SCDC Consultation Response
New powers for Democracy and Community development
Note: this section directly relates to q2 in the DM2 consultation
General Powers
Using the principles set out in the previous section, we think that the following new powers should form part of potential legislation we’re calling the Local Democracy BillL
Consolidate and build on existing statutory duties for community engagement and empowerment in ways that leave no doubt that the expectation is for these duties to deliver rights for communities to have significant and undisputable opportunities to influence the local implementation of service priorities. This should include community planning, physical planning, health and social care, community justice and other single service group areas such as Children and Young Peoples service planning.
Provide a unified statutory recognition of the above and the various duties on public bodies to support participation and engagement should be recognised as a statutory imperative for Community Learning and Development (CLD). This should seek to ensure parity of support for engagement and community capacity building from CLD and other services such as Third Sector Interfaces, this is not the case at present. This may require making reference to the Statutory Guidance for CPPs on delivering their CLD duties and/or seeking to amend the Requirements for Community Learning and Development (Scotland) Regulations 2013. This should then be reflected in the guidance and regulations covering the development of local CLD plans. This is going to require a significant increase in community development resourcing overall. If the overall aim of Democracy Matters and other empowerment polices are to reduce inequalities, it is important to ensure that deployment of these resources is targeted favourably to areas of greater need where developmental conditions are more challenging.
Give communities the powers to review or develop stronger anchor organisations and/or anchor networks. This is essential to ensure that they are effectively represented by representative, accountable organisations and processes. In this sense it is the bedrock of further local democratic development.
Match this power with duties on local authorities to provide development and other admin support to these bodies in all communities choosing to take part in the post DM democratic arrangements.
Place duties on public agencies to:
Meet with community representatives regularly to assess/review the priorities for local service delivery and planning, possibly on an annual basis.
Agree mechanisms for ongoing liaison with communities to monitor progress on a quarterly basis as a minimum.
Support communities to work with local service provider staff on specific actions to improve service outcomes where practical and reasonable.
Place a duty on public agencies to enable delegated authority to local staff to make the above a deliverable outcome.
This should include specific duties to meaningfully involve community bodies in new structures such as those developed by the UK Government e.g. city/regional deals. The legislation should also make clear that new agencies, institutions, or projects affecting lives in communities should also be subject to this form of oversight from community bodies.
To meet these duties public agencies and local authorities will require to access powers to:
Recognise new community-led structures as partners in delivering, local services and wider regeneration
Be eligible for additional SG funds and be able to allocate resources to community bodies on a decentralized basis
Recruit and deploy suitably skilled staff to build capacity for power sharing in their own workforce and in community organisations
Share appropriate data and other information with communities in new, more accessible ways
Ensure referral pathways they might be needed eg from a Local Authority to a contracted community group are co-produced and fit for purpose
Institutre delegate authority to their officers to work with communities in more flexible ways to meet needs
Note: The points above relate to question 14 in the DM2 consultation.
The ‘Planscape’
Community-Led Local Planning is a well-established approach widely supported by the Scottish Government, independent funders, and local authorities. The current local “planscape“ has become very unwieldy and confusing for communities. We suggest that a Local Democracy Bill could address overlaps in current legislative duties for community engagement in Community Planning, Physical Planning, and single service-related duties, e.g. Children and Young Peoples planning, Health and Social Care or Criminal Justice. In line with the intent of DM2 this should position Community-Led Action Planning as the lead process from which others could flow.
A ‘Democratic toolbox’
In direct response to question 2 of the Democracy Matters 2 consultation portal, we believe that new powers should be introduced in the format of a ‘'democratic toolbox' . This should consist of a set of core and optional powers. The core elements should be available to all communities and include powers as described above such as increased influence over local services and plans, being able to review or develop strong anchor organisations/networks and engagement duties on statutory agencies. Optional powers would be in relation to what services, functions or facilities communities should have control over.
Engagement
It is important that it is the wider community that expresses a desire to take on additional or optional powers rather than a community anchor organisation or network. In most cases, the drive and ideas will come from community anchor organisations and networks, but they should be supported to engage meaningfully with all parts of their community to gauge the level of support there is for taking on optional powers. This engagement should include informed deliberative dialogue with a focus on equality and inequality in order that any measures taken work to promote equality rather than widen inequality.
Taxation
Community influence or control of service budgets or project resources is closely connected to notions of greater local democracy and this includes how services are to be funded in Scotland via different forms of taxation, therefore it is right that Local Government AND community-led structures considering taking on greater powers and responsibilities should have a meaningful say in how these are to be generated. The potential for devolving tax powers should be seen in the context of fair tax reform in Scotland. The Poverty and Inequality Commission's work in this area offers practical yet ambitious approaches for this, and we support the Commission’s call for deliberative engagement (such as citizens assemblies) to be part of fairer tax reform, as well as its caveat that this should not be to the detriment of making tax fairer as soon as possible. It makes sense therefore, that some discussion of the local financing of services which allow citizens and communities greater control over how these resources are used is linked to the coming deliberation process for democratic development.
Charter or standards
The DM2 consultation refers to some draft content of a charter and standards which sets out relationships and agreements to regulate the kinds of relationships between new democratic structures in communities, existing representative structures, and Scottish Government. This would also ensure that people in communities experience a similar standard of democratic leverage wherever they live in Scotland. This submission makes a range of suggestions that could be included in a charter to this end related to the purpose, governance, influence, and funding of the process. We suggest that;
The concept of such documents is right to ensure common positive experiences of citizens and other residents, i.e. asylum seekers and refugees, migrant workers.
Currently the content of these lacks sufficient detail so we have not responded to it on that level.
