The potential reopening of a long-abandoned railway station is at the top of the agenda for one Fife community. For years, the halt in Newburgh has been an overgrown mass of weeds — but community activists insist it could hold the key to a more sustainable future.

Research by the group, Sustainable Newburgh Project, has shown that reopening of the station would be hugely popular locally. Results from a recent survey are being used to create a community wish list of future carbon-cutting measures and improvements for the town. It is envisaged these could be paid for by the income from a proposed community-owned wind farm.

Initial results from the survey show 84% of those who responded supported the reopening of Newburgh rail station. Angela Douglas, project manager of the Sustainable Newburgh project, said, “Newburgh is the largest freestanding settlement in Fife adjacent to a passenger railway but with no rail station of its own. The town sits in a poorly connected corner of Fife, entirely dependent on road transport, and some of its bus services depend on continuing subsidy from Fife Council.”

And elsewhere……

Many stations now have “friends” groups that look after gardens and create artwork. The most innovative example is Gobowen in Shropshire. The station was unstaffed for many years until a local teacher, the late David Lloyd, had the idea of using his pupils to run a booking office as an educational project.

Things have moved on since then and Lloyd founded Severn-Dee Travel as a not-for-profit company, which runs the booking office. Use of the station has nearly doubled in the last five years and Severn Dee is a successful business. Sheila Dee, the community rail officer for the line and a director of the company, says that part of the growth is down to having staff at the station. “People from Oswestry and surrounding villages use the station knowing they can get good information and journey advice.”

The station staff can handle European travel, group bookings and specialise in schools travel – a much wider portfolio than a normal station booking office. Severn Dee has stimulated other local businesses. Later this summer a cafe will open on the station and one of the old railway buildings is already used as a GP surgery.

“Gobowen offers a way forward for other stations which are either unstaffed or facing booking office cuts,” says Dee. “But potential station businesses need to be prepared for a lot of hard work!”

Other partnerships are looking at ways of generating revenue through trading. The Settle-Carlisle Railway Development Company runs a flourishing station cafe at Skipton and provides an on-train trolley service along the scenic route.

And it’s not just stations….

Community rail partnerships have transformed many of Britain’s local railways, and not just rural branch lines transporting tourists through some of our most scenic countryside. The partnerships cover around 60 lines, some of them urban routes in major cities where community rail is playing a role in urban regeneration. They bring together train operators, Network Rail, local authorities and more than 100 “station friends” groups and community groups that promote lines which were threatened with closure.

Many of the lines have experienced double-digit growth, thanks to imaginative promotion and community involvement, backed up by modest investment. Stations have experienced a new lease of life through community adoption, including a social enterprise which runs the booking office of a formerly unstaffed rural station.

Railways minister Theresa Villiers has praised the “ideas, innovation and enthusiasm” of community rail partnerships. And their services could be in more demand than ever, following last month’s government-commissioned report into rail industry costs by Sir Roy McNulty. He called for £1bn in costs to be stripped out of the industry and, while not recommending line closures, he floated the idea of phasing out ticket offices in small stations.

Cape Farewell marks its tenth anniversary with a new focus, investigating how environmental and economic change impacts on communities and individuals. In relation to the Scottish islands, this includes investigation of the innovative use of local resources, the effects of environmental change on marine ecosystems and wildlife, the preservation of local culture and language, and cultural interventions to support and reflect life on the islands. 

42 artists, researchers and scientists including acclaimed Gaelic singers Julie Fowlis, Mary Jane Lamond and Mary Smith, poets Rody Gorman and Jo Shapcott, artists John Cumming, Ian Stephen, Andy Mackinnon, Stephen Hurrel, Annie Cattrell, Anne Bevan, chef Oliver Rowe, playwright Iain Finlay Macleod, novelist/filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, Eigg Heritage Trust spokesperson Lucy Conway, writer Sara Parkin and sailor Jo Royle – best known for sailing from America to Australia in a catamaran made entirely from plastic bottles – along with oceanographers and environmental scientists, will travel through the Inner and Outer Hebrides this summer as part of a series of voyages organised by Cape Farewell, in partnership with Cove Park. 

