As Labour’s polling figures continue to fall towards impending catastrophe, the drumbeat of frustration from ordinary people across North East Hertfordshire is becoming deafening.
Every day my inbox is flooded with a spate of messages from constituents saying how useless our Conservative predecessors were, how hopeful they had been for better from Labour, and how disappointed they are that their experience under our government to date has simply felt like more of the same old inadequacies.
More in Common recently found that just a quarter of voters expect the government to improve the local communities. This correlates pretty neatly with the pervasive sense from the public that their views, concerns, and aspirations for their local area are at best treated as irrelevant and often disregarded with contempt.
From the destruction of the countryside next door to make way for housing far too expensive for local families to afford, to consultations that are little more than rubber stamping exercises, people are understandably sick of an unholy alliance between corporate profiteering and central diktat stripping them of their agency and failing to improve their lives.
Fortunately, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill offers a golden opportunity to deliver the fundamental shift in the balance of power, so central to Labour’s historic mission.
I have joined forces with grassroots campaigners like Rights Community Action, the Friends of the Earth, and the Town and Country Planning Association to call for a new Charter for Community Rights to be put at the heart of this legislation.
Containing seven key rights designed to put power back in the hands of ordinary people, the Charter offers a starting point to restoring popular agency in our democracy. Each right is based on clear legal proposals often already in place in other countries, and each builds upon long-standing demands stretching back into England’s history.
The seven components of the Charter for Community Rights are:
1. A right to a clean and healthy environment
2. A right to a healthy home
3. A right to play
4. A right to grow food on public sector land
5. A right to roam and swim
6. A right to participate in decisions shaping communities
7. A right to challenge local decisions.
Ever since the working-class were pushed into the filthy overcrowded slums of industrial cities, ordinary families have been demanding a future in which lives are no longer blighted by cramped, polluted, dangerous conditions.
After years of scandals, with ordinary people powerless to stop sewage being pumped into local rivers or their children being poisoned by the air they breathe, the right to a clean environment would give every community the power to challenge proposals threatening to impose pollution on them and sue rogue landlords who fail to remedy dangerous mould and damp.
Similarly, the right to a healthy home would put an end to the era in which permitted development rights have been used to create slums of the future. These “dwellings” in ageing office blocks and isolated industrial estates are used to house the most vulnerable in society without adequate space, security, fire safety, or proper ventilation. With the Charter, communities could require that new housing delivers the basics of a happy healthy life with plenty of natural light, access to green space, and comfort in all weathers.
The freedom to go out the front door and play in the street or near home is no longer a normal part of most children’s lives, as it used to be. The right to play would flip the script on estates full of signs shouting “No” and “Do not”, which have more space given to car parking than playgrounds for kids. It would empower communities to ensure streets are designed to be safe for children, so they are no longer stuck indoors, missing out on the all the joy of physical activity, new skills and challenges, friendships, independence, a sense of belonging to their communities.
Ever since Parliaments packed with landowners in the 18th and 19th centuries privatised away seven million hectares of common land shared by ordinary people, the ability to grow your own healthy food has been a distant dream for millions. The right to grow food on public land, championed by Incredible Edible, would unleash the power of grassroots growers currently held back by bureaucracy to turn parcels of unloved land across our communities into oases of food and wildlife.
Similarly, while most of England is still owned by a handful of aristocrats, oligarchs and corporations, the vast majority of us are prevented from enjoying the glories of vast swathes of England’s countryside. Building on the working-class activism of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of nearly 100 years ago, the right to roam and swim would finally recognise that this land is our land and would give everyone the confidence to reconnect with nature by enjoying a responsible ramble or dip in their local river unmolested.
Finally, the right to participate in and challenge decisions would finally level the playing field between the communities who care deeply about their local area and the interests of profit-seeking developers. Too often the odds are stacked so overwhelmingly in the favour of speculative developers that common-sense and the hopes of local people for genuinely sustainable development go out of the window in the rush to “build baby build”. These rights would ensure that the voices of ordinary people are properly heard and that they can appeal decisions just as developers can, so that local councils listen seriously to all sides rather than always acceding to the whims of overmighty corporations.
As others have written, Labour should be changing capitalism, not accommodating it. That change must not just be a revolution of structures but also of the heart. Across our country ordinary people show time and again through grassroots initiatives the route to a future in which communities don’t just survive but flourish. For the last two decades a toxic mix of centralisation and deregulation has left them feeling ignored, disrespected and disempowered. It is time for real change, with a Charter of Community Rights that tips the scales in the other direction and puts power back in the hands of the people.
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Chris Hinchliff is the Member of Parliament for North East Hertfordshire and a signatory of Mainstream's Founding Statement.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
