Neighbourhoods

Local services and priorities matter

I'm never quite sure about Ipsos MORI. The last event of theirs that I managed to get into featured the Home Secretary among the speakers, security was high, and there was some strange interference on my phone when I tried to use it just before the start.

Nah, sure there's nothing in that. Nor in the fact that they wouldn't give me a place at the launch of their Local report recently. Still, the next time one of their researchers came to the door (the second in a couple of weeks) and didn't offer any interesting reflections on neighbourhoods I decided I didn't have time for his questions. (And as noted here in passing, they don't always do good stuff).

Anyway here's what the MORI folk have done with the existing place survey data, augmented with some other stuff they got their hands on, and there are interesting messages put forward:

• Local services really matter to a sense of place: satisfaction with local services seems to be strongly related to overall views of the area and other key outcomes.

• Taking visible action on local priorities is vital. The more people feel that their priorities drive local improvement, the better perceptions are of local public service providers.

• There are clear signs that the biggest impact on perceptions of influence would not be actions that involve a small number of people very deeply, but rather better communications that reach a much wider group.

• There is a clear theme around seeking out views and acting as a result of seeking those views. This is particularly pertinent to crime and antisocial behaviour. The areas that are seen as doing best are those also proactively looking for feedback.

• The feeling that local people treat each other with respect, and, related to this, that parents have good disciplinary control over their children, come out as important to a number of key outcomes. A focus on young people and family/parental support seems likely to yield particular dividends in resident satisfaction.

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)

Place survey: the headlines

Headline results from the 2008 Place Survey, which reflects and contributes to local priorities under local area agreements in England, have been published today.

• 59 per cent of the population felt they belong to their immediate neighbourhood

• 76 per cent felt that people from different backgrounds got on well together in their local area

• 29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area

• 30 per cent feel that in their local area parents take enough responsibility for the behaviour of their children

• 31 per cent felt that there were problems with people in their local area not treating one another with respect and consideration (37.5% in London).

Links to various formats here.

A game about community resources

I devised and ran a game the other day for library staff and community sector representatives in Cornwall. It was part of a workshop over two days and the purpose was to explore the implications of and context for a civic/community resource in the centre of a town. What follows is a short description of what happened.

We began in plenary by inventing a town with certain features, and a few neighbourhoods with a range of unspecified social problems. We then turned our attention to trying to describe the features of an ideal neighbourhood for the residents of that town: somewhere safe, clean, friendly, informed and connected, with a viable local economy, quality housing, good levels of health and so on. We grouped these 'attributes of community' into four headings: social and community, local economy, learning and recreation, and communication.

Next we explored the institutions at work in the town - some, like the college, operating town-wide and some, which I dealt as cards to each of three groups, at neighbourhood level. All participants helped plot the roles of the institutions (a drug advice centre, a mother and toddler group, youth centre, police community support officers, and so on) in relation to the four groups of desired attributes, plus the partnership links between them. As someone suggested and the pic seems to confirm, in this fictional world, everything's joined up.

Then they got to work describing in more detail the rather unfortunate particulars of their grotty and deprived neighbourhoods - levels of crime, disorder, educational under-attainment, mortality, poor housing, the works. They scored each area for the four attributes on a matrix of 'fragile, stable, or robust': almost entirely fragile at this stage.

When this was done we went from table to table passing each neighbourhood and its problems to the next group, so that each inherited a new locality with its challenges to be addressed. I asked them to take on these challenges within a five year timeline, making reference to the role of the institutions whose laudable partnership work was by now graphically blu-tacked to the wall. What they were striving for was to work out how the existing range of local agencies, together with groups of residents, could somehow lift the neighbourhoods in a few years from their low scores on the matrix through 'stable' towards 'robust'. Ah, if only.

By this time we all had some idea of the gap between what could be achieved in the town and the aspirations for ideal local quality of life. So it was time for an announcement about a new source of funding for an agency to occupy a disused civic building in the centre of town. Participants were asked to work together to develop a bid to address the shortfall, including statement of purpose, critical success factors, proposals for management and governance, and an outline of specific projects and client groups.

This worked better than I'd dare hope. In order to prepare their part of the bid, participants had to get up and move between their groups to find out what the other groups were preparing; and they did.

Even better, those working on client groups and projects came up with something quite special. They invented a kind of community sector ideas incubator ('The Place'), where the initiatives of diverse community groups are nurtured and developed, occupying no permanent space in the venue but being nurtured there. Groups would come to and form around The Place, get help with connections, with sources of help and funding, and move on, on a community development model. Why such a role should not be seen as related to the role of a community library I don't know. I still think it has mileage, although even by the time I left the following afternoon, and we had worked hard on the meanings and potential of 'community library', those who had invented it still needed persuading of its worth.

What we had achieved I think was a mutual reassurance that a library can be a place that collaborates intensively with local people in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms.

Trooble at t'empowerment mill

Paul Evans, who set up the Local Democracy blog among various other things, invited me the other day to articulate how unwelcome it is for many people with problems in their lives to be the subject of demands to engage, to participate, and to have their say...

Nah, other stuff to do. Then I came across a note I wrote three years ago, quoting none other than David Miliband on empowerment:

"The challenge is to spread the sense of power and autonomy citizens feel over their lifestyles and values to other parts of their life, notably their interactions with public services, markets, and the community."

Good stuff to hear from a leading politician. But what I've been trying to get at is the point that too many people don't have much sense of power or autonomy over their lifestyles in the first place; so for many, maybe it's not necessarily the right place to start.

Will that do Paul?

Found difficult and left untried? Perspectives on participation and engagement

For me, one of the recurring puzzles in participation and community engagement is how little attention is paid to the benefits experienced by those who participate. I wonder if the widespread uncritical use of the C word has something to do with this: if you go round assuming that 'community=consensus' I suppose you expect the benefits to the individual to be somehow self-evident. But they ain't.

We've found that people do have views on the 'wifms' (what's in it for me), you just have to ask them. Bev Carter and I asked young people in Milton Keynes what sort of benefits might ensue to those who were active on the local issues. Among the responses:

Power
Diserplin
Make friends
Be popular
Have fun
Showing off
Right decisions
Achievements
New things
Get more respect
Feeling happy
Helping people
Express talent...

Among the perceived barriers to participation for these young people:

Getting into trubble
Age diffrence
Bitchieness
Bullying
Parents get worried
Racism...

If we are to understand the difficulties in establishing a sustainable culture of participation and involvement, surely we need to have a serious appreciation of the identifiable benefits at the individual level?

Over a year ago I noted that community engagement was starting to get some negative press, suggesting a need to distinguish its principles from managerialist practices in the public sector. If nothing else, that might mean that when we speak about engagement, we don't always adopt the service-centric view.

I'm revisiting these thoughts because JRF have just published a 'round-up paper' reviewing the evidence on citizen involvement in local governance. It's a clear and useful summary of JRF's work in this area, but guess what, it considers involvement from the perspective of service provision and decision-making. If we always do that, then this kind of conclusion is what we're going to get:

'Community involvement costs public services significant time and money. Communities volunteer their scarce time and limited resources, taking away their energies from other activities in their community. If neither providers nor communities are clear about the objectives nor perceive any impact on decisions, on service quality or on citizen satisfaction, the policy is not sustainable in the face of tightening finances and difficult decisions about resource allocation.'

This suggests, to paraphrase G K Chesterton, not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it will have been found difficult and left untried.

I can't help wondering if a different perspective might find community involvement economically, socially and morally indispensable.

Community involvement in planning

Wholly sensible article on Planning Resource by David Tittle, noting that it's now five years since the requirement for statements of community involvement (SCIs) in planning was enshrined in statute:

The best engagement develops residents' capacity to understand and plan the future of their place.

If planners' and urban design officers' time is not invested early to talk with local people and argue for positive design, it will only have to be spent later on trying to dig residents and councillors out of entrenched positions.

Active citizens and public services

I've been in Cornwall, working with library and community development workers on community engagement for Truro library. One of numerous themes to come out of some intensive discussion concerned the relationship between active citizenship, volunteering, and community action.

Someone raised awareness of a tension in the way volunteers are helping to prop up struggling services - or felt to be so doing - while the service is seeking to engage increasingly with residents active in local groups. What's the connection between those two categories?

'Active citizen' seems to be an umbrella term, popularised from political expediency in the 1980s, encompassing civic participation, community activity and volunteering. Essentially it distinguishes those who get involved (and who thereby, by implication, advance the interests of the state) from passive citizens who absorb what the state offers but do not contribute to the collective accomplishment of quality of life.

Volunteering is a form of active ciizenship at the less political (and often less ideological) end of the spectrum. In public services - such as in a public library - volunteers will be subject to expectations about their role that have to be accommodated by their managing agency. Their degree of engagement with or commitment to the service ethos can be shallow, or not perceived as critical.

Typically, a community activist by contrast is politically autonomous. They may be giving time, energy and expertise voluntarily but not perceive themselves as a 'volunteer'. Probably more consciously than the volunteer, they may be compensating for a shortfall in public provision; campaigning to increase or improve services; or otherwise, positioning community provision as distinct from public provision.

The activist could be contributing energy to a campaign against the council, at the same time as helping a different department with some issue of mutual interest. They engage on terms that are acceptable to themselves and to the 'community' to which they claim allegiance. It's political, innit.

