SCDC Consultation Response
Context and ambition
Our overall mission is to promote communities’ rights and opportunities to increase control over the issues which affect their lives through community engagement, community capacity building and by creating the conditions for community empowerment in practice wherever possible. We do this across the programmes we deliver to bring community and citizen influence to bear in Scotland in line with current empowerment legislation and many other aspects of community engagement which have a basis in legal duties and progressive Scottish policy initiatives over the last two decades or so.
Though the policy environment for community engagement and empowerment has never been so supportive nationally, we suggest that there is a major contradiction which needs to be addressed. This is that progress on the kind of democratic development that is needed to deliver empowerment ambitions is patchy across Scotland and has effectively stalled in some places. This is true geographically where place-based approaches are affected by more prosaic concerns about funding and community confidence has diminished due to the resulting stasis. There is also a major issue regarding decentralised place-based cooperation between and within services themselves where delegated authority to local levels is far from the norm.
Our experience suggests there is a lack of effective scrutiny and enforcement mechanisms to ensure the progressive policy environment is fully realised. This, in addition to the fiscal pressures on public agencies, means that there is a great deal still to be done in creating an environment where genuine power sharing can take place and communities have confidence in it.
As a result, our perspective on the lived experience of those we work with in pursuit of these aims often tends to reflect disappointment with the pace and priority of empowerment and democratic development. This is usually matched by a continued faith in the concepts, but community patience is beginning to flag in many areas where people see more emphasis on the devolution of responsibilities for services affected by savings and related closures than to wider power sharing in the design, delivery and evaluation of public services.
Democracy Matters
Democracy Matters offers an opportunity to reinvigorate debate in this area and visualize how the wider landscape of meaningful engagement, participatory democracy, enhanced empowerment and service improvement could work in a modern Scotland. Current conditions suggest that honesty about the need for a progressive realisation of citizens and community rights in this area would be a more credible approach than claiming that community ambition can be fully implemented in the short term.
However, it is essential that people in Scotland’s communities know the direction of travel based on a sober assessment of current progress. If this can recapture a sense of national commitment to power sharing based on a quality dialogue with communities it is a fantastic opportunity to restate the values of equality, social justice and community empowerment alongside the more technical matters regarding powers, structures and support processes. Otherwise, there is a real danger that the conclusions of Democracy Matters 2 (DM2) could feel like more promises made to communities without a clear line of sight to their delivery.
Unfortunately, this was a view expressed by a significant number in our facilitated conversations as part of the consultation, although it is to their credit that they then put their shoulders to the wheel in looking to find constructive ways forward.
About our response
For these reasons, our response addresses the insights gained from the dialogue in the DM2 local conversations we and partners have been facilitating around the country and is also informed through the lens of our mission and values as the lead community development organisation in Scotland. It is also grounded in the learning we are generating from our other programmes of work.
With regard to what this consultation will lead to, our assumption is that legislation will be required to take the process forward to ensure clarity, equity and scrutiny of the process, all of which are fundamental to democratic development. The consultation seeks views on potential new powers that would clearly need to be translated into legal duties. It also seeks views on a charter which would be embedded in legislation to ensure consistency for communities in how any democratic developments are implemented. It is our view that such legislation is definitely required and that a charter could usefully augment guidance for such a law. Though the potential legislation has yet to be named we refer to in this response it as a Local Democracy Bill in our response.