WRITTEN EVIDENCE
SUBMITTED BY
COMMUNITY MATTERS
(LOCO 079)
1. SUMMARY
¾ Community
Matters sees the Voluntary and Community Sector and local statutory
bodies and government as being partners in creating excellent
locally-focussed public services.
¾ A localist
approach to providing public services would use the VCS' reach
and premises to house networked services and outreach work, and
engage actively with community groups to provide joined-up statutory,
discretionary and voluntary services to support individuals.
¾ The
VCS must have a role in the scrutiny and consultation work that
must accompany localist service delivery.
¾ We recommend
that a Scrutiny Officer is created to support this work and provide
a bridge between the local VCS and local authorities.
2. OVERVIEW
Community Matters welcomes this inquiry and is grateful
for the opportunity to contribute to the Committee's work on this
important and timely topic. We are aware that many Voluntary and
Community Sector (VCS) organisations are submitting responses,
and so we wish to submit evidence that reflects our members' experiences
in particular rather than trying to encompass the whole sector
and its relationship to localist public service provision.
2.1 We are also aware that the terms of this
enquiry focus on the provision of public services, in particular
statutory services provided by local authorities or other statutory
bodies. Our membership do not generally provide these services
and are mostly not set up to provide them in future, although
a very small number provide housing and health care. More usually
they host outreach sessions or offices for local services, such
as Children's Centres, doctors' surgeries or drugs or alcohol
counselling. As a result we have decided to focus on what a localist
approach to supporting the VCS in a neighbourhood might look like
and also how the VCS can work alongside the local authorities
in an area to improve impact and transparency.
2.2 It is important to establish what this submission
understands by localism. There are many traditions of thought
about policy and politics labelled "localist". Without
aligning itself to any one of these in particular, or the broader
political ideologies they may reflect, Community Matters has always
been committed to empowering local communities to respond to their
needs, develop strong community voices and to allow decisions
about public services, local priorities and resource allocation
to be taken as close to the people they affect as possible. In
this sense, Community Matters represents a fundamentally localist
movement.
2.3 Community Matters has over 1200 members,
of which just under 1000 are community organisations, mostly community
centres or similar groups but also some representing communities
of interest. They all have a more or less neighbourhood-level
area of benefit, and many are very small by the standards of the
wider VCS as a result. A quarter of these members earn less than
£20,000 per annum. Four in 10 members earn 90% of their income
or more and just under half have the equivalent of one full time
staff member or less. We also represent 77 district, county and
unitary Local Authorities, 32 Housing Associations, 88 Local Infrastructure
Organisations and 20 local or independent federations of community
organisations. We work together to support community organisations
and community action and to develop community assets.
3. THE ROLE
OF THE
(LOCAL OR
NATIONAL) STATE
IN COMMUNITIES
This inquiry has asked primarily about the way that
a localist approach to public service provision will affect local
and national Government and other local agents, and has placed
a particular emphasis on obtaining savings and increasing efficiency
and value for money. In particular it has asked about "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". It is extremely important that the social
outcomes that localist approaches aspire to are not forgotten
in the desire to cut costs. If this is seen to be the primary
concern in devolving power and responsibility for services to
local level any reform's legitimacy will be undermined.
3.1 With that in mind it seems important to state
unambiguously that our support for the principle of greater decision-making
power and resources resting in community hands does not mean a
belief that local or national Government involvement in the fabric
and activities of civil society is a bad thing. Indeed, we believe
it to be most welcome and that it fulfils a vital public service.
The question is finding appropriate ways for the State to participate
in communities and society generally, and this will always depend
upon responding sensitively to local conditions and contexts.
3.2 Nowhere is this more important than in maintaining
the physical spaces used for community activities. We are concerned
at the number of local authorities who are disposing of community
assets en masse at the moment, and at the way in which these disposals
are described as providing value for local people. In particular
Hammersmith and Fulham's recent announcement that they would dispose
of nine buildings currently in use by community groups as they
are "under-used" was presented as the only way of maintaining
local frontline services. No consideration seems to have been
made of the affected community groups' contributions to supporting
those frontline services, the impact on their effectiveness of
moving them to larger, more centralized buildings, and no analysis
of why these buildings might be underused was offered in Hammersmith
and Fulham's statements to the press.
