Policy Round Up - Spring 2009

Real Help for Communities: Volunteers, Charities and Social Enterprises

The Government launched a new action plan on the 9^th of February as a response to the economic downturn and to support charities and social enterprises through the recession.

The overall principle of this action plan is to improve economic growth, equality and social mobility for those most at risk during the recession. The support formulated in this plan is additional to the £20 million of measures already announced by the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, and existing support available through the ‘Grassroots Grants’, ‘Futurebuilders’ and ‘Capacitybuilders’.

Overall, the action plan announces £42.5 million of extra measures around a range of activities to address some of the challenges of the current crisis. In particular, the action plan focuses on the following four strands:

1. Grants to third sector organisations

2. Support to social enterprises

3. Support for volunteering

4. Changes to commissioning practices

[For a detailed summary read our briefing on: www.dta.org.uk/realhelp]

[Read the full action plan on: http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/real_help_for_communities.aspx

The DTA is disappointed that this plan does so little to seize the opportunity to build new forms of social business and reinvigorate civil society – with community-based enterprises at the heart of a vision that will see us emerge stronger from the recession. Coin Street Community Builders and the DTA have been pressing for fast track investment in community asset acquisition and enterprise – and recently we are adding our voice to the call for a UK version of the Community Re-investment Act that exists in the US. So we will keep the pressure on. In the meantime we regard this action plan as a first small step. In order to maximise the impact of these measures we have encouraged Government to:

• Consider applying the ‘Community Resilience Fund’ to third sector organisations with an annual income of up to £500k. In many cases, medium size development trusts are delivering vital services in England’s most deprived communities and are at risk of bearing the brunt of this recession.
• ask Capacitybuilder and Futurebuilders to widen their definition of collaboration as part of the modernisation fund, to include activities such as mentoring between community organisations and other forms of peer learning and exchanges. The experience of development trusts and other social enterprises shows that peer learning is often an effective way to improve their efficiency and performance.
• Ensure that applications for the modernisation fund can be considered not just from individual organisations, but also from network bodies.

Details on how the ‘Community Resilience Fund’ is to be delivered has not been finalised yet, and there are also concerns about the timeframe (essentially less than one year) for spending the money. We do however encourage development trusts to keep an eye on this process as there may well be opportunities for them to bid for support.

The Local Democracy, Economic Development and ConstructionBill is looking at a wide range of measures to promote local democracy and economic development, devolve greater power to local government and communities, and ensure fairness in construction contracts. It is taking forward some of the proposals made in the White Paper: ‘Communities in control: real people, real power’ published in July 2008, as well as other proposals set out in the Government's Review of Sub-National Economic Development and Regeneration (SNR), and the Cave Review of social housing regulation (“Every Tenant Matters”).

The Bill will give greater responsibility to local authorities to promote economic development helping communities respond to local challenges. Amongst these are proposals for a new duty on local government to promote democracy, powers to create ‘economic prosperity boards’ and a duty on local authorities to undertake an economic assessment of their area.

We would encourage development trusts to ensure they are involved in these changes where they can; and in particular, making sure that they are recognised in the regional economic assessments.

The key elements of the Bill include:

• New measures and tools to encourage local people to become ‘active citizens’, through involvement in the design and delivery of local public services to improve their communities.
• A duty for Local Authorities to promote democracy and increase awareness of their services within the local population.
• A new duty for Local Authorities to acknowledge and respond to petitions in order to give citizens greater power to hold them to account and influence local services.
• New duty on public authorities (from Museums to the new Homes & Communities Agency) to secure involvement from local citizens where they can.
• The establishment of a new social housing body to represent tenants
• Measures to allow the Audit Commission to appoint auditors to certain local government to increase transparency and public accountability, and reduce the risk to public money.
• Establishment of the Boundary Committee for England to regularly review electoral arrangements of each principal council
• A duty on each local authority to prepare an assessment of the economic conditions of its area
• Measure to set out and review regional strategies for each English region other than London
• Provisions for the establishment of Economic Prosperity Boards (EPBs); these new Boards will be aimed at giving local authorities the ability to create corporate bodies at sub-regional level to promote economic development.

Community Allowance

Development trusts and community enterprises have become highly skilled at tackling disadvantage and exclusion; but how important is it for these organisations to actively target individuals who have come into contact with the criminal justice system or are at risk of offending?

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) recently highlighted the role that local organisations can play in reducing re-offending. One of the MoJ’s key objectives is to reduce re-offending, and as part of the launch of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) last year, the DTA was appointed as one of its strategic partners to help reduce re-offending through engagement with the social and community enterprise sector.

The rationale for our partnership with NOMS is that offending behaviour can develop out of disadvantage and exclusion, and that with the right support it may be possible to keep some individuals away from the criminal justice system. Offenders and people at risk of offending often face multiple problems which require a coordinated and long term approach. In some cases, development trusts would have played a major role in changing the lives of these individuals, but few will attempt to capture these interventions or share them with others.

We would like to explore this further by learning from what is being done on the ground, and how it relates to people’s offending behaviours? Many organisations might not know about the offending history of the people they work with; indeed they might not need to know, but if this is one of our ‘impact’ as a movement, we should benefit from making this impact known in some way.

In this context, DTA has started to gather an evidence base of development trusts and other social enterprises working with prisoners, ex-offender and/or people at risk of offending (see www.dta.org.uk/reducingoffending), but we want to know more, so if you have anything to contribute then please tell us on www.dta.org.uk/findingoutwhatworks