The four week-long expeditions will investigate the impact of a changing climate on the cultures and ecologies of Scotland’s island communities, and consider some of the grassroots adaptation projects being designed and implemented in response. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned that rising sea levels are likely to have a ‘severe impact’ on much of the UK’s coastline in coming decades, in particular across Scotland’s outlying ‘bellwether’ islands which face the full force of increasing extreme weather events. Scotland’s Highlands and Islands are, however, exceptional in the range of pioneering sustainability programmes, adaptation projects and knowledge transfer schemes being developed at both local level and at the forefront of EU sustainability policy.  They offer new imaginative approaches to the relationship between place, stewardship and community agency.

The voyages celebrate the value of local knowledge and connection with place, and are themed around the Gaelic language, island musical tradition and story-telling, marine and environmental science, local resources and the connection between people and place. Ideas and practice ranging from the Eigg community buy-out to the use of seaweed as a biofuel will be explored as a starting point for a longer term, four-year project which will include artists’ residencies across the islands, the documentation and dissemination through exhibition and public events of the experiences of artists and islanders, in particular stories of cultural resilience and survival, and the bringing together of local communities, artists and scientists across the Scottish islands to create a meaningful extension of the voyages.

The project is supported by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England, Lighthouse Foundation Germany, The Bromley Trust and the Compton Foundation.

The voyage takes place on a high-tech, low-carbon impact dolphin and whale research boat skippered by Jim Compton (Marine Conservation Research). 

The four week-long trips are as follows:

Week 1: 15 – 22 July: Oban, Mull, Rum, Eigg, Skye, Mallaig 

Theme: Community buy-out, food, energy, stewardship

A community event will be held at the community hall on Eigg on the evening of 20 July. Everyone welcome!

Week 2: 22 – 29 July: Skye, Soay, Canna, Mingulay, Pabbay, Barra, S Uist, Benbecula

Theme: Ecology, wildlife, energy, climate impacts and local resources   

A community event/ceilidh will be held at the community hall on Barra on the evening of 26 July. All welcome!

Week 3: 29 July – 5 August: North Uist, Berneray, Monachs, St Kilda, Harris, Lewis

Theme: The Gaelic language, song, currents, and story telling

An informal community event/ceilidh featuring Julie Fowlis, Mary Smith and Mary Jane Lamond will be held at Taigh Chearsabhagh on the evening of 30 July. All welcome! 

Week 4: 5 – 12 August: Lewis, Shiants, Skye, Eigg, Mallaig

Theme: Ideas of home, culture and its living context

Community event tbc

For further information please contact:

Ruth Little

ruthlittle@capefarewell.com

07792 598855

Natasha Freedman

natashafreedman@capefarewell.com

020 7620 6235

www.capefarewell.com

Everyone needs enough money to buy life’s basics, but few really believe that, on its own, cash is enough. 

That’s why Oxfam Scotland wants to create a new way of measuring what makes a good life: one that takes money into account, but also recognises what Scottish people know – that it takes more than just economic growth to make a prosperous nation.  The Oxfam Humankind Index is about valuing the things that really matter to the people of Scotland. This might include their social relations, their health and skills, their physical environment and natural context, and their financial assets. 

To do this, we want to ask the Scottish people about those aspects of life that make a real difference to people.  Public participation in creation of the Humankind Index is absolutely central.  It means that the Index will be based on the values of a society rather than the views of an elite.  

This will, in turn, enable government to focus on what really matters, and to take more informed decisions about where society wants to go. We want to ensure that policy makers make policies that serve the real prosperity of Scotland, and are not simply policies that try to advance economic growth, regardless of the cost on communities or our environment.  It is about remembering that the economy should serve the people, not the other way around.  

In the longer term, Oxfam also wants a change in the way we judge ourselves as individuals, moving away from seeing the ‘stuff’ we have as a sign of how well we are doing to a wider sense of what makes us feel OK in our lives. 

You could say that the Oxfam Humankind Index is about creating a context not where people sacrifice their relationships and environment to keep up with the Jones’s… but where they celebrate and nurture their relationships with the Jones’s and the environment impacting on them!