3.3 This and several similar local authority
asset disposals are in contradiction to a decentralized, localist
approach, which ought to look to strengthening the neighbourhood-level
VCS and its ability to be a partner to government in providing
high-quality public services, particularly among deprived or hard
to reach groups. As one local government officer who attended
our recent Annual Conference remarked, "It feels as if there
are two conversations being had; the one about cutting costs and
the Big Society one about building community. We haven't got the
resources to do both in the time that's been given to us and in
the end, the savings will have to come first."
3.4 A case study in these tensions is the current
cuts are affecting small VCS organisations delivering services
for children and young people. With future cuts to be made in
other areas the future of other public venues is also uncertain,
with discussions around expanding the use of and shared ownership
of libraries, schools and children's centres, which involves the
Department of Education and the Department for Culture Media and
Sport as well as local government. Policies across these departments
need to be aligned to avoid the separation that started to exist
under Labour with DCSF focused on Children's Centres and myplace
schemes, while DCLG focused on community anchors. Future policies
need to work on how these different spaces can work together for
the local community—with each space offering different advantages
and disadvantages. Being prepared to think in terms of virtual
service delivery centres spread across multipurpose neighbourhood
buildings seems to be the most effective way of achieving this
sort of decentralized service, the virtual Children's Centre in
Heaton and Ouseburn or in Exeter being examples of this sort of
working.
4. ROLE OF
THE VCS
The terms of this inquiry that have been published
on the Committee's webpages make no explicit mention of the Voluntary
and Community Sector's appropriate role in a localist agenda.
This seems an oversight, given that by implication providing public
services as close to the people that use them ought to mean greater
involvement for the VCS in planning and delivering services with
local government.
4.1 The possible roles for VCS organizations,
particularly smaller community charities and community centres
such as our members, could include:
¾ Providing
a space for debate between local people about their needs and
their public services priorities.
¾ Providing
a space for debate between local people and local government and
statutory bodies.
¾ Acting
as advocates for particular groups within an area for their needs
to be prioritized.
¾ Delivering
services or bidding for them.
Some of these roles are potentially in conflict.
We believe that it is important that there are community hubs
such as our members where interest groups can develop and grow
but also come together to debate local issues and where they can
all meet local representatives and local services on neutral ground.
4.2 The Committee's terms of reference for this
inquiry included the issue of transparency in the local delivery
of public services, namely in the allocation of financial resources.
This is a crucial element of any localist reform that may be undertaken
by this Government. One major concern of the smaller end of the
VCS is that communities are seldom homogenous, and are often extremely
diverse. As such our members often represent a particular set
of interests within a place, rather than being able to stand for
all the residents in a neighbourhood. It will be very rare that
a community group is awarded a contract or an asset without potentially
excluding or at least not explicitly including some group of local
residents, and there may be rival proposals that might cause considerable
friction should one be chosen over the others.
4.3 Community Matters has called for there to
be a duty to help local people and groups to hold their services
and the authority to account—consultation, helping communities
understand the system, making the system easier, encouraging and
then recognising strategic community forums and plans. In particular
we support the creation of independent community based Scrutiny
Officer in Local Authorities.
5. LESSONS FROM
TOTAL PLACE
Our members experience of Total Place initiatives
has led to the following recommendations:
¾ Total
Place has so far been a rather Local Authority-focused exercise
which now needs to be driven down to rethink services at neighbourhood
level.
¾ Working
across Local Authority boundaries must become easier.
¾ Croydon's
experience of Total Place indicated that staff and services found
the process of implementing the scheme very expensive, time-consuming
and generated huge uncertainty. In order for Total Place to be
useful it has to balance time-consuming work with real, tangible
benefits much more sensitively.
¾ It is
a system which measures value in strict financial terms, and one
that is often very inappropriate when looking at the true social
value and cost of voluntary work. It currently risks under-rewarding
or over-burdening volunteers and voluntary services as a free,
limitless public good. In reality these groups operate in a low-consumption
economy, often in practice a gift economy, but the resource requirements
in terms of time, stress or the modest amounts of income required
are very real constraints.
¾ Public
services should make use of existing social networks, not try
to circumvent them or create rivals to them. This is always more
expensive and more likely to fail, but is often the approach taken
when introducing a new website, meeting place or citizens' forum.
¾ Importance
of real power and information for citizens and citizens' groups—the
proposed Right to Know, Right to Bid and Right to Buy are very
important for ensuring that local people can gain access to the
market for community buildings and services. There is also a need
for not just good quality, detailed financial data, but also data
about the social circumstances of neighbourhoods; from this point
of view the recent announcement by CLG that they will cancel the
Place Survey is very worrying, as without access to this kind
of information it is hard to put together a business case or plan
services effectively.
October 2010
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