Now that libraries are finding that the responsibilisation agenda pushes them towards both involving volunteers and engaging with activists - always to mutual advantage one hopes - will our understanding of these roles start to come into sharper focus? Do we need these subtle differences, these nuances in the relations between citizen and state provision? I suspect we do, very much, and the subtleties will increase not diminish.

Empowerment: but what about forces working in the other direction?

A couple of days before the captain jumped ship, the department for Communities and Local Government published a systematic review of the evidence on Empowering communities to influence local decision making.

There's a distinguished collection of researchers behind it, who point out that the community empowerment agenda is still in a nascent stage. But I worry that policy is only looking in one direction.

Local practitioners are a crucially important resource in developing this agenda and bringing it towards fruition.

It is important that government clarify the objectives of empowerment and give a sustained commitment to an agenda that may take a while deliver notable successes.

These simple messages imply the need for developing accessible, inclusive and facilitated strategies for empowerment. The community and voluntary sector and specifically community development techniques have an important role to play here.

The research identifies criteria that drive and define empowerment across six specific mechanisms - asset transfer, citizen governance, e-participation, participatory budgeting, petitions, and redress. There are two summaries - a short and a less-short - and it's useful stuff.

What bothers me is that government consistently and unproductively takes a mechanical approach to cultural problems. Much of our official culture is blindly disempowering, often in the misguided name of detached professionalism. Yes, getting these mechanisms right will make a difference, but what about all the embedded forces working in the other direction?

Last week I attended a meeting run by a division of a social services department, with nine or ten professionals around the table and three 'ordinary citizens'. It was a breathtaking demonstration of apparently unintentional disempowerment: the way the entrance of the citizens into the room was preceded by secret session about them; how one of them was told to keep quiet as she was 'not part of the process'; the lack of welcome or explanation of process; the negative body language; the turning away as they left; the 'wait outside please' to be followed by a communicated 'decision', which itself in turn was unclear; the failure to thank them for coming or to recognise their expertise or commitment.

These were neutral residents who were trying to help with certain social problems. How would the structures of disempowerment be cranked up for people who were perceived guilty of some misdemeanour, I wondered.

Such processes coagulate around bureaucracies, and even working across disciplines the participants fail to notice what has happened to the way they treat human beings. It all contributes to a terribly constraining culture of disempowerment all around us. Could we please have a policy initiative designed to crack some of this open?

Maybe now is the time

Here's New Start's Clare Goff on the demise of the community empowerment bill (via Julian Dobson):

'Maybe now is the time for fresh ideas to revive the collective voice and rebuild politics from the grassroots up.'

Absolutely right. Quick thoughts on the democratic turmoil, starting with three angles on those expenses:

Some people (including one who really should know better) have suggested that the issue of MPs' expenses is 'not that important'. These are the ones telling us that we've all fiddled our expenses haven't we?

Well no, we haven't. For a start several million of us have never had expenses to fiddle, and I suggest a high proportion of the rest of us haven't done so. Especially where public money is concerned. So if you have a conscience problem, don't dribble it on the rest of us.

Then we have those telling us that continued exposure of this systematised greed risks 'making it impossible for people to regain their confidence in the democratic system.' The archbeak's piece in the Times is in my view not as bad a piece of thinking as you might suppose from the broadcast headlines - but still, it's a bit feeble to tell us to stop pointing out where the cracks are in democracy just because we might make them worse. The cracks are the problem, not the publicising of them.

There's a third angle which claims that our political system is less corrupt than many others around the world, so stop making such a fuss. Duh.

And those holding any of the above viewpoints are, I suggest, part of the problem.

Three significant themes seem to be missing or understated in the debate so far. First, clarifying the connection with the unregulated greed of financiers which led to the recession; and understanding the extent to which all this greed was given room to grow in the fertile soil of Thatherite individualism, and has been shamelessly tended and nurtured under new Labour.

Secondly, emphasising that many claims made 'within' the crooked legalities of the parliamentary system reflect a decline or absence of acceptable values. Where is the discussion about values in public life, where the code of behaviour which MPs could reasonably be expected to sign up to?

And thirdly, returning to Clare Goff's point, we need to be linking this to the crisis of democracy at local level. The current shambolic state of Westminster is an opportunity for a fresh and vigorous exploration of a new kind of democracy. It will have to be a conversational democracy with a strong local dimension, and inclusive social media have an obvious role to play in helping us shape that. I want this debate to be wide open with low expectations of particular practical conclusions - let's have many thousands of flowers blooming so that creativity can take its chance.

But we must also take careful account of the alarming proportion of young people who betray a profound sense of detachment and have never inhabited a democratic culture. Speaking to one group last week I had the sense that their experience of influencing the decision-making processes that affect them has been so scarce that they might feel threatened by almost any form of empowerment. All their relationships are shallow, they have difficulty with conflicting ideas, and they have little experience of organising, being organised, self-organisation, or organisations. They have been failed.

I can't be the only one to see a connection here. This is about the long-term neglect of everyday democracy, and it's payback time.

(And to be perfectly clear, I am very definitely not categorising all or even most young people in this way. See previously eg 'Kids these days').

Invisible mutual support at the margins

Last night I was talking to a group of eight Somali men and one woman who are active in supporting members of their faith/ethnic-origin group locally. We started by talking about the range of more formal participative roles they play, and in the circumstances it's fair to say I was genuinely surprised - running youth activities, English classes, formal interpreting roles, organised volunteering with people with special needs, school governing roles, community centre committee, fire service volunteering and so on. And in much of this an integrating role was being played, working with other identifiable social groups.

If I hadn't been expecting quite so much at the formal end of the spectrum, in a seriously disadvantaged group in a meanly marginalised locality, I was more fascinated when we got on to informal support.

One man spoke about the number of calls and visits or encounters that he fields from other Somalis around. Broadly, these are requests for support, from people who are accustomed to an oral culture and a very different language, in the face of bureaucratic requirements - to do with school conditions, housing needs, what is this form about? why do I have to show my passport at the doctor's surgery? - that sort of thing.

Often these calls lead to the activist having to accompany the individual on a visit to an office and interpret, and can be very time-consuming. This voluntary role is compensating heavily for the inadequacy of the bureaucracies, for the shortfall in formal social provision. Nothing new there, this is a classic example of invisible mutual support, and to some extent of course it's healthy for social networks to be stimulated at the interface with services.

So I asked for a considered assessment of the number of such calls and visits in a typical day. We spent some time discussing it because I really wanted the figures to reflect reality and not be exaggerated for my benefit. Two people said about ten (often rising to fourteen or higher), one said about eight, others less. The total among these nine people (one of them a recent arrival to this country so less involved) was 39, and this was not of course a fully representative group.

When we've extrapolated from such figures to weekly, monthly, or annual estimates of internal community support in the struggle against poverty and marginalisation, there are old questions we need to be asking afresh.

Like, how much more do we expect people to do on their own behalf? What would it take for the state to remove the risk of this system collapsing from exhaustion, and to reduce the burden? Where precisely should that resource be invested? And how come all this effort seems not to make any difference over time?

Participation: levels and barriers

I was talking to a group of seven or eight older people the other day, who were all active in social and civic roles in an area where most had lived for more than ten years (some more than thirty years).

There was clear consensus among the group that local people were neither more nor less likely to get involved now than they were 20 years ago. 'It's still five per cent,' was one man's way of summing it up.

People spoke about barriers to participation, and got quite worked up about the impact of CRB checks, the amount of documentation you have to read to be an active citizen, and the compensation culture:

There's far more stuff you have to read. Strategies and risk analyses. Society can be so litigious, that keeps people back a bit. People are generally wary of this compensation culture, the blame culture...

It was noted that scout groups, for example, have great difficulty recruiting volunteers, and village fetes are in decline because of the insurance costs.

So there are powerful forces working against participation, and yet these experienced folk felt that levels of involvement had not really changed. What's going on then?

Perhaps previously the barriers to participation were lower but the opportunities and calls for involvement were fewer. Was there more social and cultural participation (local societies, faith group involvement, sports clubs) and less civic participation? Or does it just seem that way now because we're trying to force civic participation and finding levels of social involvement inadequate? Presumably there were also higher levels of union and political party membership, which could more readily be mobilised into political participation.

These questions highlight the need to understand if people progress from social to political participation (which seems the more likely direction, if there is one); and if so, how and why they do so. Wouldn't it be good if there was some well-funded research going on, which might give us insights into such questions? Ooh look, that's handy, Involve have announced just such a project. Presumably they'll be talking to older people.

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

I’ve been gathering some thoughts for a session on empowerment and participation with some MA students at Staffordshire Uni this week, which has sent me back to Jacqui Karn’s excellent book Narratives of neglect. Fearful that I wouldn't do it justice, I failed to blog it at the time; but here are some belated thoughts based around some of my notes, covering two main themes: consensus and community; and cultural capital.

The book is an exploration of the processes of participation and governance in the regeneration of a Manchester estate. No-one I’ve mentioned it to in the participation field seems to have read it, which is a shame, because it's packed with insights.

I come at Karn’s analysis from the viewpoint that, from the time of the initial neighbourhood governance proposals, the government’s empowerment agenda was predicated on unrealistic assumptions that community could be construed to mean consensus.

Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.

‘This dual, contractual emphasis on encouraging compliance with a latent community and the control of an ungovernable minority legitimises the use of state agencies’ coercive powers against the “irresponsible.”’

Consensus becomes a question of ensuring (or even guaranteeing) similarity rather than recognising and working with difference. In my view this is an important point for understanding how the engagement agenda might fuse with the cohesion agenda.

The second key theme refreshes some of my own recent thinking about the lack of attention paid to cultural capital. Karn stressed the way power was reflected in the language and knowledge that participants brought to the process she described. She found that

‘The dominance of professional language and knowledge undermined residents’ position both in the partnerships and amongst fellow residents as they so clearly lacked the capital at stake in the process to be able to exert an authoritative voice.’

Karn argues that the professionals in the context she studied tended to conceive of the community as in close contact and united. She adds that they tend ‘to present their knowledge of local problems and solutions as incontestable.’

‘The power dynamics created by this difference in the knowledge claims of participants are particularly important in establishing that the capital at stake in this field is not social capital but cultural.’

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.

 

 

Here's another nice period of change you've gotten me into

We're all chewing over the kind of social and political change we're getting into. In a letter in Wednesday's Guardian, Jonathan Pugh suggested that 2009 could be a watershed year with the realisation that 'policies for collective social improvement can only be achieved collectively.'

That same day, Will Davies wrily posted on the new Labour approach to nitty-gritty social policy:

'New Labour has the political psychology of an infant that has yet to work out the difference between 'world' and 'self'. It removes its hands from its eyes, and believes it has just produced everything it sees.'

Will went on to ponder, a tad pessimistically perhaps, the political establishment's assimilation of the 'anti-economic':

'The final frontier of neo-liberalism ... is crossed once resolutely anti-economic modes of organisation and decision-making, which neo-liberals have historically been least convinced by, become embraced by those with the calculator.'

And while all this intellectual prowess was exercising itself in public, I was talking to a couple of dutch researchers in a London cafe about the way in which collective behaviour is now once again permissible, thanks largely to climate change and environmentalism - a trend detectable well before the recession and in my view not necessarily weakened by it.

Oh, and here's Indy Johar in a video interview, contemplating (3 or 4 minutes in) 'the rise of public man':

'The idea of validation through consumption will be challenged. Validation through civic participation will be more significant.'

That'll be the future then: to be continued.

'Digital engagement'

I've just written an article for the New Start blog about 'digital engagement'. The other day I asked a few people who were all likely to have useful things to say on the topic, to offer me comments or responses to a few questions.

One of the things that interested me was on the question of consultation cliques (sometimes unfortunately referred to as ‘usual suspects’). Poorly handled involvement can reinforce the separation of cliques from their supposed constituencies. I was curious as to whether people feel this is more likely or less likely to happen in a digital context.

I had the article more or less sorted last night, when into my mailbox there landed a note from Hugh Flouch, who runs Harringay Online (HoL), offering a characteristically case-based insight:

An example just tonight. About a month ago, one of our cabinet members tweeted about a new local community engagement framework. I hadn’t heard about it till I picked it up from Twitter. I added a post to the forum – robust debate – defence by councillor – offer of a meeting to discuss with HoL members – tonight was the discussion – about community engagement principles. About 75% of those round the table had never been “engaged” before having the digital enabler of HoL (and you can count me as one of those).

So let's just run through that again. Using digital media, the founder of a local online network finds out about a community engagement framework on which local people had not been consulted. By using the network he enables a debate which leads to a f2f meeting about the principles of community engagement, which in fact had been happening more as a result of the online network than for any other reason. And I had this information within an hour or so of the meeting.

The article is here.

Coming round

This blog was in a coma for five days - medical report from Typepad still awaited - so for once I will succumb to the temptation just to offer quick links to some good stuff going on.

What works in enabling cross-community interactions? Perspectives on good policy and practice. This is a paper by Andrew Orton for CLG as part of their work on meaningful interaction. It matters because it's about small-scale community activity and informal connections gradually getting some of the policy attention that is needed.

Dancing with Down syndrome - Hildy Gottlieb links to a striking video to remind us to keep pushing back at the Culture of Can’t.

The Eden Project has launched (more quietly than expected; one suspects there is some tense politics in the background) The Big Lunch - street parties everywhere on 19 July.

'The day after the Big Lunch, people will walk down their street and know someone in most windows.'

Paul Evans shows there's even benefit in a human being of the right calibre travelling to Miami, by coming back with knowledge about Mixed ink, which looks like a sweet way of stimulating civic involvement.

Helen Milner and colleagues have set up a blog on digital engagement (which I applaud) with an invitation to write yet another manifesto (which I don't). Manifestos (manifesti?) have a role, but it's usually to do with the process of structuring action around pricniples and surely we've come further than that. Maybe we should (a) dig out the three or four previous manifesto attempts in this country and be familiar with them, together with the recommendations of the shelf-and-a-half or reports that got generated (unh, mea culpa); and (b) assess what impact they had.

Julian Dobson quite rightly calls for more thought about the over-excited bashing of public sector language ('jargon'). The Local Government Association have got all lathered on this; or rather, I suspect, in New Labour style they are following some assumptions of popular media fancy. Reminded me of my wee challenge to the Plain English Mafia.

New research into participation, empowerment and social care

Today I was in Eindhoven relishing a new role as 'publication coach' for several PhD students carrying out research on social work themes. The expectation is that I help the researchers towards some form of publication. In return, the peculiar privilege is that I hear at an early stage about some significant research issues and findings in social care, empowerment and community development.

Like for example, this morning I heard about qualitative research into multi-disciplinary case conferences for vulnerable older people who live at home independently.

You might have five or six professionals clustered in a clinic, talking about an older person, in their necessary absence. The research explores the awkward disempowerment implied - 'on what grounds can you take these decisions on my behalf, and not tell me about them?'

Later I got to hear how participation in youth councils in the Netherlands might be percieved as spurious. According to the researcher, the rhetoric of involving young people in governance emphasises one of five discourses: representation, power, self development, responsibility, or efficiency. For example, a municipality might advance a policy of youth participation on the grounds of representation or simply of improving efficiency. The hypothesis is that tension between these approaches will have negative effects. As I understand it, the youth councils aren't exactly celebrated as empowering arenas as far as political decision-making processes are concerned, and there's a lot of room for understanding.

One of the researchers has been looking at the social networks and cultural capital of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. It seems that the power of their social capital is not in question: but low levels cultural capital, by comparison with Dutch entrepreneurs, are likely to be problematic. Most striking here is the extent to which the education system can be seen not as a platform for entrepreneurs, but as a mechanism for filtering them out.

Then I got to find out about how young people in vocational education experience citizenship, in the home, workplace, school, neighbourhood and leisure activities. The early impression is that they experience school as a sharply undemocratic environment, and this has a negative effect on their sense of citizenship for the future. if this is so, as a policy issue it's not trivial.

Finally, a chance to catch up with Laurens de Graaf, from Tilburg University, who I believe to be uniquely positioned with a wealth of research material to explore the similarities and differences between political and social participation. For example - is there really a clear gender distinction between community activists motivated by social involvement and those committed to civic governance roles? Do people migrate between the two? Is there a career path from one to the other? Do they share common values?

So I quite fancy this role of 'publications coach'. It requires good listening skills, ability to appreciate the research topic and methodology, and to place it in the context of other knowledge and social policy, and some familiarity with the literature. If I can encourage Laurens to pursue his questions, and the other researchers likewise to bring their results to publishable form, it will be more than rewarding.
 

Zap thy neighbour

Volunteers in a Suffolk village have been trained to use laser monitoring equipment, which records the speed and registration of passing vehicles, information which can then be passed to the police.

Such community speed watch schemes are a logical development of citizen involvement in policing. Another parish council decided not to be involved in the scheme because they felt that the public should not be expected to do the police's job.

“It involves quite a bit of cost to set up, we would be doing the police's job for them, you get people to stand out there in the cold and possibly catch their friends and neighbours which could cause problems.”

So once again the technology helps us focus in on the extent to which we've outsourced responsibilities for the co-production of safety and security in our neighbourhoods, to external formal agencies - and got so accustomed to it that we think it's right.

People are justified in getting agitated about the disregard with which motorists are allowed to speed through the neighbourhoods, but I wonder about a couple of things.

First, there's something sinister (but not deceitful) about the power of this technology to monitor other people's behaviour. Have we really worked hard enough at more human persuasive processes to encourage civility on the part of the cocooned motorist to other members of the species?

Secondly, village life being what it is, there could be a concern about the extent to which volunteers are known and identifiable. Have there been inclusive engagement exercises within the village to explore consensus around the issue and the process, so that harmful and lasting social divisions don't begin to appear?

Vote 'stocks' while local villains last

Patrick Wintour reports in yesterday's Guardian that the government is preparing a green paper which may allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood. This would apply to low-level crimes such as disorderly conduct. (Daily Mail coverage here).

It does have the unfortunate feel of government by the miserable standards of contemporary broadcasting. As I understand it, a broadcast programme can have expert judges dismissing a comic-but-flat-footed celebrity in a televised dancing competition to the resounding displeasure of millions, who then overturn the decision by the power of popular vote. Be sure the message did not go unnoticed in Whitehall.

