Cross-sector collaboration is crucial to survival

Monday, May 10, 2010

It's time community organisations and local authorities worked more closely together to benefit local people, writes Ben Hughes, chief executive of bassac

Who is more representative of, and accountable to, their community – a community organisation or a ward councillor? And does the commissioning of services from community organisations compromise their radicalism and their ability to challenge social injustice?

Just two of the questions raised at bassac's recent conference in Manchester which looked at the role that community organisations can play in articulating the needs and concerns of local people to decision makers.

On the accountability question, we estimate that our members, settlements and multi-purpose community organisations have contact with more people than turn out to vote in local elections. That contact is in depth and sustained. Birmingham Settlement, for instance, held more than 1,500 detailed consultations over the past year through its money advice service alone, rescheduling £6m of personal debt. Its total footfall for the year was around 25,000 people.

Our members work in some of the most deprived communities in the UK. One of the biggest challenges they face is to articulate the needs of their community and feed this into local political decision-making.

Community anchors – organisations well-known and trusted by the community – are perfectly placed to be a link between local people and their elected representatives. What emerged from the debate is that there is great potential for a healthy, more effective democracy to be created by our members working more closely with ward councillors and their local authorities.

Relationships with local councillors must improve. Although our members are at the heart of their community, many do not have a constructive relationship with their local councillor; only 23 per cent of bassac members that we polled at the conference said that their relationship was 'good'. They know this has to improve. We're asking our members to think about how they can do things differently to counter the anger and frustration with politics that many in their communities feel. We need to use the broad reach and the legitimacy of community organisations to articulate local concerns and build a stronger relationship between local people and their councillors.

bassac members regularly engage with local government through the commissioning of local services. Our members' relationship with the community means they are ideally placed to deliver local services. But rarely are they asked to co-design these services to meet community needs. This failure has led to poorly designed and ill-delivered services, which compounds the alienation that people feel. We want to see a democratisation of commissioning which will get us away from the idea that delivering services and community activism are mutually exclusive. They are not.

bassac believes that in a climate of cuts in public spending cross-sector collaboration is crucial. We are the lead partner in the Collaboration Benefits programme, a project which aims to strengthen the long term capacity of community and voluntary sector groups to respond to the complex needs of local communities. We want service delivery by community organisations to be placed at the heart of national and local commissioning strategies. We welcome the creation of the Ministerial Committee on the Third Sector and urge it to look at contracting with the community sector on the basis of added value and efficiency, not simply price.

bassac's Inspiring Democracy programme addresses many of these issues. We will be encouraging councillors and community organisations to shadow each other and we will be running taster sessions to introduce ward councillors to the work of community organisations. We've also produced a guide for our members on how to improve their engagement with councillors.

Our members have a long and rich history of social action and the delivery of services to meet community needs. The settlement movement, for example, equipped people who felt powerless to speak out for themselves through the setting up of the Poor Man's Lawyer service at Aston Mansfield in 1890. This was the birth of Citizens' Advice. Today, the gap between rich and poor is widening again. We believe that encouraging communities to speak out is the first step towards tackling social inequality.

We want our members and other community anchors to be recognised and resourced as a key agent in strengthening local democracy. bassac wants to see funding streams such as the Inspiring Communities and the Take Part programme, and local authority funding, broadened in focus and better resourced. This will enable community groups to comment more effectively on government policy and practice, advocate for local concerns and build the potential of people to take part in debate. We also want to see local authority departmental business plans setting out explicit objectives to involve community organisations in delivering key strategies such as the Duty to Involve and the personalisation of services.

Local authorities are losing out on a vast amount of knowledge, experience and information about local issues. Labour through its Total Place initiative and the Conservatives through the Big Society agenda are both exploring ways of creating stronger communities and sustainable neighbourhoods. Our members have a key role to play.