Friday, 30 September 2005

Neighbourhood governance conference

Conf_leafletNeighbourhood governance and community engagement, CDF conference, London 22 November - this event has been postponed. I will announce a new date (likely to be Frebruary 2006) in due course.

30 Sep 2005 15:39:59 | Governance and participation, Neighbourhood relations

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Neighbourhood governance conference * THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED * I will announce a new date (likely to be February 2006) in due course. ----------------- I’m organising a UK national conference on neighbourhood governance, on behalf of Community Development Foundation. It will take place at the Kings Fund Centre, central London, 22 November 2005. The event will be chaired by Carol Hayden, Associate Director, Shared Intelligence. Speakers include Charles Woodd from the Civil Renewal Unit of the Home Office, providing a government perspective on the community sector’s role in neighbourhood governance; and Susie Hay, regeneration and participation consultant, who will discuss the importance of informal networking at local level. We will be playing the neighbourhood governance game, devised by David Wilcox and Drew Mackie with a little help from yours truly. A research perspective will be provided by Paul Hilder from the Young Foundation and Paul Skidmore from Demos. A panel including representatives of local organisations will contribute to a discussion in the concluding session. I’ll link to further information as soon as it becomes available, but please email Cheryl Roberts at CDF if you want to make sure you get that information directly. Meantime, ODPM have just published a leaflet offering an introduction to the Why neighbourhoods matter discussion document that sparked it all off.
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Parish councils and neighbourhood governance At their recent conference the chief exec of the National Association of Local Councils supported the idea of neighbourhood arrangements as part of the renewed drive to bring about change in local government. "Within this focus," he argued, "parish and town councils should be able to take on more services from other tiers of local government, if they so wish." (Emphasis added). Now NALC, in collaboration with the Commission for Rural Communities have released their Ideas Paper on the Neighbourhood Governance Review. "This paper argues that the Government needs to link parishes strongly into local government policy and delivery, but also into the local voluntary and community sector and the wider community capacity building agenda. There are dangers that without building and supporting these linkages parish policy could fall between the gaps of Government department responsibilities." The paper calls for the government "to provide a distinctive narrative and reform programme for parish and town councils." As might be expected, it also calls for funding support for training and related development for the parish and town council sector, and there is reference to capacity building, although I have still yet to see any link across to the role of the Academy for Sustainable Communities. From where I've been sitting - just outside the loop for the past three months - I think it's fair to say that the local government voice has been totally dominant in the debate so far, with the parish and community sectors peripheralised and having difficulty keeping up with what's going on. We begin to detect a little shuffling of others trying to get to the front, as it were. Thanks to Martin Dudley for the alert.

Kevin Harris

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