Empowerment White Paper Communities In Control Real People, Real Power
The Community Empowerment White Paper was launched on the 9th July 2008. The paper, entitled Communities in control: Real People, real power is the Government’s strategy to pass power into the hands of local communities. The White Paper sets out a vision for strengthening representative democracy through participative democracy.
Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP said: · It’s about the citizen not the system
It was received with sharp intakes of breath in the House of Commons
She wants the body politic to come alive – currently in the Victorian era · Democracy should be about what you do every day of your life · Aims for big cultural and political change
Main points in the White Paper include:
- a new duty on Councils to promote democracy.
- a range of measures to increase visibility and accountability in local services.
- a review of redress in Council services for when things go wrong.
- support for Councils at the community level, such as Parish Councils, and will introduce a new right for local people to appeal to the Secretary of State if their council denies them the opportunity to establish a community council.
- extension of the ‘duty to involve’ across a range of public agencies and bodies, so that publicly-funded bodies must do more to engage with the public they serve
- the launch of a £70 million Community builders scheme to support community organisations.
NIF's Views
At Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation we welcome the ‘Communities in Control’ White Paper. Community Empowerment is what NIF is all about and it is encouraging to see that the Government now realises that change has to be built from the ‘bottom up’ as well as coming from the ‘top down’. At NIF we have developed many ways of working with groups and individuals from many different communities; from deprived multi-cultural inner city neighbourhoods to marginalised outer city council estates and from isolated villages to communities under threat from change – man-made or natural.
Our work builds on our most recognised methodology – Planning for Real®. The value of Planning for Real® is highlighted in the case study in the ‘Empowering People in the Planning System’ (p79) and we are delighted that the power and relevance of Planning for Real® has been acknowledged by the Government. But as an organisation we have expanded and broadened our ways of working in recent years and we are constantly striving to find new ways of giving people a voice. We are at a time of great change and we face new threats (one of our new contracts is on simulating the impact of flooding on communities) and we look forward to taking forward many of the proposals in the White Paper – working in partnership with communities, with developers of all shapes and sizes and with local authorities and other public bodies.
Jon Stevens
Interim Chief Executive NIF
