Policy-makers have identified that community and mutual ownership can make a significant contribution to the economy, welfare and society more generally. A historical analysis of social change can inform contemporary understanding, policy and practice.

This study charts the historical development of ownership of land, resources, businesses and services. It identifies models of community and mutual ownership and draws out implications for addressing social problems and meeting new needs.

Key points
•  Modern ideas and practices of ownership took a long time to develop, and were based on the enclosure of common land, the emergence of concentrated private ownership and the enlargement of state activity, both through regulation and the direct ownership of resources and services. These long-term historical transformations were not inevitable processes with a fixed outcome.
•  The project identified five models of ‘community and mutual’ ownership:  customary and common; community; co-operative and mutual; charitable; and municipal and state ownership.
•  There is a contemporary opportunity for community and mutual ownership to help meet needs relating to the economy, welfare provision, society in general, and the environment.
•  However, new forms of democracy, membership and belonging cannot be created overnight. In the past, community and mutual ownership was built up over a long time and depended upon the growth of popular participation and associated feelings of ownership.
•  Nurturing community and mutual ownership requires a coherent and systematic approach, based on a clear set of values, if it is to realise its full potential.
Summary  Download as PDF, 4 pages, 0.11 MB

Key Findings (Download a copy of the full report)

The aims of this research were to find out who was buying community shares; what were their
motivations when they bought the shares; what was most important to them – the financial, social
or environmental returns on their investment; and, informed by the findings, what marketing
techniques would be best suited to this form of capital raising. An internet questionnaire to 11
Societies which had recently issued Community Shares was emailed out to 1785 members and 240
respondents completed the survey (a healthy response rate of 13%). This was followed up with 30
semi structured interviews by telephone. Data was also analysed from the share register of Societies
on amounts of individual shareholding and location of members. From this research we have been
able to build up a picture of who is buying community shares.

There are 4 categories of investor

– The Local Community Investor – an individual who wants to create or maintain local
facilities for social return, can also include those with connections to, but no longer living in
the area (e.g. investing in a community owned shop or pub); “…seemed like a good idea to
own the store between us and maintain it…”

– The Community of Interest Investor – an individual who wants to create or maintain
facilities they have an interest in for social return (e.g. investing in a community owned
railway); “..purely out of interest! I am interested in railways and railway management…”

– The Social Investor – an institution or high net worth individual interested in receiving a
blend of social and financial return, possibly social investment is only a small part of a larger
investment portfolio (e.g. investing in a co-operative wind farm); “…the finances have to
stack up or we won’t invest, but if the social impact and mission isn’t there then we won’t
invest either…”

– The Ethical Investor – an individual with no obvious connection to a Society other than
approving of its social aims, sometimes motivated by democratic structures and ideology,
and wishing to invest as a means of receiving primarily a social return (but not foregoing
financial compensation – a small amount of interest or a tax incentive); “…When we have a
bit of extra money we’ll put a £1000 in something if it seems good…”
 

Two guides also launched at seminar : Investing in Community Shares 

                                                 Community shares: A practitioners guide to governance and offer documents

Two recent articles offering different perspectives on the future of community councils

Hugh Docherty – The Herald

One of the first jobs I did on joining Strathclyde Regional Council’s public relations department in 1985 was to help breathe new life into the region’s ailing community councils.

That was 10 years after they had been established as part of local government reorganisation in 1975, and a visit to the community council resource centre in Glasgow, plus some press releases to the 52 local papers covering Strathclyde, wasn’t encouraging.

It soon became clear that no-one was very interested in involvement, while the cornerstones of tenants and residents’ associations and neighbourhood watch committees were the same people as those on community councils.

Most were retired, some obsessed with a particular single local issue, and others were members of that peculiar class of people, many seemingly suffering from an adult version of attention deficit disorder, bestowed with the over-dignified title of ‘community activist’. No wonder ordinary residents shied away.

Today, the picture is similar in the majority of Scotland’s 1,200 community councils. Now that axes are being sharpened for the cuts to come, community councils should be first in line for the chop. For they squander enormous amounts of expensive and precious council officer time pandering to the whims and moans of members, who generally don’t represent anything but the particular obsessions of those who are generally co-opted to them. The majority of community councils never have enough candidates for membership to run an election. Getting on is easy, staying on is easier and it becomes a closed shop.

