LOCAL RURAL COMMUNITIES –
POTENTIAL CHAMPIONS OF THEIR OWN DESTINIES?
A note of a Workshop convened by the Arkleton Trust, October 2002
Professor Malcolm Moseley Lady
Higgs
Countryside and Community Arkleton
Trust
Research Unit Enstone
University of Gloucestershire Chipping Norton
Francis Close Hall Oxon
Cheltenham GL50 4AZ OX7
4HH
MMoseley@glos.ac.uk arkleton@enstoneuk.demon.co.uk
The
Workshop organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Countryside
Agency
This note is an attempt
to summarise many of the points emerging in a workshop convened by the Arkleton
Trust in association with the Countryside Agency and the University of
Gloucestershire and held at the Mill and Old Swan, Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire
on 10 –12 October 2002. It has been written by Malcolm Moseley, one of the
organisers of the event and a trustee of Arkleton, with assistance from Stephen
Owen and Ros Boase.
The
Workshop’s aim
was to explore how far it is desirable and feasible for local communities
(broadly at the village, parish or small town level) to plan and manage the
social, economic and physical change affecting them, and to ‘make things
happen’ at that very local level. A sub-title might have been; ‘how far is real
subsidiarity desirable and feasible’? The focus was very much on rural England
though valuable reference was also made to the situation in Scotland, Northern
Ireland and Belgium.
Participants to the workshop, listed in the Appendix, were drawn widely from people in the statutory and voluntary sectors with relevant interests or experience. All participated in a private capacity and no remarks have been attributed to individuals.
Various recent
developments have brought these issues into focus. They include the 2000 Rural
White Paper (in particular its chapters dealing with market towns and village
communities) and subsequent initiatives taken by the Countryside Agency and
others designed to promote the contribution to ‘regeneration’ made by various
small town and village organisations.
At the same time, all principal local authorities are now required to prepare
holistic ‘Community Strategies’ and many are grappling with how to involve
local communities in that process. And as important as preparing plans and
strategies is the challenge of implementation – by means both of very local
‘bottom-up’ initiatives and by influencing other agencies and decision
makers.
In considering all this, we must beware of focusing
excessively on rural England. There may well be lessons to be drawn from our
cities, from elsewhere in the UK and from the continent – and we hope to draw
on some such perspectives’.
The format of the workshop
Though the emphasis was on small group discussion and
open debate there were a number of short presentations which valuably described
specific initiatives and local experience. They were as follows:
·
Nick
Holliday and Crispin Moor - ‘The Rural White Paper, the Vital Villages and
Market Towns initiatives as spurs to local development; attempts to strengthen
England’s Parish and Town Councils.’
·
Madeline Barden -
‘Village Action Plans – the Lincolnshire Experience 1993 to 2000’
·
Rob Murray – ‘Experience in Dorset – Community Involvement
in the Bridport Market Town Action Plan and the Chideock Parish Plan’
Those presentations are not summarised here; anyone
particularly interested should contact the presenters for further information,
(e mail addresses are to be found in the appendix) though formal papers, as
such, were not produced.
The ‘small group discussions’ and final plenary session
focused on the following questions. “Should local rural communities be able
to plan their own future and make it happen? If so how far and how? What constrains them? Can those constraints
be relaxed?” Those questions
provide the basis for the rather selective and inevitably personal resume which
follows.
1 Should local communities be able to plan their own future and ‘make it happen?’
The workshop never sought to define ‘local communities’ as
such though there was a broadly accepted sense that we were talking about
people living in villages, parishes and small towns, at the most local level of
(potential) governance, below that of the principal local authorities, namely
the districts, counties and unitary authorities.
That said, there was a general acceptance that in principle
the answer to that question is ‘yes’ – to the extent that decisions taken at
that level would have only minor consequences beyond the immediate locality.
Four justifications for this view were mentioned:
·
local people have local knowledge that can improve
decisions affecting them,
·
decisions taken at the local level are more likely to be
adhered to,
·
action at that level is likely to make use of otherwise
untapped human resources,
·
capacity building – the ‘development of human and social
capital’ is likely to come about as a by-product.
There was also the view that it is happening anyway to a
greater or lesser extent. The opportunities are there but their take-up varies
and this can in practice bring undue advantage to the more sophisticated
communities. Thus the view was expressed that much of the intervention to
encourage greater planning and action at the local level should be aimed at
spreading more evenly this growing phenomenon of very local community planning
and action.
There was also some discussion of the kind of action that
was most pertinent in this context – planning a future strategy, influencing
other agencies, or delivering discrete projects or programmes? Clearly there is
great variation amongst local communities regarding which of these they feel
comfortable with – and great variation in the preferences and competence of
individual people within those communities.
2 How and
how far might local communities best play an enhanced role?