Take part in the survey and have your say – click here

Want to know more? Read our Frequently Asked Questions

Review of the Climate Challenge Fund 

By Brook Lyndhurst and Ecometrica

Intro

The Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) was set up to help communities address climate change by reducing their carbon emissions. Communities were funded to encourage people to adopt new low carbon behaviours and measures (but not capital funding for the development of renewable energy). Projects covered a wide range of behaviours, including energy, food growing and purchasing, transport and waste. The CCF made 331 awards to 261 communities located throughout Scotland in seven funding rounds between 2008 and 2011, with further funding announced in March 2011 for 130 projects. To illustrate the range of outcomes achieved by the CCF, 21 projects were selected for an in-depth review. The aims of the review were to identify the kinds of impacts the projects had made, to draw out some of the key factors that make a successful behaviour change project, and to explore the role and contribution of community projects more widely in delivering sustainability goals.

Main Findings

■ CCF projects in the review successfully influenced behaviours across a wide range of actions, including take-up of energy efficiency measures, everyday energy behaviours and food growing. Some projects demonstrated effective ways to encourage take-up of renewable energy or stretch participants’ food purchasing habits. Transport behaviours were more difficult to change.

■ Projects had most success with participants who were open to change. They overcame inertia (accelerated change), opened up new possibilities that people might not have considered (activated) and supported participants in working through change processes and barriers which they may have found daunting without projects’ help (facilitated). Where participants had already made changes, the projects’ influence reinforced their behaviour (consolidated). However, projects rarely succeeded in convincing those to change who saw no merit in it (converted).

■ Participants generally had positive environmental attitudes to begin with but also significant scope for behaviour change. Participants’ motivations to change were often highly personal; environmental benefits tended to be seen as an additional ‘feelgood factor’. Projects had limited impact on participants’ environmental attitudes, other than to reinforce positive attitudes where they already existed.

■ Key characteristics of successful projects were a good understanding of the audience and how to best engage with them, and organisational competence, including a learning culture and good project planning.

■ Estimates of lifetime carbon emission savings from the installation of home energy efficiency measures were more certain than those from behavioural change interventions. Improved measurement methods for capturing the impact of behavioural interventions are needed so that priorities between different approaches can be assessed fairly, including longitudinal research into the long term evolution and maintenance of behaviours.

■ While the review suggests that community projects are unlikely alone to deliver carbon savings on the scale needed to meet national targets, they make a distinctive contribution and, perhaps more importantly, are uniquely placed to engage people in sustainable lifestyles more broadly.

■ Key implications for climate change policy were identified with respect to: the role of government in removing external barriers to behaviour change, complementing the activity of community projects; the possibility of explicitly broadening the strategic aims of the CCF to go beyond carbon savings to encompass sustainable lifestyles; and the need for long-term funding support to encourage the evolution of new social norms and help build community capacity and willingness for action on climate change.

Full report has not yet been published. For a full summary of findings click here

Author: David Ross, The Herald

SCOTLAND’S highest civil court will have to decide whether flagship land reforms can breach the human rights of landowners.

A bid by crofters to take over part of the 26,800 acre Pairc estate on Lewis could take years after a sheriff directed the Court of Session in Edinburgh to decide whether the Scottish Land Reform Act 2003 is consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sheriff David Sutherland at Stornoway Sheriff Court made the direction before he considers an appeal from the landlord at the centre of the dispute.

Critics have previously compared the laws to the regime of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who has forced white people from their land through violence and intimidation.

At issue is the section in the act which gives crofting communities the absolute right to buy their croft land, subject to ministerial approval, whether or not the owner wants to sell.

Nobody knows when the Court of Session will be able to set down dates for a hearing or how long an appeal would take
Barry Lomas, a Warwickshire-based accountant, does not want to sell the estate his family bought in 1924. He has claimed the act breaches his human rights and that he is the “whipping boy of land reform”.

Both sides urged the Scottish Government to release the official valuation price which was assessed by an independent surveyor but ordered to remain secret at the last minute.

Almost 400 people live on the estate, which covers a similar area to Edinburgh.

It embraces 11 townships and 208 crofts. Much of the area being fought over is boggy moorland but at stake is the control of potentially lucrative profits from a £110 million wind farm.

Residents have declined to buy out the croftland villages, opting, instead, for the houseless common grazings having been advised to take this route given the tight timescale and detailed mapping requirements buying the full estate would require.

The ground presently has little value except as rough pasture for livestock, but Scottish and Southern Energy’s application to build a giant windfarm has raised the odds.

Scottish ministers gave the crofters of the Pairc Trust permission to proceed and Mr Lomas sought to appeal that decision in court yesterday. But last year he also petitioned for a judicial review in the Court of Session on the human rights aspects of the legislation.