Of course, there are some community councils doing an excellent job, but they only seem to work where the first line in their title actually exists – a community itself. I’ve come across examples in Neilston, where the community council has worked with the local council and other agencies to start an effective regeneration of the village, while Portpatrick’s community council publishes an excellent newsletter and effects physical and attitudinal change in the community. In both cases, vitally, there’s a community to start with.

But the majority of community councils in urban and suburban areas labour under the disadvantage that no real community exists. They tend to be dominated by older people who often make little effort to communicate with residents and whose personal interests tend to dominate proceedings. Local news agendas also tend to be distorted by them, for young reporters head to the community council meeting for guaranteed stories criticising the local council for the neighbourhood’s every ill.

Community councils are legally constituted bodies, have a right to be consulted on planning issues, and have a duty to work with the local council for the good of the community. But, far too often, members vent their rage on councillors who attend and their first response is often ‘No!’ to any proposal. In-fighting can also be destructively brutal.

The problem is that councillors can be over-influenced by community councils, whereas the average citizen isn’t interested in spending an evening in a school hall discussing issues such as littering, the latest application for a take-away, or that ‘the area’s not what it was when I moved here 40 years ago’ – a common community council discussion topic. Most people are far too busy getting on with their lives.

None of this is to denigrate the work of genuine people who run effective community councils, nor the efforts of the Association of Scottish Community Councils which has worked with COSLA to bring out a model code of practice.

We have to ask if we can afford community councils. They were launched 25 years ago as the cornerstone of what was then a more active local democracy with more participation by voters in elections and when more people belonged to churches, clubs and other organisations.

None of that applies today. It’s time to say goodbye to community councils as a touching anachronism.

Lesley Riddoch, The Scotsman

Mini-councils will energise Scotland’s communities

The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan recently made the case for localism in this paper: “Give councils more power and you will attract a higher calibre of candidate, as well as boosting participation at local elections.

“In Britain, local authorities raise 25 per cent of their budgets and turn-out is typically around 30 per cent. In France, those figures are, respectively, 50 and 55 per cent; in Switzerland 85 and 90 per cent.”

Interesting comparisons – and not just because Gallic councils raise more cash and enjoy higher voter turn-out. They also have tiny units of local governance compared with big, remote, clunky old Britain.

France has 22 regions, 96 départements and 36,000 communes with an average population of just 380. The Swiss have 7.6 million people in 23 cantons and 2,900 communes with an average population of 2,600.

Norway – same population as Scotland – has 431 municipalities responsible for primary and secondary education, outpatient health, senior citizen and social services, unemployment, planning, economic development and roads.

The average Norwegian municipality has 12,500 people – the average Scottish council serves 162,500.

North or south, Baltic or Mediterranean, most European states are micro-sized at their local tier. That means more councillors and more cost. It also means more connection, traction, trust, effective service delivery and involvement than our disempowering and distant “local” government.

Since the majority of MPs start as councillors, their early experience of community really matters. In municipal, small-scale, active and co-operative Norway, an expectation of local competence and involvement has informed national policy-making. The opposite has happened at Holyrood.

Politicians of all parties like the idea of involving local people, but in practice wouldn’t trust them to run the proverbial in a brewery.

So we are stuck with the biggest “local” government in Europe – too large to connect with actual communities, too small to achieve genuine efficiencies of scale. Kind of the mummy bowl size in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Betwixt and between.

Take Highland Council, which covers an area the size of Belgium with a population the size of Belfast. Councillors drive hundreds of thousands of miles a year to create a sense of connection through meetings, surgeries and local events. Despite such superhuman efforts, many remote communities feel largely negative, reduced to questioning, suspecting and vetoing whatever emanates from Inverness.

Meanwhile, Europe’s fastest growing city also lacks a dedicated council of its own. One size doesn’t fit all – in fact, it doesn’t fit very much.

Those who run Scotland’s overlarge authorities are on big salaries and a losing wicket. Many struggle valiantly to keep their ears to the ground. But the ground is simply too large. Ironically, this means more money spent on consultation, which then decreases confidence in community capacity because few locals bother to respond.

