The ‘Big Easy’ – Barnet’s Big Society
Author: Alex Thomson, Localis (in the MJ) |
The Big Society has garnered more than its fair share of headlines over the last couple of years, but what does it mean for local government? In the first of a series of pamphlets, Localis is publishing ‘Barnet’s Big Society’.
Written by Cllr Lynne Hillan, who was council leader until her recent retirement due to ill health, this pamphlet examines what the Big Society means to Barnet, and the practical steps the council is taking to implement its own Big Society vision.
The lessons from Barnet are an important contribution to the debate about how best, in a time of financial strain, to put greater power in the hands of ordinary citizens to allow them to direct and engage with the services they encounter in their everyday lives.
The pamphlet outlines a clear and distinct philosophy that the relationship between citizen and state approach needs to be rebalanced away from the latter and towards the former. It argues that in recent years as a society we have collectively conceded more and more money upwards to the state, in return for the state assuming greater levels of responsibility in our lives, the better to allow it to tackle our problems.
But this covenant has proved unsustainable. Not only has the state, unsurprisingly, proved unable to solve everything, but we have found ourselves beginning to believe that, once we have paid our taxes, there is no need for us to make any further contribution to society.
So how to remedy this situation? In Barnet’s view, the answer is the empowerment of local people and communities to engage with and customise the services they receive; to do away with needless ‘nannying’ by the state, steamline public service provision and get people putting something back into their communities again.
The council’s role is to facilitate this transformation. ‘Barnet’s Big Society’ identifies a number of practical tools and mechanisms all of which are underpinned by the council’s ‘One Barnet’ programme, which aims to develop a new relationship with residents and service users.
Firstly, the pamphlet argues that a big society is built on the foundations of a strong and active community, and consequently the local authority must support and nurture the voluntary and community sector, which is at the core of these grassroots networks. To this end Barnet Council have created the ‘Big Society Innovation Bank’, which has 600,000 to spend over the next three years to kick-start community-led projects and encourage social entrepreurship. It is hoped that this will help to inspire and support the development of more initiatives like ‘Community Coaches’, which builds on the principle that just a small amount of support can help develop more resilient communities which are able to help themselves. At the same time it is important to recognise that to fully support the Big Society, it is vital to focus not just on the funds and initiatives which the council can deliver, but to work across the public sector and develop community budgets in collaboration with partners ? both public and private.
Secondly, there must also be attention to empowering and engaging individuals. Barnet Council’s ‘PledgeBank’ is an excellent example of how this can lead to better outcomes for all. PledgeBank provides an online facility for individual residents to make their own pledges to support local initiatives such as helping to clean off graffiti or clear pavements of snow and ice.
It provides a mechanism for residents to organise their own projects and recruit neighbours and local people to achieve community goals. Engaging the individual is at the heart of mobilising communities. A key aspect of this is understanding people’s needs and wants and allowing them to act on them – this applies not just to the Pledgebank but also to core services.
In the realm of social housing, for instance, Barnet has found that by offering more information on property types and availability at the outset, individuals are empowered to make choices choose based on their own personal considerations, such as proximity to family or cost, as opposed to a subjective assessment of a property’s ‘niceness’.
We hope this pamphlet will provide the local government community with some concrete ideas for how to make the Big Society philosophy a practical reality. To quote its conclusion: ?In essence, the Big Society is about putting society back in the driving seat. Everyone has a responsibility to do their bit to make it work, and local government is uniquely placed to act as a catalyst to make it happen.?
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Barnet’s Big Society: a practical perspective from local government