That had been put on hold, but yesterday Sheriff David Sutherland directed the Court of Session to rule on the human rights issues before he heard the rest of the appeal on the ministers’ decision to approve the buyout.

Some predict it could take up to a year for the Court of Session to make a ruling, and thereafter there is a right of appeal which could take even longer.

John Randall, vice-chair of the community-led Pairc Trust, which is behind the buy-out bid, said “The sheriff said it had to be referred to the Court of Session by July 21. Nobody knows when the Court of Session will be able to set down dates for a hearing or indeed how long an appeal would take. That’s my understanding, and after all that it’s back to Stornoway Sheriff Court for the rest of Mr Lomas’s appeal.”

Mr Lomas said last night: “Pairc Estate continues, as it has done for many years, to encourage members of the Pairc community to come forward to discuss how progress can be made, away from the failings of politicians and Pairc Trust.”

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “As the legal process is still ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.”

One way of tackling the shrinkage which is currently taking place in local bus service provision in many parts of Scotland is to look at the potential for local communities to be more involved in running services.  There are numerous community run transport schemes, operating on a non-profit basis, where all funds are invested into developing local services for local people.  Though most have been set up to provide a service for people who can’t use public transport, such as elderly and disabled people, the legislation which governs them offers opportunities to provide services to the wider public too.

Changes to transport legislation in 2009 now mean that community transport services have the potential for an even bigger role in local transport, particularly the changes to Section 22 permits. In areas where services have been withdrawn and where it is difficult to run a commercially viable route, community groups can fill the gaps in local networks. The low overhead costs of community transport services can often make them more financially viable than a commercial service. However, few local authorities are looking seriously at how community groups might fill the ever widening gaps in local transport provision and the Scottish Government could do more to nurture bottom up responses to community need .  

Something which Government could do to help would be to extend the free bus concessionary fare scheme to include services run by community and voluntary groups. Many of those people who most need the concession cannot use it; instead they have to pay for the community transport services which do meet their mobility needs, which is not in keeping with the scheme’s social inclusion objectives.

As part of Investing in Communities, Community Spaces Scotland supports communities to become more involved in, and to take responsibility for, their local environment, communal spaces and places. This will focus on bringing communities together while making them healthier, not just physically, but also through sharing activities in a space or place that is fit for purpose. We will do this by providing funding for communities to improve the appearance, functionality, accessibility, effectiveness and sustainability of local spaces and places (including buildings). 

We want this programme to help address the areas of greatest need in Scotland. To help us achieve this we have added eligibility criteria, based on the area where the project will be delivered, to ensure this funding is targeted where it is needed most. You can find out quickly and easily if your project is eligible by typing the postcode where your project will be based into our eligibility checker. 

To find out more about our approach to eligibility for this programme read our Community Spaces Scotland  guidance notes 

Outcomes

Projects must achieve all three of the following outcomes under Community Spaces Scotland:

• Communities come together to make better use of local spaces and places.

• Communities come together to improve their environment.

• Communities come together to get healthier and be more active

What types of project will we fund?

We expect to fund a wide range of activities involving meeting spaces; recreation; and community green spaces. Examples include providing facilities for community activity through developing and improving: 

• local parks

• community paths and gardens

• play parks 

• allotments

• community centres, and 

• village halls. 

We may also consider funding suitable revenue projects that will meet our outcomes.

Through this programme we can also provide  development funding  to provide any relevant technical advice you may need to develop your full application. We can also fund business plans where these are considered necessary to securing the project’s long term sustainability.

Author: Polly Toynbee, Guardian

‘Let local people decide!’ sounds fine in rhetoric but reeks in reality. The consequence is services sold out or gone forever.

Here is a great example of what pollsters call the public’s “cognitive polyphasia”. In plain language it means we want impossibly contradictory things. As the localism bill returns to the Commons for report stage today, the government should be warned that while people love the Ambridge sound of localism, they deplore the postcode lottery it brings.

Brave would be the politician these days who refused to pay lip service to the localist idea: who could be against local people taking making local choices, until you ask what and how? Labour in power was utterly conflicted, pouring out initiatives for community action while raining down centralised diktats.