Maybe it's just one of those 'test-the-water' ideas which policy makers dribble from time to time, to see if anyone's paying attention. But it has its justification in Louise Casey's review of community engagement in the justice system, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I note also that the green paper will be published (this spring) by the Ministry of Justice, not by the Home Office; and that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears is said to be supportive. So it may well come to pass in some form.

Watch out for the option of online voting to spice it up. A few moments thought about just who would be motivated to review thoroughly the available evidence in any given local case and make a judgement on it, should be enough to shiver the spine a little. The potential for amplifying local social divisions, rather than stimulating cohesion, is not trivial. It could force people to 'take more of an interest in local issues' (and is this the best way to achieve that objective?) or more likely it could lead to more people withdrawing from local affairs in despair.

But let's say a senior civil servant, having worked hard promoting this policy measure, is making their way home one evening in spring. Turning the corner of their home street they are accosted by a local person coming out of a pub.

Believing themselves under attack and lashing out, the official's elbow strikes the other's head (who, your honour, was just asking for a light). Down he goes, striking his head against the kerb. Blood on the pinstripes, sirens in the night, intensive care, incensed relatives and furious friends who, ah, happen to live nearby. The case comes to court: the official is found to have acted with unreasonable violence. Invited to decide on the punishment, how do local people vote? Would you be ready to accept the outcome yourself?

Wintour writes in the Guardian:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that she favoured local people being given a much clearer choice in deciding what form of community punishment is imposed in their neighbourhood.

['Community punishment'? What does that mean?]

Smith told the Guardian it was wrong that Casey, former head of the Respect unit, was not retained in the Home Office but was moved to the Children's Department soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister. As a result the government lost focus on antisocial behaviour, Smith argues.

Three separate points strike me, to do with the misguided respect agenda, understandings of the role of expertise in governance, and the historical precedent for locally-meted punishment.

(i) The government ought to refocus on civil relations, but it was right to drop the Respect agenda. It was a half-baked set of policies which used disrespect, through an emphasis on shaming, to promote a peculiarly partial approach to civil relations. In particular, it completely failed even to acknowledge that our society is riddled with sanctioned disrespectful behaviour on the part of 'respectable' citizens. More, if more is needed, in chapter 1 of this.

(ii) In three or four presentations last year I used a slide about the three roles in governance, emphasising the need for a balance of influence between elected representative, citizen, and public sector officer. I expressed the concern, which seems to be recognised by people I've spoken to, that most of us emerge from our education system with a feeble understanding of the role of officers (expertise) in local democracy - how important their expertise is in areas too specialised for most of the rest of us to follow.

Broadly speaking, this lack of understanding is reinforced by our popular media. They bash our public services at every opportunity and central government stifles support - for social workers, teachers, probation workers and many others trying to compensate for all sorts of social shortfall.

If this new initiative erodes the ability of the courts to apply their expertise - for instance, in an understanding of research which explains the effects of different punishments in different circumstances - it could be diminishing democracy, not enhancing it. And as one of the commentators on Comment is free puts it:

surely we vote for people who then represent us -

not vote for people who then say "i can't be bothered - YOU do it"

Oh yes and there's that irritating little point (picked up recently by Paul Evans over on Local Democracy) that it's not unheard-of for the public to be wrong.

(iii) Sometime last year I got interested in the system of gebuurten developed in medieval european cities of Belgium and the Netherlands. These were neighbourhood associations and in Ghent each covered an average of 45-50 households. All adult inhabitants were full members of their gebuurte, regardless of their wealth or social status. Heads of households elected a 'dean' who could exact punishment through fines for a wide range of offences related to anti-social behaviour and community norms.

The deans' role was to keep peace and order. They carried out a form of locally-accountable justice, and the system survived in cities like Ghent and Leuven for something like 500 years. I hope to be able to research the geburrten in more detail in future, because I suspect they point to an achieved equilibrium in terms of maintaining local involvement in justice. I'm particularly curious about one possible implication, suggesting that neighbourhood online networks might function most effectively if they include a governance role.

Meanwhile, back to the future: I'm not at all averse to this government exploring as far as it can the limits of local involvement in public services, in fact I applaud that. But I would rather they did so with a better record of having listened when arguments built up against them.

Previously (selected):
Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

Respect agenda dissolves in self-parody

Young people, respect and uniforms.

 

Government as 'pilot light'

Over on Podnosh, Nick Booth notes how 'we habitually structure most government on an assumption of permanence' and wants us to work out how, when we need less government, we 'scale it back and put the excess capacity to useful work elsewhere'.

Does it make sense, he asks, to create 'some stronger culture of treating government as something that gets deployed where and when it is needed'?

It strikes me as something that is fully consistent with the network society, where the old hierarchies continue to shrivel. It will depend on more widespread experience of participating in governance than we can boast at present, so it fits with the momentum of empowerment.

And it will require and/or give rise to a revised understanding of the idea of a 'job'. I see all these things, including Nick's basic principle, as desirable.

Empowerment and community development

There's a timely and well-written CDF short paper on community development and empowerment published recently. It pays more attention than I expected to informal relations and cultural change, and concludes:

Empowerment can reach higher into decision-making procedures: setting agendas, raising aspirations and ensuring that the channels for communication and influencing between community members and their representatives, even at the topmost tiers, are accessible and acknowledged as legitimate aspects of the democratic culture. Community development practice aims to embed these structures and understanding into everyday democracy so that everyone knows how they can influence decisions as individual citizens but, more importantly, through collective approaches involving learning, dialogue and negotiation.

Collective solutions on housing estates

Here's Kate Davies, Chief Executive of Notting Hill Housing, writing as chair of a group report on housing poverty for the Centre for Social Justice:

'At Notting Hill we have found that our tenants generally dislike “collective” solutions. They appreciate help and opportunities to improve their situation (e.g. training, work, financial advice) and that of their children. We have far more interaction with our residents as individuals than as a group. Much of what they discuss with us is personal - debt, children, relationships with neighbours. And most of our help is devoted to improving social skills and encouraging social mobility.'

Gnarled old community development folk like me may dismiss such points a bit too readily sometimes, but I suspect there are two awkward forces that help explain the position.

One is the residue of consumer individualism, like it or not - people have been encouraged to think of themselves as independent of social systems, to disparage collective responses and to blame individuals for their circumstances.

The other point is the uneven experience of good community development practice in housing associations. I'm ready to hear that Notting Hill Housing has exemplary CD practice, but all the same I believe that where it's carried out properly, people are enlightened about collective solutions to their problems and will often mobilise to transform them.

We know that many poeople do not see their problems as systemic, and do not anticipate that there might be collective solutions: that's the whole point.

The housing poverty report needs to be read as a contribution to the social policies of a Tory party which aspires to govern before much longer.

Research conducted for the exercise found that nearly 50% of social housing tenants did not trust their neighbours. The report recommends 'releasing some of the value in social housing to sitting tenants who pay their own rent and make a contribution to the community.'

It goes on:

'the most radical approach is also the most important. We recommend that economic analysis be commissioned into the rewarding of constructive behaviour in the community, including, but not limited to, a genuine effort on the part of a social housing tenant to find work, by giving social housing tenants increasingly larger equity stakes in the home.'

So it looks as if the carrot-and-stick policy approach to behaviour is likely to be with us for some time. Does anyone have an alternative?

Housing poverty: from social breakdown to social mobility.

Community engagement and consultation in Manningham

I've just published a couple of reports on pieces of work I did for Bradford Libraries earlier this year, to do with the refurbishment of Manningham Family and Community Library under the Community Libraries Programme.

The first was an exercise working with residents to develop their own plan for consultation on the library development. Rather than impose a consultation framework, Bradford Libraries sought to help local people to prepare their own.

The second was an open event designed to raise awareness of the refurbishment project, engage with local people and invite them to submit views. I designed a treasure-hunt inside and outside the library, exploiting the presence of the architect and his drawings. This was supplemented with some basic text messaging consultation.

The first report is called Ask them.

The second is called Manningham Treasures.

Previously on this blog: Community engagement by treasure hunt.

 

Empowerment: some nuances

Following my note yesterday about representation and participation, Regen and Renewal reports some comments on the empowerment white paper made by Vince Taylor, head of strategic economic development at Sunderland City Council. He suggests that the empowerment plan could prove ineffective because 'few people are interested in playing an active role in their communities':

'The white paper focused too much on imposing the Government's view of empowerment on communities, rather than considering how people may want to be engaged.'

Not new, but valid as far as it goes: the Ipsos-MORI report on empowerment based on New Deal for Communities data noted:

‘While there is a clear push from the government towards increasing community empowerment, the extent to which people want this is far less clear cut. The evidence suggests a spectrum of interest, with only a very small minority at one end who want to be actively involved, a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, with most in the middle.’

Yes, most people just want to have a say or to know they can influence things if they choose to. But low levels of motivation could at least partly be explained by the fact that most of us have grown up with habitual detached indifference on the part of authorities towards us - indeed systematised discouragement of seeking to influence.

My take on this is that empowerment is not a constant commodity, but reflects its cultural context: it is capable of being increased. It's the cultural context which should be the subject of change - putting it crudely, with the objective that it should not be seen as exceptional to want to have influence on decision-making processes; nor exceptional, for those with decisions to make, to want to involve those affected.

