Neighbourhoods

Caution: is your community legal?

This is fun. According to the LGiU,

‘The good folks at Eland House have a problem on their hands. The official line is that the Localism Bill has been delayed by “parliamentary congestion”. There’s also speculation, however, that the Bill is being delayed because some of its content is creating a headache for the civil servants. One of the most interesting sticking points is providing a legal definition of what a community is.’

While I was still rolling around on the floor helpless with laughter, visualising the desperate policing of various kinds of illegal communities ('excuse me sir, I have reason to believe you have nothing in common with the people at no.38'), my old mate Gabriel Chanan who has worked alongside these hapless officials and has perhaps more sympathy with their plight, saw a glimmer of an opportunity and fired-off the following snippet of wisdom to The Times:

Sir, Civil servants preparing the Localism Bill for the government are said to be having difficulty defining what a community is so that it can be given legal powers. This is promising. A community cannot be given legal powers because it is not an entity. It is a description of a certain (or more often uncertain) state of relationships amongst the population of a locality or some other group with interests in common. The only population-based entity to which you can give legal powers in a locality is a community organisation of one sort or another. This ought to throw the spotlight onto the question of the relationship between such an organisaton and the rest of the local population. So when the government, in Big Society mode, says it will enable ‘communities’ to take over a public service, the question should immediately arise of what does that community  organisation need to do to show that it is acting in the interests of the whole local population, and what responsibility necessarily remains with the relevant public authority to ensure this. Communities as a whole do not and cannot take over public services. Community organisations can collaborate with public authorities to deliver the services better.

Gabriel Chanan, www.pacesempowerment.co.uk

Who knows if they'll publish it, but I have.

A crisis of volunteer management?

Yesterday I was at a conference in which representatives from the voluntary sector in south London were seeking understanding about big society. Today I was at something quite different - the launch of a substantial paper on poverty and social exclusion in later life by the Centre for Social Justice.

On both occasions I was struck by a clear common sub-theme in the discussion: people involved in the management and support of volunteers are getting very agitated as their work is getting hacked away and its validity seems not even to be debated.

What seems to be happening is that public sector funding cuts are eroding systematic management of the volunteer force rapidly. This is consistent which what some people see as the big society ethos: process hardly seems to matter any more. Big society isn't bothered how stuff happens, as long as people get out there and do it. Against that, volunteer managers speak from experience when they insist that volunteers need management, support, regulation, training and so on.

I think it's fair to say that a significant proportion of the volunteer force comes from the traditional conservative philanthropic base, not from community action so there's an interesting new political take on this.

But having railed against the over-formalisation of human and social systems for years, even I am starting to feel a little queasy about the wild ride we're all going to have as the free-for-all involvement culture takes over.

Discussing big society without using the words 'big society'

A couple of days ago someone posted this note on the East Dulwich Forum (a very popular local site which covers an area in south London):

sweep your own leaves, clean your own ice and snow: saving the council money balancing the budget

Posted by ataubin November 14, 04:48PM

At the Community Council Meeting on 10 November at St Faith's we were told Southwark has to cut 80 million from its budget. But where? What if we make East Dulwich a trial, a model for community (tiny) action that saves mega bucks? If every one sweeps the leaves and clears the ice and snow from the 8 metres in front of their property the council would save up to 10 million pounds. Yes, you read that correctly: 10 million if everyone did it. Seems a small action to me to save a lot of money. In an entire year it might take one hour? two?. No leaf blowers, no trucks. 10 million saved...

The sequence of responses encapsulates a number of the standard responses to big society, including for example -

The Perverse-Logic rejection:

'there would need to be a shed load of money spent to advertise this so people knew they had to'

(which seems to deny the power of the local online network itself to do this bit for nothing).

The Naive-Detection-of-Fatal-Flaw parry:

'Great idea and no problem doing it but my street has quite a lot of older people living on it. Would they be expected to clear up? If they don't then how will it work with half the street clear and the rest not?'

