CCH Response to Home Office consultation paper "Building Civil Renewal"
March 2004
Introduction
The Confederation of Co-operative Housing is the representative body for co-operative housing in England & Wales. The CCH was set up in 1994 and has a membership base of about 180 housing co-operatives and other community controlled housing organisations. The CCH is volunteer led by representatives from member housing co-ops.
Whilst the CCH has a primary duty to represent its members' interests, the CCH has always considered that it would best achieve this by seeking to export the co-operative values and principles on which housing co-ops are based to a wider audience.
Therefore the CCH has played a major role in participating with current community empowerment debates and has made the following specific contributions:
- the CCH pioneered the Community Gateway approach as a means of developing large scale housing based organisations that have built into their framework the ambition and means to generate and support small scale community controlled options (see below)
- the CCH has developed and implemented a long term programme in partnership with the Housing Corporation to offer guidance to housing association tenants on setting up community initiatives, through the production of a guide entitled Taking Control in your Community. Whilst aimed at housing association tenants, this guide is of relevance to any community empowerment initiatives [1].
The CCH welcomes the opportunity to respond to the "Building Civil Renewal" consultation paper. We agree wholeheartedly that empowering people and communities is the fundamental means to providing the answers to contemporary social problems.
We would particularly point to:
- recent research [2] that showed that ordinary citizens in the UK rate "friendly communities" as being the prime factor that determines their views of particularly neighbourhoods, this above even the fear of crime and way ahead of more tangible issues such as health, transport, education and employment issues. A conclusion that can be drawn from this report is that if we get the approach to local community engagement and empowerment right, tackling the associated social problems will be done through whatever means seen to be appropriate by the local community.
- research commissioned by the CCH [3] that investigated how community controlled organisations impact on social exclusion, which showed that both active and non-active community members in community controlled organisations highlighted the informal mutual community networks that had developed in their organisations as being of more importance to them in their quality of life than the more tangible Government defined priorities.
The key issue therefore, if Government is to support and respond to the wishes of ordinary citizens in the UK, is how can Government intervention help to facilitate and support communities and community led approaches. Therefore the "Building Civil Renewal" consultation paper is particularly important.
Values & Principles
The "Building Civil Renewal" paper makes a good attempt to define the values and principles that need to drive our approach to community capacity building. They bear some similarity to the co-operative values and principles, but the key places in which they differ from the co-operative values and principles are significant:
- the "Building Civil Renewal" paper defines self-reliance as a principle, whilst the Co-operative Values and Principles place self-help as a value - which needs to underpin all our thinking in this area. Too often the UK approach to community regeneration is based on outdated charitable models that seek to provide external solutions to problems. Whilst clearly communities need to work in partnership with external organisations that will further their aims, the only real solution to community problems is for communities to generate their own solutions. In the housing field, too many legal and structural issues force communities to define themselves as charitable institutions that need to be supported by outside sources in order to retain resources within the community [4].
- similarly, the principles do refer to autonomy, but the co-operative values and principles list autonomy as a key principle. Autonomy is fundamental to community renewal. It is only by communities having the ability to autonomously and independently determine their priorities that they will generate the community confidence and ability to tackle their problems.
- a co-operative principle that is not mentioned in the "Building Civil Renewal" principles is that of membership. Membership, even if membership is done through some informal means, is also key to developing the community identity and responsibility that will make the changes necessary to the way that neighbourhoods are managed in the UK. The act of ordinary citizens signing up as members to community organisations is a vital part of the process of people saying this is our problem and we want to participate in sorting it out.
The other values and principles listed in the "Building Civil Renewal" paper are all important in developing community capacity. Particularly important are:
- reflecting local needs and preferences - it is only by engaging with ordinary people and communities at the level at which they engage - ie. possibly at a street or village level in some cases, and on the issues that are important to them, that we will generate widespread community activity;
- democracy, empowerment and inclusion are clearly fundamental to developing widespread community activity.
Key Components for Community Level Infrastructure
The CCH agrees that the four components identified in the "Building Civil Renewal" paper are important (ie. at least one representative and inclusive forum or network; at least one physical hub or base for individual and collective community activity; access to generic community capacity building; easy access to small grants).
However, the CCH considers that:
- a physical hub and access to resources is important - but what is more important is that communities can aim towards autonomously having assets and resources with which they can decide what is important for them. Communities need to be able to determine themselves if their aspirations will best be met through forums, through physical hubs, through staffing support and through making applications for grants.
- there is an overarching need for a fifth component - a pro-active approach to offering a wide range of community options to communities in each neighbourhood, at the level which local communities identify and on the issue that local communities consider to be important.
The critical issue is that widespread community activity will only coalesce around particular issues and activities that communities want to be active on. At present, most communities barely know what opportunities might be available to them, or that their involvement in community activity will benefit them both individually and collectively.