In addressing this issue, there was general support for the
concept of ‘holistic community planning exercises’ – indeed a broad measur+e of
support for the kinds of approach being fostered by the current Parish Plan and
Market Town Action Plan exercises in England and the broadly similar approach
facilitated by the Fondation de Wallonie in the rural communes of Belgium, as
described by Catherine le Roy.
There was much discussion of whether the parish and town councils should
be the primary vehicle for these local planning processes and subsequent
action. Arguments in favour included their legitimacy as (usually) elected
bodies, the fact that government can normally only give substantial resources
to legal entities and their being inherently better placed than ad hoc bodies
to champion community well-being in the round.
But doubts were expressed about the competence and
commitment of many of them, and about their readiness to accept some measure of
overall responsibility for the development of their parish and the well-being
of their parishioners. In addition, many good people, it was said, simply do
not want to be involved in their parish council. They ‘don’t want to be in the
frontline’ and to give up their time for what are often very modest outputs of
real social value. There was also the argument that many parishes may be too
small to take on new responsibilities - when compared with the larger Belgian
communes that have been created by amalgamations or else with the French
communes that thrive only by working in partnership with their neighbours.
Nevertheless, many participants argued that the parish and
town councils should be the ‘preferred but not the exclusive’ vehicle in this
respect. As local authorities, they have the basic legitimacy that ad hoc
community groups lack and the view was expressed that the government’s job is
to ‘back them or scrap them’, and to work to improve their representativeness
and competence ‘using both sticks and carrots’. If a ‘critical mass’ is needed
to ensure the adequacy of skills available etc, them some clustering of
adjacent parishes might be worth considering.
Other participants preferred to extol the benefits and
achievements of formal and informal local community groups and argued that this
was ‘participative rather than representative democracy at work’ – even if such
groups can often in practice be more ‘top-down within the community’ than
genuinely ‘bottom-up’. England has a rich endowment of such groups and an
instance in County Durham was cited where an active local community association
serving a particular parish has declined to press for the creation of a parish
council wishing instead to retain the capacity to involve the whole local
community in its activities if people so wished. The challenge may well be to
find better ways of incorporating such community groups more successfully into
local systems of governance – as well as the parish and town council
There was also brief mention of ‘development trusts’ as
alternative (or complementary) vehicles for bottom-up local development.
Related to all this was the frequent assertion that
‘capacity building takes time and therefore community development takes time’.
If more responsibility is to be
devolved to the local community level, this will
necessarily be an incremental process rather than a ‘big bang’. There will need
to be early and visible ‘wins’ and the continuing build-up of momentum. Also,
experience shows that some communities will embrace new powers and make use of
new resources while others will not – at least not in the short or medium term.
Communities vary in their capacity – their collective
skills, resources and enthusiasm. Some will prefer to articulate their concerns
and wishes but without engaging in practical action or ‘delivery’. In others
there is more of a ‘do it yourself’ culture already.
Uniform progress cannot be expected, but while ‘the pace is
not critical the direction is’. Nor is uniform geographical coverage of
competence and standards realistic except, conceivably, in the very long term.
Part of the challenge for government is dealing with this lack of uniformity
without decreeing that the convoy ‘must travel at the speed of its slowest member’.
Another theme developed during the day concerned the common
tendency to proceed in an ad hoc manner. As yet the protagonists of
local community development and action have made only limited progress in
getting one-off projects to be framed within some sort of ‘local strategic
plan’. Similarly, regarding the need for very local and ‘higher up’ planning to
mesh together, many people working at the very local level fail to see how
their plans may best fit in with ‘the bigger picture’ developed by the
principal local authorities and other agencies operating across extensive
areas. There is a danger that the various levels of planning simply fail to
mesh. There is also a danger that the proliferation of plans and strategies is
a recipe for confusion.
3 What constrains them and how far might these constraints be alleviated ?
The afternoon workshops and plenary discussion focused on
identifying the constraints impeding the greater devolution of responsibility
and power to the very local level – and possible ways of addressing them. The
following is a summary of some of the main points emerging
1. Local action can have significant wider
consequences so clearly ‘self-rule for all’ is not a realistic option.
The challenge is to fashion systems of governance that best permit the coming
together of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’. Where local communities can plan and
take action with only minor ‘wider ripples’ there is little problem, but on
most important issues this will not be the case. In such instances there is a
need for ‘charters, contracts and partnerships’ bringing the different agencies
together such that the local communities may seek to influence decisions
affecting the wider area. But several people noted that such machinery can be
very demanding of staff time and other resources.
