Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Making the most of community participation: The 1% Solution
associations that can act as everyday intermediaries between citizens and
governance.
Making participation a national priority
The Government is committed to producing a ‘neighbourhood governance offer’ in
the forthcoming Local Government White Paper. 15 This clearly demonstrates its view
that the neighbourhoods agenda is a national priority, albeit one that, by definition,
must be addressed in ways that are sensitive to the particular circumstances of
individual places and the people who inhabit them.
But, if the neighbourhoods agenda truly is a national priority, then Government
should start to take seriously a view of community participation as a universal
entitlement, and not one that is simply concerned with the poorest neighbourhoods.
At the moment, the design of funding streams undermines that view. For example,
the £160 million specifically earmarked for neighbourhood work in the Safer and
Stronger Communities Fund (SSCF) is directed only to 84 local authority areas that
include the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Of course, there are good reasons
for prioritising resources – but, in the long run, it risks creating a culture of what
Marilyn Taylor calls ‘prescribing community to the poor’. 16
To symbolise a new universal commitment, we propose that Government introduce,
as part of its neighbourhoods ‘offer’ in the forthcoming Local Government White
Paper, a Neighbourhood Participation Entitlement – a package of funding and
capacity-building support, provided by a Community Governance Service and
available to every neighbourhood that wants it.
This could be achieved by:
mainstreaming the neighbourhood element (which currently only 84 local
authorities will be entitled to) into the overall SSCF, which all LAs receive
with a presumption that all neighbourhoods should be entitled to some support
allocations would be made to local authorities through the wider SSCF and Local
Area Agreement process, and it would be for local authorities (LAs) and
communities to decide how this money was allocated to neighbourhoods as part
of the negotiation of ‘Neighbourhood Charters’. 17
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