As we conduct our conversations and engagements with many different local and grass-roots actors, there’s an old chunk of weathered wisdom that often rises up. “If you’re starting something up that’s original and quirky, really answers local needs - don’t let ‘the council’ anywhere near it. They’ll fund it, control it—and then it dies a death”.

Certainly, as weary citizens look at their local councils, and much more often than not see the same party-political games that pertain in more national forums, they might well be justified. We have covered those councils, both in the UK and elsewhere, who seem genuinely interested in empowering and activating their citizens - the obvious examples of Preston, Barnsley, Wigan or Cleveland (in the US), and of course Frome (and the town and parish councils that follow their flatpack model).

But over our last three years, we’ve observed a pent-up need trying to express itself in local government - to blow open the doors of paternalism or clientilism, to craft their own response to the widespread alienation and distress of citizens (expressed in the Brexit vote).

Last year’s Civil Society Futures report really tore strips from the complacent “right-to-rule” assumptions of local government and civil society actors. Our piece of utopianism from Redbridge Council’s Director of Strategy Simon Parker shows ambition about the powers of citizens to self-determine their lives, as did the piece from Camden’s director of strategy on how localities should be inspired by the Diggers.

In this spirit, it’s great to promote the recent work of Adam Lent, the director of the New Local Government Network (NLGN). Adam seems to be on a campaign to, in his words, “transfer significant power from the institutions of the state and public sector to communities and networks of citizens – what we at NLGN call ‘communitisation’” (this link is very much worth exploring).

Scouring any of the party’s election promising, Adam finds that “none of them will admit that the legitimacy of our democracy has been weakening for decades. No politician will lead on the profound threat to our public services, or admit that their obsession with economic growth at all costs has helped degrade our communities and environment”.

Adam’s policy proposal to any imminent new government is (in this blog) to pass a “Community Power Act”. This may be something of a forlorn hope, but it’s a great excuse for Adam to outline actors in what he calls the “burgeoning community power movement”:

In Morecambe Bay, key parts of the NHS such as communications and diabetes care are now run by the local community.
In a new school in Doncaster networks of students are designing their own learning in close collaboration with the wider community.
Cambridgeshire County Council is completely rethinking its services so that neighbourhoods get to shape how social care is delivered – an approach also transforming services in Wigan, Gateshead, Islington, Camden and others.
Community power also reaches into the economic realm. In recent years, people have established thousands of community businesses – motivated more by the desire to meet local social challenges than to generate profit. Many have been set up with the help of local councils putting unused buildings, theatres or libraries into community hands. Many more have been launched with the help of social investment or grants and support from groups like Power to Change.

The causes of this burgeoning community power movement are multiple:

the increasingly apparent impotence of Westminster politics to address everyday problems;
the need to move to more humane, holistic public services that prevent rather than simply treat crisis;
the growing sense that the solution to climate change may be a re-localisation of our economy.
Maybe people have simply decided to make “take back control” mean something more than a convenient campaign slogan for over-ambitious Old Etonians.

More here on community power and here on its Act .

We have also found an inquiring comment on the eternal tension between local power, and the national legislation which can enable, constrain or crush it, from the welfare reformer Hilary Cottam (interviewed here for A/UK, and featuring regularly). In this blog, she outlines her qualms about a sweeping new Act:

Firstly, I wonder how much of what is currently blocking change needs legislation.

Reading the proposed Act, I was reminded of a Minister who made an intervention with similar intent almost 20 years ago.

In 2002 Estelle Morris who was at the time Secretary of State for Innovation implemented a Power to Innovate. The power allowed schools to ignore any piece of education legislation that they felt was blocking radical change they wanted to make. Schools simply had to inform the department.

None did. Not because they did not want to innovate but because in reality it was not law that was standing in their way but mind-sets. Those that wanted to innovate could.

Times have changed and the room to innovate has narrowed. Adam points for example to the impossibility of designing local labour market and skills policy, when decisions and budgets are entirely controlled from central London.

I have grappled with this block in the system myself and know that it prevents any meaningful change. The challenges in other words are real. But still I wonder if legislation is the way to go.

The shift we seek is structural and cultural. In Radical Help I describe this as a movement away from industrial/vertical power and organisation to one which is relational and horizontal. The New Horizontalists, as I call them, understand that it is rarely formal structures of power that stand in their way.

This group which includes radical GPs, long standing community organisers, those with lived experience as well as leaders in our more radical councils from Wigan to East Ayrshire, make change by using their soft power, by facilitating the relational foundations on which the new can be built to last.

So here is my second qualm. We cannot equate community power with a transfer of assets to local government. Whilst innovation is happening rapidly those in local government who understand how to collaborate with communities, how to devolve resources and how to do this horizontal work (which always involves grappling with incumbent power at the local and the national level) are still few in number.

And thirdly, I am concerned about inspection. In the new world we would not need inspection because local, horizontal organising is by its nature based on trust and transparency.

Our dependency on inspection has grown alongside our dependency on centralised, market driven outcome models where those in power cannot see the effects of their commands and so must send out their troops to police implementation.

We could instead liberate the considerable resource locked in these institutions of vertical audit and convert inspectors into learners. Their role would be to move between communities as channels of experience and best practice – a 21st century form of barefoot expert.

If there was to be a ‘law’ that would bring about the change Adam is advocating and so many of us want to see it would be ‘don’t look up, look sideways’. I fear that our dependency on an Act will engrain a mindset that still looks up – albeit in new ways.

More here from Hilary. A fascinating debate. We would simply note that Hilary’s acute anxieties - about any new government zeal for community empowerment or localism just being more “top-down” (and looking up) - implies that we perhaps might also need a new vision for the structures required.

What is the entity that can make the best use of the power of “relationship”, “soft power”, encouraging “trust and transparency” in communities? Perhaps something other than the usual statutory layers of local, regional, national government? We have been trying to flesh that out with our notion of a citizens action network (or CAN) - please explore some of the archive here.

However, there is a great convergence of grass-roots power going on - as Hilary says, driven by the “sideways” look rather than the “upwards” look. We will encourage and map it here at A/UK.

Pass a "Community Power Act", Adam Lent urges our contending political parties. But would that crush what needs to grow?