Community Engagement

Interview with Davy Jones, Freelance Consultant

Davy can you introduce yourself

I have been a freelance consultant since 2007 specialising in citizen engagement and partnerships. I previously worked for the Audit Commission for eight years on high profile areas such as Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA), Area Profiles, LSPs and citizen engagement. Prior to that, I worked for eleven years in local government mainly in policy development and performance review. I have provided support through PtP to improve LSPs performance management and I am also an associate with the Participatory Budgeting Unit the Consultation Institute and LSP Futures. Recently, I have designed the joint IDeA/Consultation Institute training course on comprehensive engagement strategies, and re- designed the IDeA's website pages on LSPs.

What is the context of LSPs having this new lead role around community engagement?

The key thing to understand is the broader changing policy context. First, central government is pulling back from micro-managing local services and is reducing the amount of inspections, indicators and targets. It is giving more control instead to local citizens to ensure that local services are accountable to citizens as much as to Government. Secondly, Government has finally caught up with local services and is moving towards a multi-agency focus, recognising that everything important in the local area is delivered by a multi-agency approach. Thirdly, Government has shifted to looking at an area as a whole through the Local Area Agreement (LAA) and CAA processes. LSPs play a central role in all these shifts in government policy. Most LSPs have not yet grasped that a critical part of this new multi-agency area based approach is an increased focus on citizen engagement and accountability to local citizens, but they will have to take this role on board very quickly.

How do you see the role of the LSP in leading effective community engagement?

The 2006 “Strong and Prosperous Communities” White Paper emphasised “the need for comprehensive engagement strategies in each locality”. Many local agencies are consulting and involving residents, but what needs to be done now is for LSPs to comprehensively coordinate these diverse approaches to engagement. The LSP needs to be more efficient and coordinated in its approach by using the existing citizen intelligence around services already gathered from surveys and consultation across the partners. The LSP is the natural body to coordinate that. The LAA & SCS are both supposed to be based on a thorough understanding of what the local communities want and need. If this coordination is not achieved then the LSP will not pick up all of the important messages and miss crucial opinion patterns. When the CAA inspectors come in, partners will be asked whether they actually know what citizens think and be able to demonstrate it. If the LSP can’t provide that information then the CAA will question whether the priorities agreed in the LAA are the right ones. LSP partners need to understand that desk research and statistics will not be enough; a comprehensive programme of consultation and involvement will need to be established to bring it all together. I strongly suggest that LSPs audit their existing community engagement work across the partnership early on, with a view to drawing up a comprehensive engagement strategy across the LSP. I suspect that there are huge inefficiencies within partnerships and by pooling expertise and resources then the engagement will be more centralised and coordinated. I have yet to come across an area where partners co-ordinate this work and share the knowledge and learning effectively, and yet it is an obvious thing to do!

What do you think are the key messages from the ‘Unlocking the talent of our Communities’ paper that LSPs should be taking notice of?

I found the ‘Unlocking the talent’ paper slightly bizarre as two thirds of it is not actually about engagement. I think it has to be seen in the context of the numerous other published papers and consultations on this topic, otherwise it is not comprehensible and there is a danger that LSPs will get a rather one-sided view of the agenda. Government views it as an opportunity to pull all of the loose ends together in this paper that were not adequately dealt with in previous guidance, legislation and consultations. The next White Paper to be released in June is important, however most LSPs are not yet on top of the agenda from the previous White Paper, the Local Government & Public Involvement in Health Act and the draft statutory guidance that accompanied it. Partnerships need to understand and implement the last legislation before looking to address this new one. LSPs should make sure they’ve dealt with the other myriad of guidance documents, consultations and so on or they will loose sight of what is important.

In your opinion what is the role of partnerships in encouraging and supporting citizens to be active?

There is no lack of techniques that can be used to engage citizens, for example surveys, citizen panels, participatory budgeting and an increase in more innovative web-based IT technologies. There is the recent community empowerment “powerpack” toolkit of local actions available from CLG. The real issue is changing the culture of the LSP partners so that genuinely and thoroughly engaging citizens and service users is at the centre of everything they do. Partnerships have a role in ensuring the engagement is real and that it has the potential to make a difference. The thing that constantly undermines community involvement is the fact that communities feel that decisions have already been taken and that their involvement will not change anything. Above all, partners have to demonstrate that citizen involvement can change things and does make a difference. Historical experience here and abroad is that where people can see a difference being made, they will come back again and get involved in the future.

What recommendations do you think the anticipated empowerment white paper should make to encourage active citizenship and strengthen local accountability?

The shift towards a multi-agency and area-based focus inevitably raises the question of the accountability of all the partners. Only one part of the collaboration of partners within an LSP is currently elected and is accountable (the council) and the rest are not. Government is worried about this local “democratic deficit” and is looking at different options for how to address it. One option is to give councils more control over local services (the Local Government Association is pushing this). The second is to elect the heads of the local heath and police services. This option tends to splinter power and there can be a danger that it can pull LSP partners in different directions. A third option is to have elected LSPs where the council becomes a delivery body like the police, and the elected body becomes the LSP as an over-arching accountable body (this is the option I personally favour). The final option, which is in my opinion more likely to be supported by Hazel Blears, is to have an all-powerful local mayor, making them the key person and decision maker for any area with far wider powers over non-council services than currently. It is unacceptable to continue without local agencies being accountable. People know they can vote a party out of office in the council, but they have little control over other services such as public health or community safety. There are other things that the White Paper should include to encourage active citizenship: for example by introducing proportional representation in local elections to ensure that every vote makes a difference.

LSPs should make citizen engagement at the heart of everything they do. Many LSPs have it as a partial add on involving citizens around the small or routine decisions. They also need to engage citizens around the big issues of local priorities. They have a new duty to involve, inform and consult which is not being grasped and taken seriously enough. It is not a sustainable approach and won’t hold up in the CAA assessment if LSPs have not connected citizen involvement to the LAA & Sustainable Community Strategy processes and asked citizens what their priorities are for the local area. We need to move towards a virtuous circle of involvement. If the bigger issues of local priorities have a continuous programme of engagement, then involvement of citizens on the smaller issues can feed into the wider consultations.

What is the role of elected members in the Community Engagement Agenda?

Most members have very good connections with local people - through standing for election in the first place, being constantly contacted about local issues, and generally having their finger on the pulse locally. But they can feel threatened by the proposed devolution of power to local citizens, especially when they are also being asked to work much more in partnership with other, unelected, local agencies and organisations. With the move towards cabinet and scrutiny systems, sometimes members can feel that their influence is being squeezed all round. But you can look at this in a different way: Through partnership working and LSPs, members arguably have more influence now over other local agencies than they have ever had before; and by giving local citizens a stronger voice, members are able to demonstrate powerfully that the issues they raise have popular support. Experience shows that excluding members from activities designed to give citizens greater voice and choice can lead to suspicion and antagonism, but members are often the most passionate advocates of citizen engagement work, if they are thoroughly involved from the outset.

What role and support can PtP provide over the next year to support partnerships in taking forward approaches to community empowerment?

PtP has a role in raising consciousness about this agenda. The ideas that are being considered include:

• Developing short member awareness sessions on community engagement which can be delivered locally

• Supporting participatory budgeting pilots across the region

• Developing a regional network of community engagement / participatory budgeting practitioners
  

PtP is well positioned to help LSPs to embrace the empowerment agenda, it’s not going away and LSPs ignore it at their peril.

Contact Davy Jones on davy@davyjonesconsultancy.co.uk or visit his website at www.davyjonesconsultancy.co.uk