It is essential that such tools should be co-produced by robust deliberative methods to ensure that they are able to balance the visionary, practical and sustainable elements that new democratic development will need.
The results of DM2 will be very useful in framing, teasing out and resolving the issues and content.
Securing the contribution of Community-led Action Planning
Local action plans should be led by anchor groups/ networks people trust to work on their behalf alongside local elected members. They should be supported to use credible, robust engagement processes which lead to community-led action plans in communities. These should have the following elements which could be set out in guidance:
They should help create infrastructure for empowerment building. This will include the structures, relationships, social capital and leadership, as well as show how this infrastructure will be adequately resourced and supported by trusted staff with community development and other key skillsets.
They should ensure inclusion of all those with a stake in the community and set goals for how to achieve this over time by engaging disadvantaged groups.
They should highlight how to achieve short and longer-term influence on local service priorities and how these are addressed through planning at local level and/ or co-production where appropriate, that improves how services are delivered or are more radically reformed.
They should identify issues of local concern for community-led action including supporting self-organisation around these for example housing, child poverty, food insecurity or environmental conditions. NB, these would also serve to broaden the ecosystem of community participation in a wider range of issues helping to ease pressures on key community leaders, though they should be encouraged to join in community anchor networks.
They should shape public investment by linking this local planning process to existing commitments to commit funds to local place making building on initiatives like participatory budgeting through project funding and shaping how mainstream budgets are committed.
They should stimulate and support community-led innovation in regeneration, including autonomous bids for project development, increasing community control of local assets including ownership of land and buildings where appropriate.
They should help communities to identify and prioritise the issues that affect their areas including their immediate environment, current and future life chances, individual and collective wellbeing, human rights and the overall sustainability of their “places”. What communities see as relevant for their plan must be within their control, but they should also be supported to understand that if more powers are devolved it is likely that more responsibility for communities as a whole will be expected and the content of action plans, including their impact on all their residents, will be very important.
In our experience communities who are already producing their own plans are excellent in thinking about actions which lead to preventative outcomes. This builds on their deep understanding of how issues manifest themselves as needs in their communities. However, if many more communities seek additional powers and therefore need to produce robust action plans, many will require help to think through the approach to the task. Anchor organisations may need to be encouraged not only to address the obvious issues like housing, community facilities, transport and children's services that often arise from local surveys, but also consider what is needed in terms of other key determinants of peoples’ lives such as poverty, mental health, wider health and social care issues, equality and exclusion and critical environmental concerns such as reducing emissions, climate adaption and resilience to climate change. To do this communities may need help to recognise their local relevance and how they might explore them effectively. Part of this will involve assisting communities to fully understand the needs of population groups and other demographic features of their area. Supporting communities in how to understand administrative sources of data and combine these with their own engagements methods to map needs in their area is an important element of the support they will need to tell the story that underpins their ideas and proposals.
Clearly, most community led action plans have less content in them at present. We would want it to be clear that whilst we believe CAPs would need more detail, and engage more local people than some communities achieve at the moment, it would be necessary to ensure that communities fully consent and are fully supported to develop this enhanced planning over time to produce plans which they own and cover the ground described above. This is key if they are to be used to fully express and achieve community aspirations for longer term development and regeneration.
Statutory recognition for CAPs
Despite their hugely exciting and potential contribution, CAPs have no statutory recognition despite consistently providing broader and deeper involvement of communities in the resolution of local issues and in convincing external funders to invest in communities. The Local Democracy Bill would be an opportunity to rectify this by giving them statutory recognition and a formal role. These plans should be supported as follows:
Note: this list relates to q3, q4 and q6 in the DM2 consultation and we have indicated where bullets refer specifically to these questions.
Be recognised by public bodies as the main means by which communities set the local agenda for action in their communities either in the form of public service reform, co-production or pursuing independent community-led activities and regeneration. There should be clear duties on public agencies such as CPPs and their constituent organisations to recognise and act on these plans as the overarching expression of community views derived from robust credible community engagement.
They should also be developed to actively consider how to involve the whole community including seldom heard voices, even if this has to be achieved over a longer period.
These plans should therefore be seen as the starting point for expressed community views in other plans such as LPPs, Locality Planning duties in the Empowerment Act or plans for service areas such as Local Outcome Improvement Plans, Criminal Justice Outcome Improvement Plans, Childrens Services Plans or Health and Social Care Plans.
Where appropriate, public agencies should help communities augment their CAPs by investing in additional targeted engagement to address the issues to be explored in the other statutory planning process in the point above, for example (refers specifically to q3 and q4):
by funding work on LPP priorities which can then augment the local CAP;
by adopting CAP priorities as an alternative to, or a baseline for, engagement in a Locality Plan required by the CE Act;
by using CAP priorities as a basis for bespoke engagement in service-based engagement such as for Health and Social Care, Children and Young People’s Services or others in subsequent Scottish Legislation with duties to engage communities; and
where CAPs are used in relation to other planning processes, communities must be fully involved in how this integration takes place to ensure that their aspirations are adequately reflected and not distorted by other service priorities.
Building on mainstream Participatory Budgeting commitments, the Local Democracy Bill should place duties on public bodies to develop the idea of community spending plans in partnership with local anchor networks linked to CAPs and including (refers specifically to q2):
areas of decentralised budget and deployment of resources by public agencies;
action to identify where communities and public agencies could jointly pursue funding from government and/or other sources;
independent actions where communities lead and/or are supported to bid for funding in their own right; and
Exploring social economy and social enterprise development opportunities to generate income while avoiding unaffordable marketisation of local services.