We would particularly highlight the following existing approaches to generating community level infrastructure:
- A particular approach that has successfully enabled some communities to consider what options are available to them and to make some first steps to tackling problems has been through the ODPM's Tenant Options Study [5] approach. This approach enables communities (even communities where no activity currently exists) to:
- bring together members of communities to act together in a participatory manner,
- train and develop communities so that they can take action,
- identify what issues communities consider to be important,
- identify potential courses of action,
- bring communities together with service providers who can assist communities achieve their aims,
- ensure that chosen courses have the support of the whole community.
The ODPM Tenant Options Study approach is currently only aimed at local authority tenants (although they can, should and generally do involve all members of those communities, ie. including other residents who live alongside local authority tenants). However, it is still the case that there is an artificial firewall between housing solutions in the UK and all other community activity and there would be benefits to rolling a Community Options Study approach out to all communities regardless of tenure.
- The "Building Civil Renewal" paper refers specifically to Tenant Management Organisations (TMOs), which we welcome. All research shows that the tenant management approach, whilst not without problems in some cases, has surpassed the provision of services through traditional housing organisations. It is important, however, that we understand the reasons for this success. Tenant Management is about creating a democratic community infrastructure that has levels of autonomy and that has access to significant community resources. And whilst communities within TMOs have been brought together through housing management functions, where TMOs have been particularly successful has been where they have moved on from the basic housing management functions to generating strong mutually supportive community infrastructures.
- Unfortunately, the "Building Civil Renewal" paper does not refer to the approximately 250 housing co-operatives and the various other community controlled housing organisations that own their homes. Most of these organisations are registered with the Housing Corporation or Scottish Homes. Particularly in England, these organisations have become the forgotten sector, and in some cases, struggling to survive in an environment that is not supportive to them, they have had their difficulties. This is partly because the Housing Corporation, focussing on large scale housing associations, has had few resources available to be able to understand or develop the potential of what are in most cases very small community organisations. However, the housing co-operative approach is the very small scale approach that is fundamental to generating civil renewal. It is testament to the strength of the housing co-operative approach that so many of them still exist, having outlasted their founders by several generations, and in 1996, Price Waterhouse identified that housing co-operatives outperformed their housing association counterparts [6] and this finding has been confirmed by every piece of research carried out since then.
- We would also point to the Community Gateway approach that has been pioneered by the CCH, and subsequently developed into a workable model in a report commissioned by the CCH, the Chartered Institute of Housing and Co-operatives UK [7].
The Community Gateway takes a twin track approach to developing community empowerment through large scale housing organisations that make a commitment to:
- pro-actively offering and supporting housing and wider community options to local communities in community defined "Local Community Areas"; the housing options ranging from participating in discussions on how the service will be provided at a local level through to transferring management (and possibly ownership) to local community controlled organisations - dependent on the aspirations of local communities and at a time that is right for them; the wider options relating to all other aspects of potential community activity in each area.
- enabling tenants to participate to the level that they wish to in the overall Community Gateway Association, through elected tenant board membership and through wider tenant membership of the Gateway Association, where membership enables tenants to participate in the development of the Gateway's policy approach.
The Gateway approach is currently being pioneered by Preston City Council as part of a stock transfer proposal, where a Gateway Tenant Steering Group, assisted by Birmingham Co-operative Housing Services (through funding from the ODPM), is leading the process to establish the Community Gateway Association. Necessarily a long term programme (in that building a tenant democracy and developing an approach to stock transfer takes a long time), there are still a number of hurdles that need to be overcome before a fully fledged Community Gateway Association is set up there. However, the early lessons learnt in Preston are indicative, and Preston City Council and Birmingham Co-operative Housing Services are shortly to publish a report on the early findings.
Interestingly, the Preston Strategic Partnership Housing Thematic Group, developing Preston's wider strategic approach to housing, has identified an aspiration to extend the Community Gateway principles to all tenures of housing in Preston. This aspiration suggests that the Gateway approach is both of relevance to all housing tenures, and more importantly, it could mean that a Community Gateway approach could and should be of relevance to all community empowerment programmes, and could be the means by which empowerment through housing could be much more closely allied to empowerment through other means.
Options for Support at Community Level
There are merits to each of the three options proposed by the "Building Civil Renewal" paper, alongside various particular considerations that need to be taken into account:
Option A: Neighbourhood Action Planning
The Neighbourhood Action Planning approach bears some similarity to the Community Options Study approach referred to above and on that level we support it.
However, the key issue in the Neighbourhood Action Planning approach described is the level at which this approach is pitched. If it is approached at too wide a level, it will not sufficiently engage with the community activity that is needed to genuinely generate civil renewal.
