Local government and community

This is my contribution to the Liberal Conspiracy response to Chapter 8 of Hazel Blears' communities in control document: Ownership and control. 

Chapter 8 looks at how citizens can move beyond being consulted or holding officials to account, to how people can own and run services for themselves, either by serving on local boards and committees, or through social enterprises and cooperatives.

Well.

Don't want to start on an arsey note, of course, but -

The first question I want to ask Hazel Blears when Hazel blathers on about the joys of handing community assets to the community to operate is 'you mean the few assets that New Labour hasn't allowed to be sold yet, Haze?'

I mean really, people - this has not been the golden age of community, or community assets, exactly: swathes of housing stock moved to arms' length management organisations, schools closed and ownership of new city academies handed to private sponsors, lidos closed, nursery schools shut and nursery places cut, etc, with Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative councils all cheerful offenders.

Various Olympic programmes, meanwhile, slash and burn community projects like the Manor Gardens allotments, and look set to scrag Greenwich Park monumentally, etc. Hazel, somehow, sees a world where happy communities club together to profitably run 'community centres, street markets, swimming pools, playgrounds and tracts of land, as well as derelict facilities such as a disused school, shop or pub.' I, unfortunately, see a world where local and national's government greatest - if inadvertent - contribution to community unity in recent times has been the relentless promotion of deeply unpopular anti-community initiatives that inspire communities to unite against them.   

Which isn't to say the idea  of community asset ownership as promoted by Hazel is a complete dog: far from it. In her lyrical moments, Hazel understands that 'where local asset management and ownership works well, it can create a new cadre of active citizens, owning, directing and running a service as well as providing good value for money for local authorities and other public bodies. It can support the creation of new co-operatives, mutuals and social enterprises which are responsive to local needs, reflect local ambitions and which generate loyalty from the local community.'

That appears to have been the case in some cases. Witness, Hazel tells us, social enterprises like the Fifteen Cornwall restaurant, which gives disadvantaged local young people a chance to train each year as chefs, with all profits made being returned to the charity. She also cites The Big Issue, the Eden Project and the fair-trade coffee company Cafédirect (although you'll note that most of those have a strong profit theme).

Lewisham CE Barry Quirk - a man with a loftier reputation for community mindedness than Hazel - has better examples in his 2007 'making assets work' paper (the review on which Hazel bases her abovementioned ode to local empowerment).

He notes Gamblesby in Cumbria, where the restoration of the village hall to the local community has gone some way to restoring the morale of a town in economic decline. The village reclaimed the hall from the council, and got funds to restore it. According to Quirk, the town now 'has an attractive focal point for social activities and some economic opportunities may also be opening up through the establishment of the hall as a venue and the associated demand for catering.' 

He mentions also the Sheffield Burton Street Project, where local people have turned a disused school into community buildings, from which they make money by renting out space at affordable prices to local groups. Quirk says that the centre now rovides a home for 100 groups and over 2,000 people use the centre each week, and the project has managed to buy the building.

You'd have to be a Boris-sized plonker not to applaud those sorts of initiatives: what we need from Hazel, though, is reassurance about the true meaning of them. When he published his 2007 review, Quirk was criticised for generating a paper that was more about raising a quick buck by selling the family silver than inspiring the downtrodden: Hazel needs to make sure that these three points:

- the public benefit needs to be clear
- any sale or transfer of public assets to community ownership and management must generate social or community benefits without putting wider public interest concerns at risk
- the community must not become overly burdened with managing assets 

are enshrined in any legislation she proposes to draw up on asset transfers. The profit motive must not be the only motivation. It is also important that council initiatives like a few bob for local hall restoration do not transmogrify in government minds into adequate substitutes for much-needed social services like medical centres, council housing and schools.

We also - not to put too fine a point on it - need legislation that prevents asset sales to the private sector and puts community groups on an equal footing. At one point in her paper, Hazel blithly observes that the government 'will encourage local authorities to ensure that social enterprises are able to compete fairly for contracts.' They'll need more than encouragement, I'm afraid. Tory councils all over the place are outsourcing to the lowest bidders as we speak - Hammersmith and Fulham, for instance, have just outsourced their cleaning and road maintenance contracts to big companies that are in a much better position to undercut than a small group of local church-hall hopefuls. Barnet council transferred its older people's carehomes to a third party concern that is closing those homes, and trying to shoehorn more money out of the council for the limited service it proposes to provide from now on.

Like I say, Hazel - the theory is all very well. In any new world order the left wants to achieve, we'd need the practice as well.