A recent Rotary event in Fort William was packed with retired planners, civil engineers, project managers and council chiefs despairing about the lack of vibrancy in their town. What had this talented, practical bunch done about it? Nothing.

Our disempowering, paternalist system of local government has stifled localism for decades – why should anything change now?

Local confidence, capacity and management skills come from running real assets and sweating over real decisions with real neighbours able to really help or really obstruct. Not from box-ticking consultation exercises.

So as life in Scotland looks set to become even more centralised in the name of efficiency, could it also become more localised at the same time? Should our current local authorities become the tier to scrap or – given Scotland’s penchant for failing to grasp the thistle – circumvent?

Prominent Scots have already been thinking the unthinkable.

Former Inspector of Constabulary Paddy Tomkins has called for a single police force in Scotland which communicates directly with beefed-up beat patrols. Labour’s education minister Peter Peacock has proposed scrapping Scotland’s 32 education authorities, allowing ministers in Edinburgh to fund headteachers directly.

Local police and municipal schools – why stop there? Why not ultra-local mini-councils à la Europe? Why not – because there’s no cash, no spare energy, no appetite for local government reform and no real belief that the massive distance between people and power in Britain actually matters. Happily, there may be an ad hoc solution.

Powerless community councils are so toothless they can’t legally own an asset. So development trusts have been set up to handle community orchards, lochs, pubs, libraries, bridges and wind turbines – and in the process a very practical, capable and focused set of people have been gathered together and let rip.

Community-owned or joint-venture wind farms will soon be netting millions (not peanuts) for their areas. Already in Fintry near Glasgow, community wind cash has paid to insulate homes and replace axed bus services.

It’s a silent revolution. There are 4-500 development trusts in Scotland – community-led, multiple-activity, enterprising, partnership-oriented and keen to move away from reliance on grants. Working with local housing associations, they could become a powerful force for local good.

Could they help to run Scotland? They soon will be.

Cost-cutting councils are already closing libraries and village halls. Development Trusts are ready to take them on – pigs in pokes excepted.

Joint procurement, shared backroom functions, local energy companies and district heating must become the norm in Scottish life, not the praiseworthy exception.

That can only happen if little and large combine powerfully to improve governance. Cometh the hour, cometh the community

Our approach

We want to provide long-term help that supports and joins up with the valuable work already being carried out at a community, local and national level to help disadvantaged and overlooked neighbourhoods.

To do this we will set up a new independent Trust and give it up to £200 million to invest and spend over about 10 years. This Trust will support local funding schemes in specified urban and rural neighbourhoods that will help meet local need and build skills and confidence in the communities.

An independent Trust brings with it many benefits. A Trust can plan for the long-term and ensure that money committed cannot be diverted for other uses. It can be flexible in the kinds of local spending it supports, including giving out grants, setting up microfinance schemes and neighbourhood endowments, and organising social investment bonds. It can help local partners attract further investments for neighbourhoods. A Trust may also recruit staff or contract with other organisations to carry out elements of its work, and raise money from other sources, to add to the money from us.

Another important benefit the Trust can bring is its ability to work at neighbourhood level to provide support to communities: building confidence, developing skills and helping them to identify and tackle issues they prioritise.

How the Trust will work

The Trust will be set up to achieve the aim of our Big Local Trust programme:

To enable people to make their communities better places to live in, now and in the future, by helping them develop the skills and confidence they need to identify priorities that matter to them and to take action to change things for the better.

The Trust will focus its work on between 100 and 150 disadvantaged and overlooked urban and rural neighbourhoods in its lifetime. The targeted neighbourhoods are all places where many people face multiple barriers to meeting their needs, and which have not had great success in gaining resources to help. We have already selected the first 50, based on extensive analysis and discussion in each of our nine England regional areas, and we will also select a further 50-100. Details of the first 50 neighbourhoods are available on the Big Lottery Fund website www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/biglocaltrust

The Trust will have its own objects, which describe what it is set up to do. It will also have powers that set out the ways it can achieve its objects, for example, by giving grants, providing loans or tendering for services. These will include the power to seek other income to add to its endowment from the Big Lottery Fund.