I'd also tender the heresy that community development is not necessarily the sole essential ingedient in the mix. CD promotes empowerment among other things through involvement. Involvement is not the only source of an increased feeling of influence or of the sense of power. However, by promoting collective involvement, CD is likely to multiply that sense of increased influence more powerfully than anything else.

To my shame I never got round to spending time on it before, but it happens that this morning I sought-out and read the CLG definition of community empowerment (page 12 here) which, er, needs a bit of work:

'Community empowerment is the giving of confidence, skills and power to communities to shape and influence what public bodies do for or with them.’

'Giving'? What about the confidence and skills that residents already have but which is overlooked or stifled? I don't like to be too picky, but definitions need a bit more thought than appears to have been spent on this. Why not just say ‘bestowing our largesse on the peasants’ and be done with it?

Yes, it is about power, but increasingly I'm wondering whether 'empowerment' - presented as feeling one is able to influence - is really the best approach to bring about the necessary cultural shift.

Hugh Butcher offered some thoughts of lasting validity on the CLG empowerment discussion forum a year ago:

'the Action plan seems to lack a recognition of the multiple 'faces' of power - it focuses overwhelmingly on a) 'decision making' power and b) 'power-to' (building people's confidence, skills &c).  I would like to have seen more acknowledgement of: c) power to set agendas (the proposals in the Action Plan are 90% about responding to opportunities to 'engage' with those who have already set the agendas) and d) the power to shape the underlying assumptions (the taken-for-granted 'framing' assumptions, beliefs and values) which prompts the identification of particular kinds of agendas (and ignore others) in the first place.'

Representation and participation

Yesterday to an ESRC seminar on democracy and participation, to hear Gerry Stoker, always good value, reminding us that most people aren't after active participation in local governance. We want the right to have a say over the issues that affect us, but most of us just want a quiet time.

'We should be cautious about our expectations about the extent and depth of engagement that people want. We need to design institutions, structure processes and develop support systems to make it easier for people to engage... without at the same time expecting them to give up their lives and become professional politicans.'

What's needed, he says, is for representatives to do a bit more representing, to be more accessible to those they represent and be required to explain their decisions.

Which echoes nicely a note from Peter Hetherington in yesterday's Guardian, referring to a system of citizen-government partnership in Delhi, known as "bhagidari":

a proactive programme where officials regularly have to explain their actions to a range of groups, from charities and residents' welfare organisations to small traders. "No decision is sacrosanct."

Confidence, engagement, and services

Last night to an Ipsos MORI event on 'Building confidence in the fight against crime', where I found myself surrounded by representatives of the criminal justice system (or the 'public justice system' as Louise Casey, the government adviser on All Things A Bit Dodgy, suggested it should be called).

MORI's messages about communication with residents, and the need for cultural change in police forces and local authorities to engage with people at neighbourhood level, seemed to be well-received.

But unfortunately, the discussion seemed entirely based on an assumption that confidence is a rational, mechanical and linear process: ask people what concerns them, give them some information, do something about what they've asked for, tell them you've done it, and bingo, problem solved. If that were so, expression of confidence in a service could be a reliable indicator and we'd have been using it for years.

But confidence is a fluid emotional process influenced by a wide range of factors, including health, mobility, housing, the quality of the public realm, family relationships, personal social networks, and so on. My level of confidence in the authorities' handling of anti-social behaviour could be influenced variably by any of these factors from one day to the next. We know this, which is why we talk about joined-up services.

There's a related point which helps us understand the limits of this approach. People are still talking about demonstrably unsuccessful traditional approaches to 'engagement' - door-knocking, newsletters, surveys, formal meetings called by the police or local authorities. And having had a conversation with the police authority in my county (noticeably absent last night) I have some sense of how shallow the understanding of community engagement can be.

It seems to me that few authorities think about finding ways to contribute through the existing processes and structures of local groups, to which residents are already committing time and energy. Nor, I suspect, is there much recognition of the barriers to informal communication between residents which would help information to circulate. Once again, police and local authorities are talking about certain tasks purely on their own terms - we organise the meeting, we run the meeting, you turn up, you tell us stuff when we ask you to.

Community engagement is a process whereby people who have something in common are involved collectively, together with a responsible agency, in influencing what happens to or around them. It is not a bureaucratic process and should not be approached with a bureaucratic mindset.

MORI: Closing the gaps: crime and public perceptions

Engaging communities: a review by Louise Casey

Postscript: JRF this morning has published a study of Public officials and community involvement in local services.

Involving local people in delivering local services

A few months ago I was talking to some senior people in local government and asked them what they and their citizens co-produced: not 'what service do you provide?' but what is it that results from the combination of that service and the involvement of local people? Yup, I got the quizzical silence I should have expected.

Well I don't have the right kind of robust optimism, but the people at nef do. Here's Josh-Ryan Collins in yesterday's Guardian finding a silver lining in the polluting combination of the recession and new labour's approach to the public sector as a competitive market.

He offers four examples of how authorities are beginning to support service models of co-production 'that deliver mutliple benefits in the short term, and build future resilience.' Such examples suggest

'how public bodies can create real value for people over time, instead of ruthlessly pursuing the shortsighted goals of bigger-is-better and more-for-less... These models acknowledge the importance of spending public money in ways that deliver social, environmental and economic benefits, assessing performance according to this "triple bottom line"... The challenge now is to turn the exception into the rule, moving beyond discredited market solutions to strengthen communities and economies, to build resilience locally, and to promote sustainable wellbeing.'

Meanwhile, eslewhere in the Guardian, David Clements takes a rather clumsy pot-shot at the government's 'communities' agenda. He's right to be concerned at 'the notion that democracy can be imposed by diktat', but I'd offer a couple of reflections:

(a) the sustainable communities bill was sponsored by a Tory MP, Nick Hurd, which might at least suggest broader recognition that the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes that affect them is long overdue; and

(b) there may be a lot of bad practice in community engagement but that does not invalidate the principle. We need to improve practice urgently before more cynicism spreads.

Previously: The public sector is in crisis.

Celebrating community activists

There's a nicely uncomplicated recent article by Jamie Carpenter in Regen and Renewal about Jean Bartlett, who is an award-winning community activist on the Aylesbury estate in south London.

It's reassuring to have straightforward journalism that doesn't over-emotionalise either the role of an established, committed activist or the challenging conditions in which they are trying to bring about change. Negative media coverage of the estate over the years has not helped, indeed according to Bartlett it has made residents 'ashamed of where they live'. And arguments on whether or not the council's decision to demolish the estate was justified will continue to simmer.

But I've worked on an estate where regeneration - including decanting and reinstatement of residents - has been transformational. I've worked on one, like the Aylesbury, where residents voted against a stock transfer to tenant management and really struggled to adjust to that ballot outcome.

And I've worked in a place where residents might well have welcomed the idea of regeneration with or without demolition and decanting, but saw no chance of any initiative coming near them. Being invisible in public policy reflects a profound level of disempowerment and exclusion.

And in all this we seldom hear much about the attitudes of regeneration officials and developers - often supportive and ennabling, but also often steeped in a subtle patronising condescension which disempowers routinely. And sometimes worse: thanks to William Perrin for a disturbing example from personal experience in this recent comment. See Jacqui Karn's excellent Narratives of neglect for an insightful study of how some of this happens.

It's important we continue to support and report on people like Jean Bartlett and those who work with them, because they have an uncelebrated impact on the quality of life of a lot of people.

Responses to regeneration

I was discussing residents' responses to regeneration with a friend over the weekend.  She's very close to the hurdles and difficulties residents have to face when demolition and re-build is something they're confronted with, and gave me these two quotes:

'I'll be dead before regeneration happens here... how do you think I feel about getting involved?'

'I've lived here for 30 years, this is my home, I like and know my neighbours. If they uproot me and move me to another neighbourhood do you know what I'd be most concerned about? People wouldn't know or trust me, and as a single man, some parents would tell their kids to keep away from the pervert'.

Community engagement 'may be delusory'

I've had a couple of revealing discussions about community engagement this week, with one local authority practitioner commenting:

It's a very complex area, it may be delusory as a notion. It evolves of itself... It's about being alive to possibilities.

He was reacting against the 'project approach' of funding specifically for community engagement:

'We want you to do this, we want you to do that.' It's not helpful. In some sense, the 'project' is the evaluation.

The previous day, I'd been asked to give my views on improving people's perceptions of police performance. I chose to highlight the contrast between the development of measures that are as objective as we can make them, and the randomness and fluidity of individual perceptions.

The mistake we continue to make, I suspect, is to take the robust methodology of objective measures and try to apply it in a kind of consumer-satisfaction approach to service delivery. When afterwards I was told how the police collect such material - an independent board member accompanied by an officer door-knocking with questionnaire proformas, and structured 'consultation days' - I admit my heart sank.

I've banged on often enough about the need to be stimulating conversations with residents and service users on their terms, in their context, at their pace. The issue seems to be how we capture the content of the conversations: but increasingly I'm wondering if that isn't a minor or even a non-issue.

My former boss at CDF, Alison West, used to say, sometimes to very august audiences, that consultation without engagement is crap. What she meant was that if you find yourself consulting people with whom you're not already in conversation, you risk failure.