The I-Couldn't-Possibly-Where-Are-The-Servants? riposte (not for the novice, a difficult niche genre this one but supremely performed here):

'I don't mean to be unhelpful but I own neither broom nor shovel (dustpan and brush aside). Having traversed the mulchy leaves in frippantly high heels, I know this is a task that needs doing, but I'm afraid my tools are not fit for purpose.'

The We're-So-Rubbish-In-This-Country-Other-Places-Do-It-Better standard proclamation:

'In Germany and parts of the US and Canada you have to clear the path in front of your house of snow by law.'

The Informative-Intervention by a ward councillor:

'The Snow code highlights good practice to clear snow from pavements and paths such that you can avoid being successfully sued - which is a commonly given reason for people saying why they haven't cleared the pavement outside their home.'

The Calm-Sensible-Intervention by same:

'Their (sic) will never be enough council employees to clear all pavements outside homes - hundreds of kilometres of pavements.
But if residents clear the pavement outside their home the effects of the snow would be dramatically reduced. This really helps reduce peoples isolation.'

The Defence-Of-Jobs-Above-All-Else deflection:

'I presume more people would be made unemployed by this thus money would have to be spent supporting them and their families?'

The Completely-Miss-The-Point-Damnd-If-I-Will blurting-out (exquisitely executed in this example):

'Considering the amount of council tax we pay I personally wont be sweeping any leaves or clearing ice from the streets or taking part in any other activity that is supposedly covered by my paying of council tax.'

And the Thin-End-Of-The-Wedge kneejerk:

'How far do we go with this? Self-policing? That would save billions!'

Ooops, I nearly overlooked this -

The Timid-Reassertion-Of-The-Basic-Idea:

'But if we all did our bit in sweeping leaves, clearing snow etc that can be regarded as a physical, non financial, contribution to the local area that avoids an increase in local taxes. As an added benefit we might get to know our neighbours, help out th elderly who were unable to sweep / clear and perhaps as an added bonus everyone would take a little more civic pride intheir immediate vicinity.'

 

'Local solutions to local problems'?

Weather's turning cold, time for a precautionary draught of Kev's Traditional Grumpy Old Cynicism.

Among the happy-clappy mantras trotted out so readily in the present policy context is this one: 'local solutions to local problems'. As with 'there is no money' and 'we're all in this together', all a politician has to do is regurgitate this and shake a few hands, and apparently-intelligent beings fold away like reeds before the prow.

I observe that a lot of poverty that can be witnessed today is experienced as a local problem, well it would be wouldn't it, to which people are not able to find a local solution. Cos there's this thing called the economy, and it doesn't simply operate at the local level.

Or you might not like to think about poverty, so let's take transport. Major roads affect traffic flows indirectly causing damage in local areas, which sometimes local people are powerless to do much about. There may be a regional solution, but often not a local one. And so on.

It's not a new observation, even on this blog. Five years ago I posted some thoughts on neighbourhood governance after a meeting at which the point was made that residents in a given locality have to be able to intervene at levels other than their own. And I noted that people were uncomfortable with the requirement to have neighbourhood boundaries defined in order to ensure representation and therefore accountability.

Well well, plus ca change. The recent Local growth white paper includes the idea for 'neighbourhood plans' - around boundaries that the government doesn't want to have the responsibility for deciding. Here at para 3.9 is the stated intention of

giving every neighbourhood the chance to shape its own development through the creation of neighbourhood plans, which will give local communities greater flexibility and the freedom to bring forward more development than set out in the local authority plan.

'The freedom to bring forward more development'? Who are these people comprising 'neighbourhoods' who are so determined to surround themselves with more development? Could there be a connection with this point made by Domenic Donatantonio on the Planning blog? -

in a bid to scythe through red tape, the government has said it will provide incentives to ensure that local communities benefit from development, raising the dangerous spectre of cash payments to buy off frustrated neighbours.