For more information on the Trust click here

Author: Jonathon Freedland, Guardian

The most common reaction to David Cameron’s “big society” idea is mockery. Even the Tories can’t resist. The prime minister had barely launched the project on Monday when Boris Johnson seized the chance to take another pop at his arch-rival. “We must tackle the scourge of obesity, or the big society, as it’s sometimes known,” smirked the London mayor. That was polite compared to the senior Conservative who, during the election campaign, said of the idea that could come to define Cameronism: “The big society is bollocks.”

Labour can hardly be blamed for wanting to join in this kickfest. Ed Miliband wasted no time, branding the big society – which hopes to see citizens, local communities, voluntary groups and philanthropists take on tasks currently performed by central government – a return to “a 19th-century or US-style view of our welfare state”, comparisons that were not meant as compliments. Yet insults and sniggers, however enjoyable, might not be the right response. For this is a rare case of the wrong person at the wrong time and in the wrong way delivering the right idea – an idea that Labour and the left would be foolish to reject.

That Cameron and the coalition are the wrong bearers of this message should be obvious. For what, by their own account, is the chief mission of this government? The slashing of the deficit. That instantly renders suspect any plan to shift responsibility away from government. Even the Telegraph reported Monday’s launch under the headline: “Big society is not a cover for spending cuts, insists Cameron.” When money is as tight as it is now, when ministers are cutting not just fat but flesh, people will inevitably assume that government passing the baton to what Eric Pickles calls “folks”, is a fancy way of dressing up shrunken budgets.

That would be true of any government proposing such an approach in an age of austerity. But the suspicion is doubled when the government is led by a Conservative. For we know that the party has an ideological attachment to the apparent corollary of a big society: a small state. Voters can hardly be blamed for wondering if Cameron, a former PR man, has not simply lighted upon a more appealing sell for the old Thatcherite product. Sure, he now speaks of rolling forward the frontiers of society, rather than rolling back the frontiers of the state, but they could easily amount to the same thing. On this logic, a reverse version of the Nixon-to-China principle holds: only a government of the state-supporting left could advocate a big society without having its motives impugned.

Cameron likes to suggest that the big society chimes with an ethos that lies deep in Toryism. All those community groups doing things for themselves are surely Edmund Burke’s little platoons. Yet whatever ideals pre-industrial Toryism cherished, they are a long way from the world-view of the post-Thatcher Conservative party. Maurice Glasman, of the grassroots London Citizens movement, notes that what people need if they are to take on some of the communal tasks envisaged by Cameron is a commitment to the place they live in and the time to get involved. And time means money. “If you’ve got to do two jobs to survive, how are you going to have the time to be a school governor?”

The Conservatives have no answer to that, because they are committed to a doctrine that demands maximum flexibility of labour – even if that means getting on your bike and moving to the other end of the country – and that refuses to legislate for a living, as opposed to a minimum, wage. A big society needs people anchored in place and blessed with time, yet Conservative economics grants neither – except to the well-off.

The problems don’t end there. The brief record of the coalition reveals enough contradictions to undermine one’s confidence. A core tenet of the big society, at least as Cameron explains it, is a preference for the local over the central: the word “local” appeared 19 times in his Monday speech. And yet his education policy seems predicated on a quiet loathing for local education authorities, taking schools that are currently under the wing of an LEA and turning them into academies answerable to central government or else creating “free” schools, also out of the LEA’s reach.

Cameron lauds the work of voluntary groups and social enterprises who do, as he rightly says, inspiring work. Yet talk to those groups and many now fear for their existence. They know that government departments or local councils desperate to save money will look first to contracts with third sector providers like them: how much easier to terminate a contract with, or cut a grant to, an outside body than to lay off your own staff?

All of which adds up to a lot of bathwater sloshing around Cameron’s big idea. However tempting it would be for Labour to throw the whole lot out, it should beware – for there is a baby in there, too, one to which Labour has a decent claim of paternity.

To find it, it’s worth digging into Labour’s roots. There you will find the Co-operative movement, friendly and mutual societies, as well as the trade unions, out of which Labour was forged. The ethos of collective organisation and self-help predated the Fabian emphasis on central government and the later obsession with state ownership.