Now here comes Eric Pickles, not conflicted but deceiving. Tory devolution hands down responsibility for failing to finance local services, devolving the blame for cuts. His bill squares the problem: if the money doesn’t cover all that councils are obliged to do, this bill gives him the power to revoke any inconvenient duty on councils. Parliament has painstakingly passed laws obliging councils to do things we regard as essential to civilisation, but this gives ministers Henry VIII powers to strike any of them out at a stroke.

There may be daft regulations on the statute book, but this includes everything from the duty to protect children at risk to providing libraries, free parking for the disabled or enforcing food safety laws – all lumped together as “burdens” that ministers could scrap without further debate. From protecting ancient monuments, wildlife and hedgerows to the mental health act, child poverty act, homelessness act, adoption and children act, the chronically sick and disabled act – hundreds of laws will become open to summary removal.

Labour has no chance of winning its Commons amendment to stop this legislative vandalism, but the Lords may yet rebel. If you find it hard to believe how much of the fabric of social protection could be snuffed out at the whim of ministers, pause to scrutinise the official list of “burdens”, listed on the Communities and Local Government website..

This act is a powerful mechanism for shrinking government, amid Pickles’ ritual abuse of “bureaucrats” and “town hall busybodies”. Let local people decide! Let them vote for councils that provide whatever services they want.

That sounds fine in rhetoric but reeks in reality. Recent local elections show that council elections are mainly a barometer of national, not local, politics. If people rarely vote on local issues, they certainly don’t get much involved: Ipsos Mori finds one in five people claim they might get involved – but only 2% do, no change, despite years of Labour’s community efforts by Hazel Blears and others. Of course participation could and should be better, but people know well that most funds – and most cuts – come from Westminster, where blame usually lies for shortfalls in local services. Pickles stopped reform of council tax and George Osborne capped it, while the Lib Dems gave up on local income tax.

In polls people say they want services to be fair. Equality always trumps local autonomy. Mori’s Ben Page says “Fairness is a strong British value. They say state provision should be the same everywhere – and the buck always stops at the top with ministers.” How extreme is their wish for equal services? Mori found 91% thought the grass in public parks should be cut with equal regularity everywhere. This country thinks nationally when it comes to rights to services. Unpicking all those laws that protect the weak and ensure citizens can trust the food they eat, the water they drink and the air they breathe goes against the grain in a country where these are part of the natural history of social progress. Francis Maude says centralism never did away with local variation, but just see how extreme his postcode lottery becomes.

Remember all this happens while the government massively redistributes council funds from poorer to richer areas. The cuts hit the poorest councils hardest – Liverpool worst – and the richest like Dorset are barely touched. Pickles’ plan to let councils keep their business rates will make the rich very much richer at the expense of poor areas. Currently business rates are centrally collected and handed out according to need. Once keeping their own business taxes, the City of London gains £517m, Westminster and Chelsea gain £1.6m each while the great losers are Birmingham, cut by £175m, Hackney by £116m and Liverpool by another £104m. When the government lets councils decide how much – if any – council tax credit to pay poorer households, what will rich areas do? Without geographical sharing we stop being a nation in any meaningful sense. But that is the logic of localism: the little platoons all thriving or struggling on their own.

There is more danger in this bill: Sir Robin Wales, the mayor of Newham, also worries the bill will be a charter for the planning corruption it took so long to stamp out. Developers can get up a small local group to front their plan, with unseen backhanders. Meanwhile the bill lets nimbys stop plans for necessary social housing or unpopular services on their doorsteps.

There is more: any small group can call for public services to be put out to tender. Naturally, this is dressed up in “big society” disguise, promising local people can run their community centre or take over their library and leisure centre. The reality is that the door to everything is being opened to “any willing provider”, as David Cameron revealed in a recent speech.

Yesterday the head of Capita, the outsourcing company, told the Financial Times he had been assured by Francis Maude that the “big society” would not get in the way of large firms taking the lion’s share of contracts. Eyeing one giant £2.6bn contract, he came away saying: “There is absolutely no way on the planet that is going to be let to a charity or a small- or medium-sized enterprise … the voluntary sector will not be a massive player as they simply don’t have the scale and can’t bear the risk.” Exactly that happened with the Department for Work and Pensions DWP welfare to work contracts: 38 of the 40 contracts went to a handful of big firms with success records worse than the jobcentres.

So much is being torn up in a whirlwind, with uprooted services outsourced or gone forever. This government is making sure it leaves behind ineradicable change. As Margaret Thatcher disposed of utilities, David Cameron is disposing of the state.