If you're having the right kind of conversations on an ongoing basis with people, it's then straightforward to ask their views, for instance, 'Would you rather have locked gates on your park?' or 'What conditions should be imposed on the renting of lockup garages on this estate?'

It's taking so long for this cultural change to come about because of the embedded resilience of performance management culture, which requires practitioners to track everything they do and systematise it all. I interviewed a practitioner last week who said he understood community engagement when he realised he didn't need to feel he'd failed because a box wasn't ticked.

Not being rigid about how you achieve something, so long as the principles of involvement are demonstrated in what we do.

Somewhat generously, he attributed much of this to a throw-away remark I'd made in a meeting, when I'd said that if you just run formal meetings, you'll get people who are comfortable attending formal meetings, and the rest you won't see.

Which is another useful lesson - turning up at meetings and tossing-in remarks sometimes makes a significant difference, which may or may not subsequently be revealed.

Not engaging but docking

Over on Podnosh Nick Booth has come up with a thought-provoking metaphor about council and government officials -

Officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then [get] back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

Well right enough, I've encountered a few flushed-out airlocks in community meetings before now. Guess I just never realised their significance.

I'm with you so far Nick. And yes, I too worry that

the conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve.

But being separate from is not the same as being irrelevant to. Nick worries that this view is perpetuated 'because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve.'

Well of course they're not, because services are the provision of something from beyond that which is immediately available. The rhetoric of 'community' (local people, interest group or category of people with a common need) providing services is often questionable in all sorts of ways. 'With local people'? - yes. 'By local people'? - not necessarily.

Maybe my feeble title allusion to Stevie Smith could come in handy. How do you know if someone with difficulties in their life is not waving but drowning? You need to know something about them, have some common bond, and/or be close enough to be able to make a judgement. You may also need to have the resources to take action, which helps explain how services come to be organised on an extra-local basis.

Part of the reason why services become detached has to do with the professionalising ethos, which tends to make it harder and harder for even the best-intentioned official to integrate what they're doing into everyday life at local level.

Still, Nick is definitely onto something, and I think it's the on-off, 9-5 nature of the connection between service provider and resident. (I'm resisting the temptation to explore the AC/DC metaphor here. Go ahead, if you think you're tough enough). The docking image resonates because it suggests an obscure imperialist power, with connotations of imposed dependency - a potentially colonising force landing to see what it can make of things, where the essential inequality of transactions is likely to be deepened, not re-negotiated and evened.

As an afterthought, I wonder about the effects of car-mentality. In my time I've undoubtedly covered more miles on foot and on two wheels than at the wheel of a car, and I'm often struck by the way that being cocooned in a moving metal box transforms people's attitudes towards others. I think we might be surprised at how the boxed separateness of modern mobility has come to influence relations by creating an on-off, inside/outside, connected/disconnected mindset. 'Docking' sums it up neatly.

Where relations between service provider and residents are engaged and functional, what is it that's different? How would we modify Nick's metaphor? It doesn't mean that staff have to live in the neighbourhood or that services have to be delivered by residents.

I think it means that services are developed with the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes, are constantly refined in relation to their responses, and that those responsible for providing them are familiar and welcome to those whose situation requires it.

If you're on a bike or on foot, you don't 'dock' to have a conversation with someone, client or neighbour. You're already where they happen to be.

A dangerous group

There's more here about the trend in official removal of neighbourhood assets, in an article by Finlo Rohrer. My attention was drawn to this observation:

Councillors now know to be wary of a dangerous group - the early retirement activists with burgeoning web skills.

If we had been consulted

If your council decides to remove an identifiable component of your neighbourhood and give it to someone else, without consulting you, how do you respond?

Victorian-style cast-iron street lamp columns in St Andrews, Bristol, the Beeb reports, were being replaced with more efficient, modern ones. The originals apparently were being refurbished to 'enhance the heritage' of conservation areas elsewhere in the city.

David Cemlyn, 66, chained himself to one of the posts and decided hunger strike was called for, saying:

Isn't it strange you have to chain yourself to a lamppost at seven in the morning to get the council to talk to you?

This corporate approach seems not to be unique to Bristol - something similar happened recently in Ealing, where one resident said:

They know full well if we had been consulted there would have been an outcry.

In Bristol, as I understand it, the issue has been resolved and hopefully Mr Cemlyn is eating again contentedly, job done.

But I'm curious. How much does it take just to ask people? Does this sort of thing suggest deliberate surreptitious attempts by authorities to change people's neighbourhoods without them noticing? Is it a question perhaps of insufficient funding in the 'consultation' budget, or dogged compartmentalised blinkeredness on the part of staff? Or are the officials perhaps genuinely puzzled that anybody's interested?

In Bristol, there's a faulty light reporting system but it's not the same thing is it?

Community engagement by treasure hunt

Where would you find a mouse in the library? Not a difficult question, but as part of a treasure hunt I organised yesterday in Manningham, it got people interested and finding out about the proposals for the new library building.

I love going to Bradford and I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to help out with consultation in Manningham lately in relation to proposed library renovations.

For this occasion I designed a treasure hunt augmented with some SMS consultation to create interest. A Thumbprint site has just been set up - thanks to Andrew Wilson at Blink.

For the treasure hunt I used the playful eBook technology developed by Giles Lane and his colleagues at Diffusion.

These are digitally generated handbooks which, among other things, are ideal for jotting things down as you move about. Visitors were given an eBook with the first clue printed on the first page. At the location of the answer to that clue, the next clue was to be found in the form of a peel-off label, which was stuck (‘Clue 2’ etc) on the next page.

There were eight clues, several of them designed to require some consultation of the plans (‘Where will the toilets be in the new library?’)... This usually necessitated a conversation with the architect, who was present; as well as reference to the history, place and role of the existing building.

In addition to the clues, we used the eBooks to ask consultation questions. For example, Clue 4 required people to consult the plans where they would discover that a ‘community garden’ is proposed. We then asked them:

What sort of garden would you like to see beside the new building? (A peace garden, a herb garden, a rose garden, or something else?)

We encouraged people to hunt in pairs, where possible of different generations. In a couple of cases whole families went round, learning and discussing as they went. Language difficulties meant that we didn’t always get much written content, but what we did capture is valuable and augmented by plenty of conversations. Either by talking with staff or through a checklist on the eBook, residents had the chance to express interest in influencing a range of decisions to be taken as the project develops.

This approach meant that the exercise hit some important objectives for us: it was

• intergenerational
• multicultural
• conversational
• informative
• created opportunities for volunteering, and
• fun.

A key advantage of the treasure hunt was that it avoided those inactive ‘pools’ and conceptual congestion that you can get, where people stand around repeating the same points based on their own advance agenda. We have tried in the consultation exercises so far to be clear about what is negotiable and what is not, to avoid the risk that people get frustrated asking for something that is not on offer for whatever reason.

Another point is to see it more in terms of engagement than consultation. The exercise was only partially about the latter and we hold no presumptions about the depth of comment to be found in the eBooks and certainly not in the SMS exercise. These devices and processes are part of the mix of engagement which goes on and hopefully will strengthen and bear fruit.

The Maningham Library treasure hunt eNotebook is available for download here, and a description of its use on the Diffusion site here.

Well-being and empowerment (updated)

This morning I interviewed someone who's been trying to implement a community engagement approach in her role helping to provide a local public service.

Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the gulf between the harried and hassled local practitioner, constantly adjusting to change, and the policy context beyond. Through a project I was involved in, a few months ago she suddenly appreciated that the thrust of government policy was in the same direction. Knowing this, my correspondent felt hugely empowered and given confidence to be more assertive in her organisation, thereby accelerating a change of attitude towards citizens.

Here's something else that will make just that sort of contribution. The Young Foundation's local well-being project, working with IDeA and the LSE, has published a report on practical empowerment initiatives in neighbourhoods, called Neighbourliness + empowerment = wellbeing: is there a formula for happy communities?

It argues that the right kind of work on 'neighbourhood and community empowerment' is likely to increase wellbeing in three key dimensions -

• By providing greater opportunities for residents to influence decisions affecting their neighbourhoods
• By facilitating regular contact between neighbours
• By helping residents gain the confidence to exercise control over local circumstances.

What the report seems to do really well is to distil some wishy-washy key contemporary social issues into focused practical points, and this paper looks like it could really give momentum to the efforts of local practitioners and local politicians who have been grappling with (or perhaps avoiding) All That Stuff about social capital, well-being, neighbourliness, involvement, democracy, responsibilisation and so on.

The report puts forward several case studies of empowerment 'done well' (from Manchester, South Tyneside and Hertfordshire) stressing the significance of the balance of control. Yup, it all comes down to mature understandings of the power issues.

But it's also the case that this is an institutional perspective on the issues - this comes across as an impressively crafted practical guide for local officers on trying to stimulate a greater sense of well-being at local level. I think we still need more work to bring local people's experience of such initiatives, and of initiatives they establish and run themselves, to the surface.

Postscript... Two other thoughts about the report.

It seems to have little to do with neighbourliness, which hardly gets mentioned because the scale of the activities and schemes described is well beyond what is likely to be most people's mental map of neighbourly interactions. Perhaps that's understandable from the practitioners' point of view: so is this another example of the appeal of the N word brought on by the exhaustion of the C word?