What those Labour pioneers understood was that more was at stake than providing services efficiently; that there was an extra, human value in people coming together and working for the common good. The sociologists speak of the “social capital” that accrues when people form such connections with each other. There is, as Cameron argued, a “passivity” that can result – and has resulted in Britain – when people habitually look upward, for solutions, like feudal serfs waiting for the baron’s nod.

There is no reason for people on the left to be opposed to a society made up of neighbours who don’t wait for the council to clean up a needle-strewn park, but do it themselves. Indeed, Labour will make a great mistake if they put themselves on the opposite – and wrong – side of the idea at the heart of the big society. For they will be offering an impoverished notion of what it is to be on the left, reducing it to mere statism.

Instead, Labour needs to seize this idea from Cameron, reclaim its Labour origins – and then improve it. That would start with a realisation that a truly big society does not entail public services on the cheap. In fact, the reverse is true. According to Hilary Cottam, whose pioneering work with the Southwark Circle – a remarkable service run by, for and with the elderly – has been praised by Cameron: “This work couldn’t have happened without state investment.” Social entrepreneurs like her can’t take out a loan for what they do; they’re not running a business. They need public money, often large amounts of it. Only then, once the initial research is done and the scheme is bedded in, can the authorities, local or central, expect to save money. Labour can make that case. But the deficit-fetishists of the coalition, cutting left and right, cannot.

Labour can also notice the big gap in Cameron’s big society. His idea rests on the notion that the only obstacle in people’s way is the state. But what’s good for the public sector state is surely good for the private sector gander. Why not nurture a shift in power away from the banks and to local credit unions? If we’re going to have academies, why not encourage a local university to be the sponsor, rather than big business?

So yes, Cameron should be hammered on some of the contradictions and ugly motives behind the big society. The name itself is laughable. But there’s a good idea in there, screaming to get out. Labour should grab it – and claim it as its own.

Big Tent is organised by Falkland Centre for Stewardship, a small charity based in the heart of Falkland Estate.

As well as caring for the A listed House of Falkland with its arts and craft interiors and historic landscape, we are developing Falkland Estate as a place where people are learning how to live and work more sustainably. Our interests span from the value of re-skilling our communities to the impact of today’s decisions on climate change for future generations. We are adapting old ideas of stewardship to the needs of our modern, fast changing world with an organic farm that is starting to produce affordable food for our local town, by upgrading miles of paths to strengthen our connections with neighbouring communities, planting thousands of trees and considering plans for allotments and wood fuel production.

As well as hosting the Big Tent, we are also home to the One Planet Food project which aims to encourage a sustainable, healthy and inclusive food culture – in partnership with the Carnegie UK Trust, Fife Council, the University of St Andrews and others.

History of Big Tent

The original proposal for Big Tent was for a “festival of stewardship” at Falkland was conceived on the steps of Falkland Upper Town Hall at the end of the first stewardship forum meeting held by Falkland Centre for Stewardship on August 31st 2004. The prompt was the forthcoming G8 summit at Gleneagles in July 2005 – we imagined an event (following the G8 summit) which would act as a counterpoint providing a venue for ordinary people to share and celebrate ideas and actions that promote good stewardship.

We saw the festival as an opportunity to make contact with and extend invitations to like-minded organisations, and thus as one way in creating the wider partnerships which would be needed for the long-term establishment of Falkland Centre for Stewardship as a national as well as local focus for stewardship.

The festival has run during the summer since 2006. Programme content has evolved over the last 4 years but at its heart, the festival remains an environmental festival with an excellent music and cultural programme. It is not a music festival with a green makeover.

The festival is divided into zones which are: Head Zone for debates, poetry and other expressions, Family Zone for entertainment especially for children (eg workshops, theatre, music), Food Village for locally sourced/organic traders, Body and Soul Zone for therapies and alternative remedies, Wood Zone for all things woody, new for 2010 is the Craft Zone, then there’s the Market Zone for fair trade and quality traders and the Music Zone which comprises two stages – the Wee Shindig and the main stage.