Housing associations could lead public service reform , Foster Evans , EVH

The Christie Commission’s review on the future of public service delivery is expected to be published this month.
 
The commission is likely to address a range of fundamental challenges, and call for changes. Service redesign might emphasise the need for more working in partnership, including involving local communities, politicians and the voluntary sector. It will stress the need for innovative responsive services designed around what people need. And it will call for early intervention to cut costs later.
 
In our own submission to the commission, EVH have highlighted the potential for local community-based housing associations (CBHAs) to meet these expectations.
 
Many housing associations have been successful in moving beyond being a landlord, doing more than providing good quality affordable housing. There are countless examples of housing associations delivering a range of important local services. We see health and wellbeing as one of the most pressing issues for many of the communities they serve.
 
It is a natural evolution, given that high levels of social rented housing are often found in areas of poor health, poverty and benefit-dependency.
 
A greater integration of effort and collaboration between the NHS, local authorities and the local social housing provider could have a positive effect on health and wellbeing at individual and community level. Top-level commitment to developing this relationship could bring real benefits.
 
Many CBHAs possess a unique community credibility and that high trust relationship could be exploited effectively for the promotion of community health and wellbeing.
 
Their expertise in housing development, professionalism, local credibility and, critically, knowledge of their communities suggests they could provide an ideal platform from which to improve local services as well as the physical environment.
 
There are many good examples, including housing integrated with health promotion, care and other services. These can be isolated; relying on individual initiatives and specific local factors. Re-examining the structural relationship between the social housing, care and health professions should build from these experiences. That way such work can be scaled up to take advantage of the sector’s potential to provide community anchor organisations, around which services can be based.
 
Opportunities presented from the commission’s recommendations could support CHBAs to enhance the services they provide to the communities they serve. This will arise from both a desire to do more and a realisation that current services models will be stretched to breaking point as tensions building between resource constraints and public expectations become more severe.
 
Good health encourages independence and supports opportunity. Communities are built on this. Building better communities attracts people, improves services, enhances assets, attracts investment and supports sustainability.
 
It is interesting to note that EVH’s initial research for this was supported by private sector partners (Cruden Estates and Land Engineering) with an interest in this developing policy landscape and how this will influence the way in which they conduct their future business.
 
There are challenges and opportunities in the reforms to public sector service delivery in Scotland. The housing association sector represents an under-exploited resource for the development and delivery of public services. CBHAs can do more to support this and are ready to translate Christie’s policy recommendations into practice.
 
Foster Evans is director of EVH, who have over 140 housing associations as member employers.
 

Author: Steve Wyler, chief executive of Locality

Charity will use commission’s formula to convey government ideas to community groups

The charity Locality, which has been asked by the government to “help the sector and communities to better understand the opportunities of the big society”, will adopt the definition of big society provided by Acevo.

In its role as a strategic partner to the Office for Civil Society, Locality has been asked to make sure community groups understand the government’s agenda. Other strategic partners have been given responsibilities in different areas.

Steve Wyler, chief executive of Locality, told Third Sector a “working definition” of the term was necessary in order for it to carry out its task.

He said the charity would use the definition (set out in full below) that was published in a report produced last month by the Commission on Big Society, a group set up by the chief executives body Acevo.

Wyler said the OCS had also asked Locality to identify any challenges faced by community groups.

He said Locality would carry out its role of helping communities to understand the big society by telling its members about the provisions in the Localism Bill and the progress of the Big Society Bank, and notifying them of new government funding programmes.

He added that it was equally important to make sure the government listened to criticisms from community groups.

“We will build up evidence about any obstacles that charities and communities face, and take that back to the Cabinet Office,” he said.

“Where things are going wrong we will be in a position to speak truth unto power, but we will also try to find solutions.

“We are campaigning for a moratorium on cuts, so that charities and community groups are given a right to reshape services before their funding is lost.”

He said he did not think Locality’s role as a strategic partner compromised the charity’s independence. “When we bid for the funding we put forward our own agenda and we will now be able to carry that out,” he said.

“The role of helping communities to understand the big society is an additional role to that.”
 
The Commission on Big Society’s definition

“A society in which power and responsibility have shifted: one in which, at every level in our national life, individuals and communities have more aspiration, power and capacity to take decisions and solve problems themselves, and where all of us take greater responsibility for ourselves, our communities and one another”