There are warning signs from the NRU supported Community Empowerment Network (CEN) approach, set up to attempt to ensure voluntary and community sector engagement with the work of Local Strategic Partnerships. Some problems from this approach are:
- CENs, in order to engage with Local Strategic Partnerships, often set up through Local Authorities, have had to mirror local authority structures in the way that they generate community empowerment. This means that, in some cases, CENs have had to use ward or constituencies as the basis for community engagement, and communities rarely define their boundaries at this level.
- there is a key issue in the CEN approach about who is setting the agendas. In the absence of well defined community networks, scarce financial and community resources have had to be used to track what is essentially the Local Authority's agenda. It is unlikely that significant community development will take place through any externally generated agendas, let alone those generated by Local Authorities. Civil renewal will only be built if it is communities who define their own agenda and take actions to further them.
- there is a further key problem with the CEN approach in the grouping together of the voluntary and community sectors. They bear little resemblance to each other. Generally, because voluntary sector representatives are often paid staff who are employed by a voluntary sector organisation, some of whom have very little regard for the importance of community empowerment, the community sector finds itself squeezed out. Community organisations should and do work in partnership with other organisations, but civil renewal will only be forwarded if community groups are enabled to speak for themselves.
Option B - Replication of tested approaches through one or more national agencies
There are a plethora of organisations operating nationally and regionally who offer support for the development of community infrastructure. Some are good and some are not so good. Even amongst those that are good, some of their staff are good and some are not so good!
Government should set some national standards for any organisations that are working with community organisations, primarily aiming to ensure that the approach that is taken by such agencies are to provide options to communities and to enable communities themselves to achieve their aspirations.
Government should not seek to work with any one particular agency or organisation, whether they are operating nationally or regionally. Communities themselves should be empowered to determine which agencies or organisations they work with, and the role of Government is to ensure that this happens.
No doubt, the agencies and organisations themselves will be responding to let Government know the effective community development approaches they have sponsored. However, because of our background in housing, we would particularly refer to the network of agencies that support housing co-ops and the "Section 16 agencies" that the ODPM supports, some of whom do good work with community organisations, and some of whom do not. The views of the ODPM's Tenant Participation Branch should be considered carefully. Their programmes have been amongst the most successful Government programmes to generate successful and sustainable community activity - the evidence being clearly demonstrated by the numbers of tenant management organisations that have stood the test of time.
Option C - investment in key local 'anchor' organisations
There is merit in supporting some of the anchor organisations listed, but again, it should be on a case by case basis, because some of the organisations listed will be doing good work to generate community empowerment, whilst others won't.
Startling by their omission are housing associations. Housing associations have received massive amounts of Government funding to develop homes, and therefore they ought to be hub community development vehicles. Unfortunately, very few housing associations consider the empowerment of communities to be important and few do much work to offer options to communities. That the development of community is of such a low priority in the housing association sector suggests that the Government had not had value for money from their investment in the sector. The Government should raise the importance of community empowerment in housing associations, and should cease to invest in housing associations unless they are actively engaged in seeking to work in partnership to facilitate empowered communities.
The National Housing Federation has itself started to recognise the threat that housing associations face to their businesses from their lack of community engagement through their iN Business for Neighbourhoods campaign. In some cases, the poor public perception of housing associations means that fewer people actively want to live in housing association homes, a serious threat to the viability of the housing association sector. This threat will only be temporarily ameliorated by the Housing Corporation's current drive towards merging housing associations together, a process that potentially runs counter to the Government's desire to build civil renewal.
We would also particularly highlight emerging Community Gateway Associations as potential community hub vehicles.
References and Footnotes
[1] Taking Control in your Community - CCH/Housing Corporation - 2003. Free copies of the guide are available from the CCH at http://www.communitiestakingcontrol.org/
[2] Regional Futures & Neighbourhood Realities - Richard Scase & Johnathan Scales - published by the National Housing Federation - 2003.
[3] Tenant Control & Social Exclusion - Professor David Clapham, Philippa O Neill, Nic Bliss - published by the CCH - 2000.
[4] For example, recent developments in the housing association sector relating to the payment of VAT have forced associations located in some of the most deprived areas of the country to choose between becoming charities or paying large amounts of Corporation Tax. Apart from the potential stigma that becoming a charity brings with it (ie. the definition of disadvantaged communities as charity cases), becoming a charity, an irreversible action, could well have implications on tenant and community membership of these organisations, as well as on the potential to generate community owned assets.
[5] Administered through Section 16 funding by the ODPM Tenant Participation Branch.
[6] Tenants in Control: an evaluation of tenant led housing management solutions - Price Waterhouse 1995. Commissioned by the then DOE, this study compared the performance of housing co-ops and other tenant controlled organisations to local authority and housing association counterparts. It concluded that housing co-ops outperformed their local authority and housing association counterparts, and provided a range of unquantifiable social and community benefits.
[7] Empowering Communities - Hacas Chapman Hendy 2003 - commissioned by CCH, CiH, Co-operatives UK - published by Chartered Institute of Housing.