Over the last four years we have developed close working partnerships with different organisations who have helped to evolve and promote programme content. For example, WWF and Word Press have been partners with the Head Zone, Lapidus brings poets and an excellent poetry programme to the Big Tent every year, a local yoga centre coordinates the Body and Soul Zone and an array of wood organisations helped to form the newly created Wood Zone for 2009. The Food Village is coordinated by one of Fife’s leading chefs and the Climate Champions Zone brings communities from all over Scotland to celebrate the work that is being done in the battle against climate change.

The festival has acted as a catalyst for other initiatives. For example, the media acclaimed Fife Diet was first conceived here and now over 800 people in Fife have joined this local eating experiment. Transition Scotland held their first ever Scottish gathering at the festival in 2008.

The Big Tent has always promoted an affordable ticketing structure. Since 2008 it has promoted free entry to children under 12 and in 2010 day tickets start from less than £12. With entertainment, music, workshops and debates from 10.30am each day until 11pm, it is one of the best value festivals on the UK circuit.

Plans to make it easier for communities to deliver affordable housing developments without requiring planning permission will be contained in the forthcoming Decentralisation and Localism Bill, housing minister Grant Shapps has confirmed.

Speaking at the Community Land Trusts conference in London, Shapps said that the bill, which is due to be introduced in the autumn, would contain measures to encourage the establishment of “local housing trusts”

Shapps said that the initiative, which was first proposed in the Conservative Party’s planning green paper earlier this year, would allow communities and groups of social housing tenants to form trusts that would decide on the amount and type of affordable housing in an area. They would then be able to take steps to deliver new developments, without having to submit a planning application.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Communities and Local Government said that local housing trusts would have to prove that any new schemes had support from an “overwhelming majority – around 90 per cent – of the local community”. They would also have to meet some “basic planning criteria”, she said, but would not have to lodge formal planning applications.

Shapps told delegates: “I want communities to have the freedom to decide on the type and quantity of housing without external restrictions imposed by a centralised planning system.

“Local housing trusts may also want to build some housing to sell, sheltered housing for the elderly, or even set aside plots for people to build their own homes.

“They will be able to make a judgement about how best to invest in their community and meet its needs, for instance they might offer long-term low rent for local shops, a community hall, or a sports facility.”

He said that the model for local housing trusts would be based on that of community land trusts (CLTs) – local bodies that own or manage land and assets in perpetuity for the benefit of the community.

“Once a new development has been built, local housing trusts will be expected to invest any financial profits back into the community. And the land will remain in the trust for local benefit forever – regardless of what happens to the homes built on top,” he said

Author: Lesley Riddoch, Scotsman

The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan recently made the case for localism in this paper: “Give councils more power and you will attract a higher calibre of candidate, as well as boosting participation at local elections.

“In Britain, local authorities raise 25 per cent of their budgets and turn-out is typically around 30 per cent. In France, those figures are, respectively, 50 and 55 per cent; in Switzerland 85 and 90 per cent.”

Interesting comparisons – and not just because Gallic councils raise more cash and enjoy higher voter turn-out. They also have tiny units of local governance compared with big, remote, clunky old Britain.

France has 22 regions, 96 départements and 36,000 communes with an average population of just 380. The Swiss have 7.6 million people in 23 cantons and 2,900 communes with an average population of 2,600.

Norway – same population as Scotland – has 431 municipalities responsible for primary and secondary education, outpatient health, senior citizen and social services, unemployment, planning, economic development and roads.

The average Norwegian municipality has 12,500 people – the average Scottish council serves 162,500.

North or south, Baltic or Mediterranean, most European states are micro-sized at their local tier. That means more councillors and more cost. It also means more connection, traction, trust, effective service delivery and involvement than our disempowering and distant “local” government.

Since the majority of MPs start as councillors, their early experience of community really matters. In municipal, small-scale, active and co-operative Norway, an expectation of local competence and involvement has informed national policy-making. The opposite has happened at Holyrood.

Politicians of all parties like the idea of involving local people, but in practice wouldn’t trust them to run the proverbial in a brewery.

So we are stuck with the biggest “local” government in Europe – too large to connect with actual communities, too small to achieve genuine efficiencies of scale. Kind of the mummy bowl size in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Betwixt and between.