2. There is often a reluctance to devolve by the
principal local authorities and statutory agencies – for a variety of reasons
including a lack of trust and confidence in parish and town councils and
informal community organisations and a concern that at that level the
‘articulate minority’ often has excessive influence. Another factor is the
unevenness or ‘patchiness’ of
competence and interest at the local scale with government departments and
local authorities ‘finding it difficult to deal with non-conformity’. There is
also sometimes a feeling by professionals that ‘community action’ is a threat
to their role and some have been heard to sigh ‘here’s another local plan or
shopping list for us to deal with’!
In response to these
difficulties, ‘contracts, charters and protocols’ between the different actors
have sometimes proved useful, spelling out mutual expectations along the lines
of ‘if you do that, we’ll do this’. The general feeling was that local
communities need some sort of framework or guidance on what other agencies are
expecting of them and what help they might reasonably receive.
3. Related to this is another
constraint - the need for facilitators
or mentors to help local people and groups realise their full
potential. In particular skilled and reliable help with such exercises as ‘plan
making’ and the implementation of plans is often crucial and currently
insufficient. Rural Community Councils do a good deal in this regard at present
but the feeling was that this is often not enough. One suggestion was that
parish clerks (and certain councillors) could themselves be ‘community
facilitators’ if properly trained and resourced, as could salaried ‘village
agents’ working with just a small number of parishes on an almost daily basis.
Others suggested that the business sector might be willing and able to offer
appropriate support in some cases. But generally it was felt that central and
local government should do more to ensure that such help is made available.
There was also mention of helping to convene ‘brokerage tables’ to facilitate
the implementation process.
4. Some participants suggested that many of
the people who currently get involved in parish and town councils lack the
vision or breadth of perspective to help local communities to be pro-active and
holistic in considering their needs and in determining appropriate action. Related to this is a need to build up local leadership – to
‘nurture leaders and champions’ - and there was favourable reference to a
‘Community Champions Fund’ initiative and to the work of commune mayors on the
continent
5. This relates of course to a more
general need
for ‘capacity building’ and there was general agreement that the capacity
of ‘both sides’ needs building up. Thus just as local councils and
community leaders frequently need advice and training in the best ways to
relate to, and to influence, agencies ‘higher up,’ so do many principal local
authorities and Regional Development Agencies need training in the best ways to
relate to local councils and community groups. (One participant suggested a
need for the main stakeholders in local development to be ‘community-proofed’ –
i.e. appraised for their sensitivity to the concerns and culture of local
community groups.)
6. Another constraint cited was ‘red tape and bureaucracy.’ There
is a general need for grant giving agencies to simplify their procedures. A
particular concern is that the filling in by local groups of complex
application forms for what are often quite small sums of money is a
disincentive to local action. Local groups want to ‘get on with things’ and the
suggestion was that they are often unnecessarily constrained by over-complex
grant schemes. ‘The best way to learn is to do, but have we made doing things
too difficult?’
7. Thus
many agencies, it was felt, need to develop more of a culture of ‘letting go.’
Likewise they should resist a tendency to ‘hijack’ the activities of local
groups – for example the temptation for some principal local authorities to
encourage village appraisals and similar ventures essentially as inputs to
their own ‘Community Strategies’
8. The
issue of ‘early
discouragement’ cropped up several times. People, it was said, ‘get fed up
waiting for things to happen’ and in response many participants stressed the
need for some ‘quick wins’ so that local communities could be reassured that it
was worthwhile undertaking surveys, filling in forms, attending meetings
etc. ‘People need a taste of success’.
A slightly different point is that people can be galvanised if they can see and
experience successes achieved by other communities with similar needs; ‘if they
can do it so can we!’ is often a fine motivator of action. And related to this
is the ‘difficulty of maintaining momentum’ when there is a high level of
dependence on the volunteer and, more pointedly, on just a small band of
volunteers in any one community.
9. Finally
there was some discussion of an alleged shortage of funding at the very local level –
funding both to do the fact-finding and planning work and for the
implementation of projects emerging from that local appraisal and planning. In
fact many participants felt that this shortage was more apparent than real.
Several schemes now exist to part fund both the planning and local action and
local councils are of course able to raise their own funds via the local
precept. Moreover it was stressed that much can be achieved with little or no
funding – particularly through systematically and skilfully influencing the ‘actors
with the money’.
A conclusion
It seems fair to conclude that the workshop participants
generally expressed a good deal of sympathy and support for the idea of more
fully engaging rural England’s formal and informal very local institutions and
groups in the governance of their communities. There was also broad agreement
that such engagement must include an emphasis on holistic local planning and
management, not just on energetic ad hocery, and also on carefully
orchestrated linkage between the different levels of governance. ‘Top-down
needs more effectively to dovetail with bottom-up’ was the broad message
emerging. And though the feeling was that this is beginning at last to happen,
there was also agreement that much more needs to be done to address the
specific issues and difficulties outlined above.