And here's Huw Morris on Planning daily in the second of two provocative articles (the previous one is here):

For planners, the big number from the big society will come with the onset of neighbourhood plans. The final bill for these as yet unproven tools depends on the size and shape of each authority.

However, the cost of producing each neighbourhood plan is likely to be at least £30,000, while some commentators put it at closer to £80,000. Another estimate puts the number of rural and urban neighbourhoods affected by the localism bill at 18,000.

Even on the most conservative estimates, this suggests £540 million will be needed to secure national coverage. At a stroke, planning could be transformed from an income stream into a big spending service.

If such figures are plucked out of the air, this is inevitable. The government has failed to offer any kind of cost-benefit analysis of its proposals. However worthy the principles and visions of a particular policy, such a lacuna in an age of austerity is staggering. It is just the type of oversight that leads to unintended and damaging consequences.

I submit that there's been some naive policy thinking which will lead to tears. It's not helped by thinking of 'communities' as some kind of 'here's-one-I-prepared-earlier' consensus, nor by pretending that local problems are necessarily going to have local solutions.

To me, it makes sense to invest in community development that is geared to helping people work towards consensus in decision-making contexts in the respected and respectful company of professionals; and also to equalise genuine participation, co-design and co-delivery through the area and regional forums that will remain necessary in order for people to have a say in decisions on a wider geographical scale than the neighbourhood.

 

Locality, diversity, and internet use

A new study published by Keith Hampton and colleagues confirms that internet use has little if any negative impact on the diversity of people’s networks. There are now fewer and fewer voices claiming that internet use will lead to the rapid descent of the human race into dysfunctional incommunicative bestiality (religious leaders and academics like John Locke in his book The devoicing of society have tried to spread misguided alarmism). Things have settled down a bit lately and hopefully with this research, based on and reinforcing last year's Pew study (which I reviewed here), we can all get back to what we were doing.

(Image from).

The article assesses network diversity and technology use in relation to participation in traditional social settings including public spaces, semi-public spaces, religious institutions, voluntary groups, and through neighbourhood ties. It concludes that the use of social media primarily supports diverse networks through participation in these settings. On the whole, internet users have networks that are more diverse than those who do not use the internet, although causality cannot be demonstrated definitively:

There may be bi-directionality; use of traditional social settings may drive some technology use, which in turn drives more use of the settings.

The importance of local place is thoroughly re-confirmed, even without reference to neighbourhood online sites:

The findings show only limited evidence that place-based relations have less resonance with Internet users; this was in one setting (neighborhoods) for one type of technology (social networking sites) – and an alternative explanation, as has been found in other research (Hampton, 2007), is that those with few neighborhood ties are more likely to adopt social media... Place is not lost as a result of the affordances of new technologies, but place-based networks are reinforced and made persistent.

The authors go on to conclude that social networks may be more persistent now than at any point in modern history.

ICTs afford relationship maintenance in ways that reduce the likelihood that ties will ever become completely dormant. Unlike in the past, when networks of high school and neighborhood ties were abandoned with marriage (Kalmijn, 2003) or migration (Hagan et al.,1996), it is increasingly likely that both the relation and the content of the relation’s messages remain persistent over time as “friends” on social networking services and as data stored and engaged with online. As our finding about the use of social networking services suggests, this directly benefits network diversity and access to social capital.

 

Neighbourhood action: extreme make-do

I don't pay enough attention to David Barrie's blog, and I know why. It's because his content is so rich I tend to tiptoe round the edges for fear I'm going to get swept under, in fact I know the current of ideas could draw me in to a few months' absorbing learning and no deadlines met. Just his use of images - I feel like I'm being led down several conceptual channels at the same time and I ought to be able to handle that, but.

My loss. Anyway, I was held up on whatever I thought I was supposed to be doing, by this pic David took of what he calls the 'extreme make-do' approach to economic reality - 'local scale, small pieces of tactical activity'. It happens to be an Athens parking lot, that had been squatted and transformed into a neighbourhood park by a grassroots citizens' initiative. More.