Take Highland Council, which covers an area the size of Belgium with a population the size of Belfast. Councillors drive hundreds of thousands of miles a year to create a sense of connection through meetings, surgeries and local events. Despite such superhuman efforts, many remote communities feel largely negative, reduced to questioning, suspecting and vetoing whatever emanates from Inverness.

Meanwhile, Europe’s fastest growing city also lacks a dedicated council of its own. One size doesn’t fit all – in fact, it doesn’t fit very much.

Those who run Scotland’s overlarge authorities are on big salaries and a losing wicket. Many struggle valiantly to keep their ears to the ground. But the ground is simply too large. Ironically, this means more money spent on consultation, which then decreases confidence in community capacity because few locals bother to respond.

A recent Rotary event in Fort William was packed with retired planners, civil engineers, project managers and council chiefs despairing about the lack of vibrancy in their town. What had this talented, practical bunch done about it? Nothing.

Our disempowering, paternalist system of local government has stifled localism for decades – why should anything change now?

Local confidence, capacity and management skills come from running real assets and sweating over real decisions with real neighbours able to really help or really obstruct. Not from box-ticking consultation exercises.

So as life in Scotland looks set to become even more centralised in the name of efficiency, could it also become more localised at the same time? Should our current local authorities become the tier to scrap or – given Scotland’s penchant for failing to grasp the thistle – circumvent?

Prominent Scots have already been thinking the unthinkable.

Former Inspector of Constabulary Paddy Tomkins has called for a single police force in Scotland which communicates directly with beefed-up beat patrols. Labour’s education minister Peter Peacock has proposed scrapping Scotland’s 32 education authorities, allowing ministers in Edinburgh to fund headteachers directly.

Local police and municipal schools – why stop there? Why not ultra-local mini-councils à la Europe? Why not – because there’s no cash, no spare energy, no appetite for local government reform and no real belief that the massive distance between people and power in Britain actually matters. Happily, there may be an ad hoc solution.

Powerless community councils are so toothless they can’t legally own an asset. So development trusts have been set up to handle community orchards, lochs, pubs, libraries, bridges and wind turbines – and in the process a very practical, capable and focused set of people have been gathered together and let rip.

Community-owned or joint-venture wind farms will soon be netting millions (not peanuts) for their areas. Already in Fintry near Glasgow, community wind cash has paid to insulate homes and replace axed bus services.

It’s a silent revolution. There are 4-500 development trusts in Scotland – community-led, multiple-activity, enterprising, partnership-oriented and keen to move away from reliance on grants. Working with local housing associations, they could become a powerful force for local good.

Could they help to run Scotland? They soon will be.

Cost-cutting councils are already closing libraries and village halls. Development Trusts are ready to take them on – pigs in pokes excepted.

Joint procurement, shared backroom functions, local energy companies and district heating must become the norm in Scottish life, not the praiseworthy exception.

That can only happen if little and large combine powerfully to improve governance. Cometh the hour, cometh the community

Author: Angus Hardie

Change the direction of travel – invest in community led regeneration

The consultation being led by Scottish Government on how Scotland’s share of the dormant bank accounts should be spent and the associated debate that is has stimulated across the Third Sector is to be welcomed. This financial windfall presents a unique opportunity for Scotland to fundamentally challenge and improve upon existing orthodoxy in terms of how to tackle the deep rooted and enduring challenges in Scotland’s most deprived communities.

This proposal is based on the following propositions concerning Scotland’s community regeneration policy over the past 25 years :

• That despite a succession of targeted, area based regeneration initiatives over this period, the baseline indicators of improved outcomes for the people living in these communities show that little meaningful progress has been achieved
• That these initiatives can be characterised as being, without exception, top-down and led by the local authority in partnership with other public sector bodies.
• That these initiatives result in programmes of short term funding for community based projects that are not able to sustain themselves beyond the end of the regeneration scheme.
• That despite the evidence that this top down, short term investment approach has failed to make a sustained impact, the same approach with minor modifications, has been applied repeatedly ever since New Life For Urban Scotland in the early 1980’s.
• That regeneration policy and practice in Central/Lowland Scotland has failed to recognise the value of lessons learnt in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in relation to the potential impact of community ownership and control and the importance of linking social and community development with economic growth.

