The Labour Government and Conservative and Lib Dem parties
nationally have signalled significant cuts in public spending after
the General Election. The cuts facing local councils could be
greater than 20% overall despite some health and education services
being protected. This means all councils are looking at how
they can deliver services differently in future – either by
reducing the cost, charging more, rationing services only to the
most needy, or closing services down.
The Tories in Barnet have come up with a plan to offer no-frills
public services along the lines of budget airlines like
Ryanair. What that means is substandard services offered to
most people with better services only available to people wealthy
enough to pay more for them.
That kind of two-tier, pay-twice Tory model is unacceptable to a
progressive Labour council like Lambeth. We are developing a
different model that aims to protect high quality affordable
services for everyone. We want to achieve this by empowering
the community with more involvement in delivering some public
services.
Lambeth’s Labour council has already been pursuing this
community agenda since we were elected in 2006. We have
- opened the country’s first – and so far only –
parent-promoted secondary school, a community-led
alternative to an academy
- more tenant-managed estates, a cooperative
model, than any other local authority
- led nationally on the personalisation of care
budgets, handing control to care users
- worked towards the country’s biggest asset
transfer by setting up a community trust to run the Old
Lilian Baylis school site in Kennington as a community sport and
youth hub
- run cutting edge environmental programmes that
give tools to local communities to transform blighted public spaces
and promote sustainable living
- launched the biggest model of participatory
budgeting – involving local people in council spending
decisions – in the country
- Coin Street Community Builders on the South Bank in Lambeth is
one of the country’s biggest and most successful housing
cooperatives.
Reductions in national funding mean we need to drive this
community-led agenda forward even faster. What’s common to
all these initiatives is that citizens take control and the
services get better as a result. The model draws on the
cooperative values of fairness, accountability and responsibility
so we are calling the model the ‘cooperative council’. It’s
these underlying values that will be key to shaping a new
settlement between the citizen and public services that will help
protect frontline provision. Cabinet Office minister Tessa
Jowell has been advocating a role for modern mutuals within a
reshaped public sector and, as a Lambeth MP, she has been hugely
supportive of our work locally.
We believe this cooperative model will protect frontline
services from cuts that would otherwise result from central
government funding cuts. It works by empowering citizens and
communities to take more responsibility for running some services
themselves, freeing up resources to guarantee services for the most
vulnerable. In some cases that means allowing people to
set up cooperatives to run local services, in others it means
giving the community the tools they need to do the job. That
not only saves money, it helps build stronger communities, local
leadership, and more flexible services that meet local needs.
In March will also set up a Citizens Commission to involve
residents and service users in discussions about this new way of
delivering public services. The Commission will give an
interim report in April and a final report no later than
June. As long as Labour wins the council elections in
May we will finalise the plans by July so we can launch Lambeth as
Britain’s first co-operative council in August.
The Commission will explore a range of ideas and ways of taking
things forward. These are not set in stone but may
include:
- An ‘active citizens’ dividend’ that could
reward residents who are involved with organisations that help
deliver community-based services with a council tax rebate
- Neighbourhood cooperatives – allowing
residents in a given ward or neighbourhood to run local community
facilities
- Citizen-led services – allowing service users
or local residents to ballot on turning certain local services into
local cooperatives, such as children’s centres or youth
centres
- Supporting more housing cooperatives under
residents’ control and ownership
It is clear that all council services – indeed all public
services – will face spending cuts over the next few years.
Tory and Lib Dem councils like Barnet or Hammersmith and Fulham are
using this as an opportunity to sell public assets, privatise, cut
services and make quality services available only to those wealthy
enough to pay for them. Labour in Lambeth is developing a
progressive alternative that seeks to shape a new settlement
between the citizen and public services, championing public
ownership and public control.
By empowering communities and service users and offering them
more responsibility we can protect frontline services and build
stronger and more cohesive communities at the same time. It’s
a response anchored in the values of cooperation and mutualism that
are so strong in Lambeth and now offer us a chance to reshape
public services for the better.
You can read how the Guardian reported this story by
clicking on the links below
Britain’s
first ‘John Lewis’ council
Interview with Steve Reed
Community-led sports hub at Old Lilian Baylis School site
Community centre at the old Lillian Bayliss school in Lambeth.
Photograph: Martin Godwin, (c) Guardian Newspaper
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