Mainstream says ‘our broken democracy must be remade through pluralism and dispersing power as widely and deeply as possible’. So, a guarded welcome for the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (EDEB) currently making its way through Parliament. It is full of proposals to devolve power to local government but that is where it stops. Apart from a provision for buying community assets, the Bill is silent on sharing power directly with citizens and our urgent need for a bottom up process of reform.
By contrast the recent Equality Trust report on Money, Media and the Lords1 gets to the heart of the matter with two key recommendations centred on building neighbourhood democracy:
Labour has a long tradition of community empowerment, represented in the 1920s by the Guild Socialist movement and its most eloquent advocate, G.D.H Cole, who argued for overcoming the division between state and civil society2.In the early 1980s, when Labour councils were fighting off a predatory Tory government determined to weaken their powers and influence, David Blunkett, then leader of Sheffield City Council, called for local government workers to embrace community action:
‘Helping the residents themselves to give expression to complex needs…is an essential part of regenerating our city… supporting their collective contribution to the life and well being of their neighbourhood. The aim is not only to provide resources which can be managed by locally based volunteers. Equally it must be to jointly determine a framework in which all the intricate dimensions of the City’s mainline policies are accountable to their users and subject to their democratic participation’3.
Following this line of thought and concerning more broadly how public services and especially personal services could be delivered to improve well being and the relationships between service users and providers , Hilary Cottam sets out a vision for re-inventing the welfare state from the bottom up in Radical Help, arguing quite simply that ‘Our existing welfare systems are not designed for collaboration…But when we designed systems that made collaboration simple and we provided tools that participants instinctively wanted to show their friend or share with their neighbour, people wanted to join in4.
Although the drafters of the English Devolution bill seem blissfully unaware of it, there is a stream of thinking developed by Cole, Blunkett, Cottam and many others that is being turned into exciting new ideas and practices in community empowerment. Locality, with its plan for community powered neighbourhoods, and Citizen Network are just two of the leaders in developing concrete approaches to bottom up democracy, setting out how ‘people can share power equitably and engage on an informed and inclusive basis in cooperative problem-solving'5.
Three ideas, in particular, link and underpin the movement for grass roots change across the country:
1. Community wealth building - investing in localities, promoting the circulation of money within communities and building local economic capacity while reducing dependence on irresponsible capital, as advocated by Preston’s civic leaders.6
2.participatory budgeting: devolving budgets and building local capacity for managing resources, a well established approach in Brazil
3. creating coops to run public services, a model that Rotterdam has developed.
Which services do I mean? Everything:
Schools, colleges, social care, primary health care, child care and family hubs, community canteens and food shops, youth services. Retrofitting housing. Revitalising town and city centres. Community capacity building to develop the legions of people needed in every locality to carry through these reforms. But there is a limit to what can be achieved without reinvesting in local services, badly hit by the Tories’ austerity drives.7
Of course, there are so many pressing changes demanding our attention, including national policies to promote equality between regions, cities and towns, introducing proportional representation at every level and changes to the way political parties operate including democratisation of the Labour Party. But they need to go alongside and complement bottom up changes to our system of government. That is why we should focus on two key principles that should be embodied in the English Devolution bill:
Finally, it is worth mentioning that government could learn a lot from itself. The thinking behind Labour’s new £5b. Pride in Place programme of urban regeneration is rooted in the belief in community empowerment. To gain access to this major new source of funding, communities and local authorities must first demonstrate that their schemes are run by a neighbourhood board representing the community as well as other stakeholders in which all members have an equal vote.
References:
1. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-base/money-media-and-lords/
2. See Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (1994), Policy Press p.101
3. David Blunkett, Building from the Bottom: the Sheffield Experience, Fabian Tract 491, 1983, p.26
4. Hilary Cottam, Radical Help (2019), Virago p.274
5. https://locality.org.uk/reports/community-powered-neighbourhoods and https://citizen-network.org/work/citizen-democracy
6. Sheffield City Council is among several other Labour authorities adopting this approach.
7. As a result of the coalition's cuts to local government grant funding, spending power in local authorities fell by almost a quarter in real terms between 2010/11 and 2019/20. The population grew in that time, meaning that spending power per person fell even further, by 28.8% in real terms.’ https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have english-councils-funding-and-spending-changed-2010-2024
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Martin Yarnit, based in Sheffield, is a veteran member of Compass and a specialist in public procurement and food hubs.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
