Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
2,500 public governors of Foundation Hospital Trust Boards (once all Trusts go to
Foundation status)
5,000 members of Patient and Public Involvement Forums
200 independent members of police authorities
1,000 community representatives on Primary Care Trusts
4,000 community representatives on Local Strategic Partnerships
20,000 tenant representatives on housing association committees of
management and tenant management boards
80,000 residents on ward and area committees, and other forms of
neighbourhood governance.
Given that this equates to 1.2 per cent of the population of England, this suggests
that The 1% Solution is calibrated reasonably well. The challenge, of course, is that
at present these 480,000 roles are not being played by 480,000 different people. As
we saw in our case studies, the same people often wear several hats. We have no
way of calculating how many additional participants would be required to ensure that
it was a different 1 per cent in each of the fields we have identified, but it is likely to
be significant. Nevertheless, 1 per cent participation does not seem to be an
unachievable goal to be striving for.
A third way is to compare The 1% Solution in governance to what we know about
levels of other kinds of civic activism. This gives us a sense of how realistic The 1%
Solution is, because it offers some indication of the size of the pool of potential
participants. We find that civic activism is typically around 5 per cent and that this
figure declines as participation becomes more formal. The Home Office’s 2003
Citizenship Survey found that 3 per cent of people engage in civic activities like
attending a public meeting or contacting a public official 7 at least once a month. In a
study of deprived neighbourhoods, Liz Richardson of the LSE found that around 3–5
per cent of residents were actively involved in community-led and neighbourhoodfocused
activities. 8 The Community Development Foundation has estimated that
there are around six community organisations for every 1,000 adults in the UK. If
those organisations had a typical core membership of around five to ten people, then
their estimate of active involvement would be around 3–6 per cent. Nationally, 13 per
cent of people say they have been actively involved (i.e. with some level of
responsibility) in at least one local organisation in the last three years, although in
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