Much of what is described is good ol' fashioned community development, and the document marks the continued tension between that field of established practice and the trend to take bits of it and call it something else - which again might be fine, so long as the lessons and principles of community development are appreciated and taken into account.

There is no substitute for intensive outreach

The other day I was at a BURA seminar on community engagement - with a fascinating mix from property development, regeneration, public affairs, housing, and a sprinkling of folk from the community sector.

And thank you Carolyn Clark from the Shoreditch Trust for this key statement in her presentation:

There is no substitute for intensive outreach, and it's a real skill.

It's a message that underpins community development, and we've struggled over the years to get people to understand it. Essentially, if you want to use policy measures in the interests of people who face social problems and injustices, you're not going to reach those who experience exclusion without some old-fashioned concentrated neighbourhood work, on the streets, meeting people, building trust and relationships, trying to connect them to others and to services. It's not easy, it's a slog.

But there aren't that many ways you can restate the message for those who won't hear it. So how do we create the conditions in which its value might be more obvious, so that policy makers recognise that's what's needed?

Avoiding Mrs Jellyby: on involvement and coercion

If you work in community participation and engagement, you can get quite sensitive to questions about exploitative or coercive practices. Me, if I get the chance to have my coercion-ometer tested or recalibrated, I'm gonna take it.

And that happened unexpectedly today when I had the privilege to chair the first trustees meeting for Friends Out There. We have some way to go as a new charity, but I found myself among friends with energy, ideas, vision and practical nous, so I'm hoping we'll be able to convert the goodwill and excitement of our launch into some meaningful change.

We met in someone's house and several of the trustees had children with them. Some of the youngsters took the initiative to set up their own Friends Out There 'club'. We're talking roughly 8-12 year-olds. So they got on with their own meeting, in the kitchen - prepared an agenda, took notes, designed posters, listed ideas, and agreed to rotate roles at future meetings.

While this was exciting and to be welcomed, I'm of the view that on a sunny spring sunday afternoon, kids should have the chance to be outside messing around, making a noise and possibly causing a limited amount of trouble. So it forced us to examine the hidden sources of coercion. What had any of us said or done that brought the children to think they should be, or wanted to be doing this?

Maybe I seem a little over-sensitive here, but given the association of our charity with a village in Nigeria, I took no comfort whatever in recollecting the image of the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Dickens at his most devastating. Mrs Jellyby is devoted to the welfare of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger, neglecting the interests of those around her. Her daughter Caddy comes to resent her exploitation by her mother.

I'm glad to say we all felt that the youngsters had taken their own path and in fact, before the meeting, one had complained to her mother that she wasn't being involved.

Still there we were in the back room, us adults, busy with Grown-Up Stuff, sigh. We invited the children to come into our meeting when they were ready and share with us what they'd done. How right-on of us.

Well, I suppose we think we understand involvement and we think we appreciate our young people, but they near blew us away with the creative directness of their ideas and approach. We now have the hefty challenge of working out how to support the stuff they want to see happen. The suspicion is growing that they might just be coercing us.

Learning from the local: engagement and cohesion

A quick note about yesterday's Learning from the Local conference organised by the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

The main purpose was to report on a recent local project, the Newtown Neighbourhood Project (report will be linked here when I'm told it is available). This material was well contextualised with other presentations, including an update from Marj Mayo on a current JRF project on community engagement, governance and ethnic diversity - 'fluid communities, solid structures'; and a session on researching and working with gypsy-traveller groups.

The Newtown Neighbourhood Project worked in a predominantly white area with a sizeable proportion of residents of gypsy/traveller origin. The partnership (a housing association, a community engagement consultant, and CUCR, with Housing Corporation funding) seems to have worked really well, so that participative research was possible and small specific actions followed from consultative exercises.

The event got me thinking about the ways in which the community engagement agenda may be merging with (or coming into collision with) the community cohesion agenda.

My take on it at the moment, FWIW, is that the two agendas come from different drivers but just because there are tensions between them - for example, there are practices of engagement which might seem to contribute to segregation; and at the same time, as Michael Keith pointed out in response to a question, there's a politics of cohesion which is fairly reactionary - I don't see why there should not be a natural combining process here.

I'd like to live in a society where people incontestably have the right to informed participation in decision-making processes that affect them, and where at the same time people from different backgrounds get on well together. Doesn't sound too much to ask.

Moments felt globally, experienced locally

Around the world people are watching the Zimbabwean election. At local level in that country, families and friends must be discussing issues in buoyant excitement mixed perhaps with trepidation at the prospect of change, dreading fierce confrontation.

In Florida a few years ago, with surely the best available technology at their disposal, a tragi-comedy played out. In Zimbabwe now, just to illustrate the contrasts, it seems that votes were counted by candlelight in some areas due to a lack of electricity.

If democracy wasn't the pinpoint of global-local meaning, you wouldn't even know what I'm on about.

Citizen participation is not community engagement

I've been advising a few public library authorities on their community engagement plans under the Community Libraries Programme, and been struck in one example by the way citizen participation can come to disguise a lack of community engagement.

The proposal involves engaging a number of volunteers who will serve, with officers, on 'community management groups' (note the term) and in other activities; and the groups will take decisions throughout the life of the project. Because it's possible to point to the participation of local residents in decision-making processes, it seems to be legitimate under the conditions of the scheme for the authority to describe this as community engagement.

But the decisions to be made are in this case part of the library service agenda, not an agenda decided by local people. There seems to have been no attempt to engage with the interests of community groups and explore how the library service can support and contribute to those. What's interesting here is that the funding system appears to allow this kind of blurring. (The library authority is aware of my misgivings and sought to reassure me that they will crack on with genuine CE once they've got the oppressive bureaucracy out of the way).

Beyond all this there is a troubling sense of flakiness around community engagement generally. With the track record of the regeneration industry on CE increasingly under question, it's unfair to pick on the library sector. If there is a little lack of clarity about what the community libraries programme is trying to achieve, I think it's definitely tweakable. Ben Taylor notes in a recent MLA baseline report for the programme:

'there is a lack of fully shared agreement about what community engagement entails – a critical part  of the vision. This includes a few respondents who still believe that community engagement is simply based on library use and issue numbers, rather than changing the relationship with libraries and empowering communities and individuals. While many have a more developed approach, the question remains unanswered: Are we trying to get people involved in libraries, or in their community?'

To put it another way: is this about local people being involved in library services; or about libraries playing a role, along with others, in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms?

Things are not critical here, not least because one can envisage a progression: lots of libraries already work with local reps and volunteers to manage, deliver and perhaps develop their existing services. This gets them into a position where they play a supportive role in whatever local groups decide they want to do; and hopefully into being consistently a proactive, deliberate stimulus for local social interaction.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, we'll see) it comes at a time when the practice of community engagement is under critical examination.

A JRF report on Communities First in Wales notes that:

'There was little evidence of community influence over statutory members of Communities First partnerships and no evidence of significant mainstream 'programme bending' where statutory agencies prioritised actions and expenditure in the Communities First partnership area.'

Earlier this month Regen & renewal reported on Graham Gardner's (questionable) fault-finding over the government's community empowerment policies.

And here's New Start magazine reporting on a New Economics Foundation report which suggests that regeneration programmes are failing to reduce inequalities because they are good at measuring things that make no difference to the lives of local people, and poor at measuring things that do. (Covered here by Regen.net).

According to New Start, the report (which I haven't got to yet, sorry) shows how government measures focus on objectives that are either unrealistic or totally miss the point.

What I think we have here is the growing sense of a miserable mismatch where the fussing pedantic slob known as New Labour Managerialism (groan) somehow shacked up with naive and seductive young Principles of Community Governance (gasp). In the romantic history of social policy, were there ever two concepts so lamentably unsuited to one another?

Control over communities

See if you think your understanding of the politics of empowerment would be enhanced by this event, publicised with this image and described in the email blurb I just received as follows:

"The Empowerment Action Plan: Making Empowerment a Reality in Every Community" takes place on Wednesday June 18th 2008 and will examine how authorities will be given increasingly greater control over their communities.

I don't care about the grammar, I'm upset to learn that people 'inside government' hold this understanding of empowerment.

Empowerment and civic participation

A long conversation this afternoon with my old buddy Gabriel Chanan in which we touched on the puzzle of whether policy on 'empowerment' is starting to get elided with job creation (see Unlocking the talent of our communities). If we're going to have disempowerment confused with worklessness, it will just serve to further marginalise older people, most of whom are outside the labour market and quite disempowered enough already thanks.

In the national indicator set, the key indicator for empowerment is NI4:

'The proportion of the adult population who agree that they feel able to influence decisions affecting their local area.'

More description and explanation here.

I think the indicators in themselves look very progressive. Of course, there's always concern about how they will be used, and we'll all take some convincing that they won't be turned into irritating and counter-productive league tables. And there are other questions.

The way the indicators will work, as I understand it, is that local authorities and their partners will establish a baseline and seek (be expected) to improve by 4 per cent subsequently.

Well let's see now, if you've got a given percentage of people in your area who have not said that they feel able to influence decisions, who do you target in order to increase the proportion by 4 per cent?

