Where does empowerment go from here?

Putting all boat-rocking, you-tubing and home-flipping to one side, community empowerment certainly had a strong ally in former Communities and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears.

During her two-year tenure she was an enthusiastic advocate of empowerment, driving it through the new round of Local Area Agreements in 2008, single-handedly championing a range of pilot projects and almost launching a new Bill onto the statute books.

So it seems a good time for us in the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) to ask, in her recent absence, where empowerment goes from here.

But first let us go back, way back in the pre-recession mists of time to June 2007 when the MP for Salford took over the reins of local government, succeeding Ruth Kelly and David Miliband before her…

The halcyon days of the CEN

‘Empowerment’ within the VCS was at this time more commonly associated with Community Empowerment Networks or CENs – projects designed to involve local people and VCS groups in the work and decision-making of England’s Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs).

Funding for such activity was ring-fenced (largely through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund) and every Local Area Agreement (LAA) contained a ‘Statement of VCS involvement’ detailing how our sector could and should both engage in and contribute to the work of the LAA.

But not all was rosy in the garden of empowerment. CENs often came under criticism from government for under-performing, dedicated funding for such work was coming to a merciless end and CEN representatives often faced charges of, well, not actually being very representative at all.

Against this backdrop Blear’s empowerment intervention, with its focus on the individual local residents rather than the voluntary or community groups as a route to empowerment, seemed to some in the CEN world almost patronising.

Much effort had gone into building up CENs over the previous five years, many of which suffered from what you might call ‘general LSP junior partner status disorder’, often finding themselves banging collective community heads against an LSP-shaped brick wall, whose approach to real partnership working many in our sector found cripplingly slow and uncoordinated.

Nevertheless there were distinct positives to the new course Blears sought to chart. CENs, (for many understandable reasons) tended to engage more established voluntary groups rather better than smaller community ones. With Hazel at the helm the vital role of the community sector was therefore given a welcome and much needed fillip.

Likewise the new set of national indicators that accompanied the 2008 LAA round put a fresh and original focus the ability of local people to influence decision-making in their area.

Known to LAA geeks as simply ‘NI 4’, the implications of this shift in monitoring for local authorities looks set to outlive the career of Ms Blears and will, we hope, push us slightly further down the road to something approaching a healthy civil and civic society.

Post-Hazel

For many VCS groups empowerment has always been a bread and butter issue. Responding sensitively to the needs of their communities can be tremendously empowering in itself – and is one of our unique selling points. Better than that it is what we do instinctively. Ministers, initiatives and new names for old concepts come and go, but some things remain constant.

So what we can learn from the last two years?

Well if we simply follow the money, not much. With public sector spending cuts looming and many of those pilots kept afloat only by the Minister’s personal buoyancy, we shouldn’t expect significant new funding for empowerment any time soon.

Those new responsibilities on local statutory partners however do not sink so easily, and we await the judgements of the first Comprehensive Area Assessment reports later this year with some anticipation.

Within our own backyards we must build on the good work of our regional empowerment partnerships – of which I’m delighted to say London is a strong example – in reconnecting us all with the work of grass roots community organisations.

London has nearly 27,000 registered charities but tens of thousands more community groups, reacting instantly to community need and surviving on budgets that in many other sectors wouldn’t cover the cost of a conference.

With the help of these grass roots networks voluntary groups must continue to work in partnership with our local and regional statutory colleagues, whose needs we must in turn appreciate and consider as they seek to narrow the gaping void between central government vision and local government reality.

We must create our own momentum, support change where it benefits our communities and hold LSPs and others to account where it does not.