The annual turnover of Scotland’s Third Sector is approximately £3.7 billion. In relative terms, £40m is a small amount of money and there is a real danger that if it is committed along existing patterns of expenditure, it will generate little in terms of overall impact and additional value.

It could however be used in such a way that would both signal the start of a new era in the regeneration of our most deprived communities, and provide the Government’s current policy commitment on community empowerment with a flagship initiative that would reinforce its devolutionary credentials.

The proposal – to establish community endowments

The £40m should be used to establish a £2 million endowment fund in twenty of the most deprived communities in Scotland (the index of deprivation that is used should include a rural component) under the ownership and control of a community owned regeneration vehicle. Each endowment would be set up as a legal trust and managed by a team of professional fund managers contracted to work with a nominated local anchor organisation. Each community would enter negotiations with the awarding body (BIG Lottery) as to which local anchor organisation should assume the role of ‘accountable body’ for the endowment. The nominated local anchor organisation and the management arrangements for the endowment would be subject to rigorous due diligence, with a requirement that reporting on investment decisions and any disposal decisions with regard to the income generated, have to be wholly transparent and publicly accountable.

If implemented, this proposal would fundamentally change the framework within which local regeneration could take place. It would:

• provide the community with a long term income stream that is not dependent on the continued patronage of a grant provider
• change the dynamic of the relationship between the community and other stakeholders . The power imbalance created by the ‘begging bowl’ culture would become less significant.
• enable the community to take their place at the ‘partnership table’ as a genuine partner with a financial stake to contribute towards common objectives
• enable the community to assume greater control in determining what local priorities it chooses to address
• increase levels of community self confidence and local capacity as the sense of controlling more of their own destiny grows

Underpinning this proposal is the principle that the people who live in a community are best placed to lead any process of change or renewal that occurs within that community and should always be given the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, inherent in this proposal is a recognition that when local people are presented with this type of opportunity, a hitherto untapped pool of creative energy and local commitment and effort can be harnessed and channelled towards the overall regeneration effort.

As supporters of Local People Leading – The campaign for a strong and independent community sector, the organisations listed below endorse this submission to the Scottish Government as part of the Consultation on Dormant Bank Accounts.

Author: Helen Pank, Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens

Report from a meeting held on 17th June of individuals and organizations  interested in the proposal to form a Community Land Bank in Scotland.

Interest in the concept of a Community Land Bank (CLB) in Scotland is growing.  The objective of a CLB is to make it easier for communities to access land for growing (and perhaps other community activities such as sport or play) as well as making it easier for land owners, both public and private, to use their land in this way.  At the moment communities can find it very difficult to find land and negotiate terms for using the land – even on a short term basis. For instance, Dunoon Allotments Association has been pressing their local authority for land for use as allotments for over 5 years.  Landowners are often overly cautious about making their land available because of fears over the return of the land in the future.

A CLB could help overcome these barriers to access to land, for example by matching communities looking for land with landowners with available land, providing template leases, advice and case studies, assisting with negotiations as an independent third party, perhaps even holding land in trust, thereby offering greater security of tenure for community groups and greater security of tenure for landowners.

The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens(The Fed)commissioned a ‘pre-feasibility study’ into the proposal to establish a CLB in England last year.  The results showed that there was huge interest in the idea, both from public and private landowners as well as community groups.  The Fed is now undertaking further research into the possible structure and remit of a CLB. However this work is restricted to England as it is funded by Westminster Government.  Therefore, on 17th June at a meeting in Edinburgh discussions took place between a range of different stakeholders including local authorities, the NHS, the Forestry Commission, SNH, Development Trusts Association Scotland, to explore the potential for a CLB in Scotland.

Although there were widely varying opinions on how wide its remit should be, whether it should include land to be used for other community purposes than growing, how much support a CLB could realistically offer to community groups/landowners without requiring a huge organizational infrastructure and resource?  However there was a strong consensus that there was a great deal of merit in the idea and that the next step should be for the Fed to apply to the Scottish Govt for funds to undertake more detailed research to define the remit and structure of a CLB in Scotland.  If this application is successful, the Fed committed to work on this project over the winter with a view to presenting a costed CLB business plan by the end of March 2011.