Community Engagement

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Community Engagement in Practice
Todays easy challenge Making it all add up!
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Community Engagement in Practice
Challenge 1
Improving practice in

• Community Planning

• Community Engagement

• Community-led Plans

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Community Engagement in Practice
Challenge 2
Avoiding Passing in the Night
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Community Engagement in Practice
Challenge 3
Integrating
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Community Engagement in Practice
Why, and Why Now?

• Strengthening of Local Area Agreements

• Changes to Local Strategic Partnerships

• Changes to the Planning System (spatial)

• Remobilisation of Parish and Market Town Plans

• The Engagement Agenda

• Strong and Prosperous Communities White Paper

• Planning for a Sustainable Future White Paper

and we simply cannot afford to run them all
separately
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Community Engagement in Practice
The Elements in More Detail
1. COMMUNITY PLANNING

• This is best summed up in Strong and
  Prosperous Communities

• It is all about improving the Sustainable
  Community Strategy, LSP and LAA system

• Its focus is

better public services
more effective use of resources
greater sensitivity to needs
integration across traditional boundaries

• Meets up with new approaches to planning along
  the way -
• spatial planning

So public sector oriented and mainly top-down -
as it should be
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Community Engagement in Practice
So (taking out most of the engagement material
for now) heres a highly stripped out summary
of ideas/aspirations

• Communities to have a say in setting priorities

• Devolve service delivery and management

• Better integration of policies, strategies and
  plans

• Expand neighbourhood management (not just urban)

• Local Charters and Community Calls to Action

• Power of well-being (and money) for Quality
  Parish Councils

• Systematic intelligence on peoples needs

• Information to communities

• Support for community capacity building

• Councillors as Democratic Champions

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Community Engagement in Practice
The Elements in More Detail
2. COMMUNITY PLANS
By Community Plans or Community-led Plans we mean

• Parish Plans

• Market (and Coastal) Town Strategic Plans

• Village Design Statements

• Other specific issue plans - eg. Conservation
  Areas

• (Zero carbon villages?!)

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Community Engagement in Practice
The model might be
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Community Engagement in Practice
Key problems are

• Without the advocacy level its bottom-only,
  not bottom-up

• None of the plans are linked systemically to
  DCLG

• Now adoption into Local Plans is dead .
  whats left?

• Seen as a parallel system

• Still fragmented, inconsistent, widely
  variable, even wish lists

• Even VDSs cant get into the LDF
  Sustainability Appraisal

( Stop Press - now tackled!)
The whole is too often less than the sum of the
(good) parts
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Community Engagement in Practice
The Elements in More Detail
3. COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

• Now utterly unavoidable

(if it moves, you have to consult on it)

• Desperate need for coherence

(stop doing some!)

• Cant central government get its own act
  together?

(they have nobody pulling it all together!)
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Community Engagement in Practice
Once again, drawing from Strong and Prosperous
Communities

• Consult communities on the LAA, SCS, LDF (etc.)

• But link that consultation together

• Engage hard-to-reach groups better

• Increase community skills to engage

• Clear audit trails for consultation undertaken

• Councillors as democratic champions
• (Engagement Portfolio Holder?)

• Comprehensive Engagement Strategy

(or is that an overall Statement of Community
Involvement?)
(or is that all within the new Best Value Duty
to Involve?)
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Community Engagement in Practice
Engagement Strategies for LSPs are certainly the
key
But very few to date have been genuine strategies
Most are just lists of principles and methods
plus a programme

• They require high level member and officer
  buy-in

• That must be backed up by action and
  intervention

• Listing principles and methods is not good
  enough

• Having a published programme is not good enough

• There must be priority-setting, choices,
  integration

• Some (many?) consultations will simply have to
  stop

• Nearly all consultation managers too junior
  to intervene

• No system for strategy implementation

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Community Engagement in Practice
An example from across the border (no, not
Scotland)
THE NORTH DORSET COMMUNITY PLANNING MODEL
1. No perfect answer
2. It might not apply to you/your area
3. But it addresses many of the key questions
4. Sets you thinking
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Community Engagement in Practice
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Community Engagement in Practice
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Community Engagement in Practice
Across Devon as a whole

• Nearly all the necessary ingredients are
  probably there

(youll hear about a few good ones today)

• Are they yet working to the full on their own?

• Does any single area yet have all of them in
  place?

• Is it all yet truly integrated lean, mean and
  effective?

• How to move it up a gear?

This is largely the agenda of the Carnegie
project in West Devon
More to come later on steps along the route there