum the community are successfully running Tourist Information Centres in each town and have won business funding to help to support them. A small community pool is being run by volunteers in Shaftesbury following an asset transfer and assistance.

· The District Council was the only authority awarded ‘Liveability’ funding to use it to create a community "challenge fund" and skills development, to help build capacity in partnerships to deliver sustainable projects based on their own ideas. Over 190 projects have been delivered to improve the access to open space, all community generated and community run.

· 15 play areas have been developed by the community and are now looked after by the community, parish and town councils.

· A high level of volunteering in North Dorset shown in the Place Survey (top quartile). New people are coming forward to Town Councils and to community partnerships.

· Increased democratic capacity/engagement from hard to reach groups, e.g. families were engaged in the provision of a long needed large play area in their recreation ground, therefore felt empowered, became less cynical and sceptical about having their voices heard and have subsequently joined a Town Council.

· Increased democratic engagement Local Delivery – number of important services and facilities retained in the area

· 48 Parish Plans have been produced and 4 community action plans

· Town and village design guidelines written by the community, and facilitated by the District, are now adopted as planning policy documents; the District wrote a toolkit to share good practice and assisted in the process.

· The district was top in 2 of the 5 categories in the Ecosgen study of economic resilience in the South West and was in the top 5 overall.

· CPEND and the AONB Partnership have been awarded £2.85M Local Action for Rural Communities funding for community led projects deriving economic benefit from the environment to improve the quality of life. This programme is being managed by the community.

· CPEND is working with the Senior Management Team and Cabinet of Council as part of Team North Dorset. Members see community partnerships as part of the solution for the future and a voice for the community.

· The Dorset Strategic Partnership (the County and District LSP) and the Community Strategy for Dorset are influenced by and informed by evidence and ideas from the Community Partnerships and the County provides a small contribution to the financial resources and the DSP provides small grant funding of £38,000 to CPEND for local community projects.

· North Dorset is selected, alongside Newcastle, as one of 2 national pilots to undertake a ‘green map’ – a Climate and Action Community Map, funded by the Green Alliance

Supplementary Material

Community Partnership Awards: Community Partnership Executive North Dorset - Building Strong and Inclusive Sustainable Communities, date 2010

October 2010