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

In the debate at yesterday's launch of nef's paper on big society there was a lot of confusion about philanthropy, mutual aid and community action. Each of these at some point seemed to be implied by speakers and comments from the floor in using the short-hand but inadequate term 'charities' (or 'small charities'); and sometimes covered by the term 'volunteers'.

Each of these forms of involvement tries to compensate for the shortfall in formal support or otherwise complement the role of the state, and is assumed to be unpaid. However, they may differ very markedly - in political ideology for example and obviously in the degree to which they aspire to empower or in practice disempower. It's also obvious that they are unevenly distributed in localities across the country. As I've suggested before, in some places it will be relatively easy to mobilise philanthropic volunteering while in others it could prove very hard to sustain even the proudest tradition of mutual aid.

Guardian Society editor Patrick Butler was the only one to come close to unpacking this in his short talk, sending me back to a seminal paper by Gabriel Chanan called Taken for granted, published in 1991.

Taken for granted was important because it revealed the distinction between volunteering based on a philanthropic tradition (ie something which comes from the surplus that 'well-motivated people' donate to others who they see as less fortunate than themselves); and community action which arises from people's own life-support needs, being

occupied in looking after children, elderly people, sometimes people with disabilities, and in doing the whole range of unpaid work which is taken for granted in the running of society - cooking, shopping, cleaning, maintaining social networks, 'emotional housekeeping', protecting local interests and the many other forms of essential activity which we take for granted as the basis for our common existence.

Gabriel went much further, locating the cause of the confusion over the community and voluntary sectors in the economic value placed on unpaid work:

All this tends to confirm the conventional definition of economic activity and to reinforce the image of the 'inactive' half of the population as being passive dependents of the 'active' half.

Sounds sort-of familiar. Twenty years on, here we are contemplating a forced revision of that conventional definition of economic activity against a cacophony of complaints about the economically 'inactive'. It's not a good time to be blurring our understanding of the different agents who can bring about that revision.

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

'many of the charities that the big society will rely on will be dead, dying or missing in action.'

This brings an urgency to the necessary examination of that word 'charities', and perhaps we have to move the big society emphasis away from philanthropy that disempowers, to mutual aid and community action that drives and makes possible the development of skills, confidence, trust, tolerance, co-production, and local economies that include caring.

 

How's business?

I wouldn't expect to see hairdressers advertising on posts in the street, but these are difficult times.

 

 

Accept no substitute

This paper by Anna Coote, published today, is quite simply the best statement on big society yet, IMHO.

In her presentation at today's launch, she emphasised that big society cannot be seen as separate from the public spending cuts:

'Big society and the cuts are all about replacing paid with unpaid labour.'

'When things go wrong, there is a grave risk that we shall only hear the voices of those who can shout loudest or whip up the most colourful media outrage.'

'We must not undermine the support systems already out there'.

The main concern of most civil society organisations, she argues, is that

'efforts to reduce the deficit will undermine the very networks and groups that are most needed as life gets tougher for those who are already the most disadvantaged.'

Coote's conclusion was that:

'The cuts make the best ideals of the big society impossible to realise.'

 

CD creates £2.16 of value for every £1 invested

CDF have just published the summary of a social return on investment project carried out by nef which apparently shows that for each £1 invested in community development activities, £2.16 of social and economic value is created. And that for every £1 a local authority invests in a community development worker, £6 of value is contributed by community members in volunteering time.

I'm reminded that back in 1992 John Bell and Gabriel Chanan came up with a figure of 14.9 hours of voluntary action generated per hour of community development. Work reported in the Netherlands in 1989 suggested a ratio of 15.8:1.

We couldn't do much with that data now, and this new study is obviously timely. Community development workers and their allies acrosss the country need to get their hands on the figures from this study, and use them to minimise the damage caused by uninformed funding cuts that threaten to remove the catalysts for genuine empowerment, co-production and civic involvement.