You're going to start with people who are indifferent but relatively empowered, and maybe persuade them so that they do feel they can influence things. You're less likely to start with people who are relatively disempowered and certainly not with the most profoundly disempowered. So what are we trying to do here - to equalise empowerment or just come up with an acceptable proportion of people who can influence processes?

Well, there's plenty in the empowerment action plan to bring about change, and hopefully a lot of that funding will be used for community development to promote lasting, collective empowerment where most needed. Meanwhile, in a post on the Guardian blog, Richard Wilson observes:

We have seen the emergence of an empowerment gap. Since 1997, the subjectively empowered have become yet more empowered and those with the least personal empowerment more disempowered.

Much to be done.

Platform 2: VSO meets community action

I think this looks like a really good scheme. It's partly about community cohesion, partly social inclusion, partly good old-fashioned volunteering:

A new Government-backed global volunteering scheme is being launched for 18 to 25 year-olds. 'Platform2' will offer young adults from less advantaged backgrounds the opportunity to live, work and learn about life in poorer countries while making a real difference to peoples lives.

Volunteers will spend 10 weeks overseas. On return to UK they will go on weekends away to prepare personal activity plans of how they want to raise awareness in the UK.

This scheme aims to give young British adults who wouldn't normally have an opportunity the chance to make a valuable contribution to the lives of people overseas who are blighted by poverty.

By living and working with people from very different backgrounds, facing very different challenges, they will learn new skills and help unlock the potential within them to become better global citizens. And on return they'll be applying what they've learned to activities in their own local communities.

BBC coverage.

DFID news page.

Post offices, informality, and participation

And so the threatened closure of too many post offices brews a storm, and the issues seem to get more complex. Today I was at an Involve workshop about community cohesion and participation, which might have had nothing to do with post offices had not another participant mentioned them to make a point, sparking a clarification for me.

It seems that everybody (presumably including MPs who voted for the closures but want to defend those in their constituencies) believes that post offices play a social role - variously described as being 'at the heart of' or constituting 'the hub of their communities' and a 'lifeline' especially for older residents.

There's no reason why there should necessarily be only one such heart or hub - indeed a mix of third places (broadly defined) is surely desirable. Pubs, cafes, libraries, parks, community centres and other venues claim this status from time to time.

But when the threat is made to post offices on economic grounds, as I've noted before, we don't have the methodology to defend them because we don't know how to quantify their value in terms that The Accountants Who Run Things would understand or accept. (Incidentally, the threat to post offices is commonly described as a rural issue, but closures in urban areas could also be devastating and there's a lot of concern in London).

My point is this: the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of such amenities is because no political value is placed on human processes that are informal and organic. Which also presumably partly explains why we don't get much research on social networks (eg on home zones).

To return to the Involve workshop, which was thoroughly absorbing, not least because I met some very experienced and articulate folk. I found myself banging the drum for informality because of the tendency (better expressed by others who, under Chatham House rules, I may not name) to discuss participation within a context of formal structures and strategic (service delivery) processes.

The point was made painstakingly by other participants that this is an unsatisfactory approach. We need to prize, stimulate and protect the values and knowledge that local people bring to their shared experiences in their neighbourhoods, for its own sake. To do that we need to ensure that there are more occasions for encounters, more conversations between different groups of people, more recognition - before oganised participation can be expected to have a role to play in promoting cohesion.

To put it another way: we need a healthy ecology of conversations and encounters and recognition and relationships, and places to bump into people or to sit and gaze or go for a natter or just hang out, before we can have meaningful 'participation' that in turn serves to strengthen cohesion. I guess you could say that this blurs into some forms of civil participation - being part of stuff that goes on in the neighbourhood.

So maybe the question, both for understanding the contribution of participation to cohesion and for appreciating the social role of third places, is perhaps something like 'how do we get our policy makers to place more value on organic development, informality and local social interaction?'

Answers on a postcard please.

Previously:

The local post office: a brand in jeopardy.

Post offices and social value.

Please serve yourself: rural post offices.

Talking about consultation

I was in Bradford the other day with my colleague Martin Dudley, talking to people about the consultation process for Manningham library. Although turnout for the event was disappointing, it was good to have a combination of local residents, professionals from the library services and regeneration, plus a councillor. In working on consultation and engagement, this is the kind of mix we're after.

Uncertain attendance is one of the hard-truths of consultation and community engagement. But what's struck me most about the process we went through in this little exercise has been the ease with which local people, given the chance, appreciate the limitations of consultation (especially in terms of referring to expert advice) and the way it fits into a mix of democratic processes.

I did my best to pass on this message to the library staff and managers because so often, misunderstandings of what 'consultation' means confound people's readiness to get stuck in. There are widespread assumptions in public agencies that inviting people to give their views is inviting chaos and mistakes, and that consultation trumps other processes. Sometimes this is based on the misleading idea that consultation leads directly to inescapable consensus, like referenda. Of course it's usually neither consensus nor inescapable, and if you start from the right angle - processes, not decisions - such assumptions just seem strange.

Image (c) Martin Dudley.

Pssst, heard what they're saying about rumour?

Word of mouth doesn't have to take months. I was talking to a couple of residents a while ago about rumour and misinformation in an area of intense regeneration activity, and we touched on the value as well as the problematic nature of rumour. The following anecdote was offered with the conviction of truth of someone reading a log book.

A community activist was busy organising a meeting about an issue they perceived to be important, but too few people promised to come. Tactics adopted included getting on a local bus with a colleague, and using a loud whisper, convincingly foretelling a negative development which would have an unhappy effect on everyone locally. According to the story, this did the trick: the meeting was very well attended.

Local Links - let's hear it for informal networks

Last night saw the launch of the Local Links report, following a joint Common Purpose / JRF project run by Susie Hay. The project worked in four areas of West Yorkshire, stimulating active networks with the aim of uniting people and energising them 'to make networks more productive, worthwhile and sustainable.'

The project injected a lot of energy into local networks over a relatively short period, based on the assumptions that (i) there is often insufficient connection between existing active networks in a locality, and (ii) informal ineraction can make a massive difference to people's perceptions, confidence and contribution.

It's an important project but a difficult one to describe because it examines the benefit of informal networking at local level -

'meeting other people who are active and involved in the area, knowing what they do, talking and working together and forging stronger links.'

All credit to JRF and Common Purpose for making the case for what too many funders would see as 'talk shops,' too wishy-washy to justify resources.

To me, Local Links is an important contribution to the growing pressure to assert informality and the value of conversations in local life. This is not just about saying 'conversations around community action are a good thing' (ho-hum) but saying that culturally we should place more emphasis and value on them as indicators of engagement, participation and a healthy democracy. Thanks Susie.

Report.
Evaluation report by Icarus Collective.
Findings summary.

Video, stream

Nick Booth over on Podnosh has done a set of short videos about neighbourhood action in various urban areas, for a recent international conference.

I liked this story of how residents in Bordesley Green, Birmingham, dealt with a stinking stream running through their neighbourhood. It turned out that some dubious plumbers working on housing extensions had been connecting the sewerage into the surface water drainage. Reps from the Neighbourhood Forum went with the water company to explain the issues to the homeowners, and got it sorted.

Ask them what they want

Last night I ran another workshop with local people in Manningham, designing a consultation plan for their new library.

Participants worked on eight themes - such as access, governance, stock, the garden, décor and furniture etc - and in each case looked at who should be consulted, how they should be consulted, what need there was for 'expert' or professional advice to consultation groups, and so on. They used the pink boxes to keep their notes and ideas in place, and it certainly gave a sense of accumulating achievement which you don't quite get from a pile of flipchart sheets. Using small slips of paper probably helps to get contributions from the less forthright or confident; and the boxes will be shared with others groups in the coming weeks to generate more input.

By the end of this third session I was struck by the clarity and immediacy with which people were deciding, for instance, whether or not it was appropriate to consult everybody or just a core group; when (eg with regard to décor or the garden) they thought it appropriate to let a design team come up with options first or after a brief from residents; whether or not to consult on a short list of options or to use open questions; what face-to-face or remote methods were appropriate, and so on.

There were none of those naïve claims that everybody has to have a say, or that professionals shouldn't move a finger without local people's approval. More a mature recognition that there are various ways of soliciting people's views, based on a mix of methods, a stimulated culture of involvement and a flow of information. And that consultation does not remove the responsibility for decision-making, rather it clarifies the requirement for those affected by decisions to be given the time, information and opportunity to contribute views, and that those views be taken into consideration.

It's not difficult: so why is it not commonplace?

'Strong safe and prosperous communities'

It's near christmas, and here's a glimpse of the government's scintillating choice of wrapping paper for the draft guidance on 'creating strong safe and prosperous communities.'

OK calm down, I'll be Santa and give you the link now, the way you'll have a topic of lively conversation to liven up parties the next few weeks. If someone else gives it to you on christmas day, appear thrilled and try not to look as if you've seen it before.

The closing date for responses is 12 February 2008, and yes, it is important stuff for neighbourhoods in England.

It covers for example the new 'duty to involve,' what is meant by 'representatives of local persons,' the role of information provision in consultation and involvement, establishing the 'distinctive vision and ambition' of an area, what is meant mean by a 'sustainable community strategy,' and how everything (especially local area agreements) relates to everything else.