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Duty to Involve: Should it stay or should it go?

Posted on April 20th, 2011 by Tim Hughes in Archived related news
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The Department for Communities and Local Government’s new Best Value statutory guidance consultation proposes to repeal the ‘Creating Strong, Safe and Prosperous Communities’ Statutory Guidance from 2008; a 58 page document which includes two statutory duties on English Local Authorities: the Duty to Involve, and the Duty to prepare a sustainable community strategy, and replace this with a one page Best Value Statutory Guidance document.

This is clearly an issue which interests many people involved in public engagement and community participation. There is little evidence of the impact (positive or negative) of the duty to date. In the Involve office, we are currently having a lively debate  about the pros and cons of the government proposals and we’d like to gather the views of practitioners and citizens in order to provide CLG with some feedback on their proposals.

We’d like your views on the following questions:

  1. Have you found the Duty to Involve helpful, harmful or irrelevant in your work?
  2. What do you think the impact will be of repealing the Duty to Involve?
  3. What do you think the impact will be of repealing the Creating Strong, Safe and Prosperous Communities guidance?
  4. Do you think the existing Duty to Involve can be improved? If so, what would you do to make it better?

We plan to submit the various views and opinions we gather to CLG as a consultation response,  so please get in touch with us if you’d like your views to be included.

At Involve, we’ve written a couple of blogs on the subject, one by me arguing that the Duty should be repealed and one by Edward Andersson arguing it should be made more specific.  I’m also collecting links to various blogs on the topic, so please let me know if I’ve missed any.

You can respond to the CLG consultation directly (deadline 14th June 2011).

Book review of ‘The Big Society’

Posted on April 19th, 2011 by Ellie Brodie in Archived related news
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Last month I read and reviewed The Big Society: the Anatomy of the New Politics by Jesse Norman – one of the intellectual architects of the Big Society and MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. In The Big Society, Norman sets out the ideas that underpin the ‘new’ or ‘compassionate’ Conservatism and explains that the Big Society is the political programme that stems from these ideas. If you don’t have the time to read the book yourself, I’ve summarised the main arguments and provided a brief critique in the latest bulletin from the Association for Research in the Voluntary and Community Sector (ARVAC) which can be accessed here – arvacbulletin114 - or downloaded from the ARVAC website (www.arvac.org.uk).

Volunteering in sport and culture

Posted on April 12th, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has released the findings of its Taking Part survey on public engagement in sport and culture. The report contains some interesting statistics on volunteering and finds that:

Of the respondents who had volunteered over the period April to December 2010, 34.7% had volunteered within the DCMS sectors. The DCMS sector with the most volunteering was sport with 19.8% of people having volunteered in this area. The next most common was the arts with 8.1%. Libraries and archives saw the lowest rates of volunteering with 0.7 % and 0.5 %  respectively.

Between 2005/06 and 2010, there was a statistically significant increase in the number of people volunteering within the arts sector, rising from 6.3 % to 8.1%. The other sectors were largely stable.

Willingness to get involved locally poses challenge for Big Society

Posted on March 31st, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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The latest edition of the Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement has just been released.

The report shows that while last year’s political events increased the public’s interest in politics to a record 58%, there was no matching rise in political or civic activity. It also shows that despite people expressing more interest in how things work locally than in politics in general, only one in 10 people say they will ‘definitely’ spend some time doing some form of voluntary work at some point in the next couple of years. Overwhelmingly, motivation to volunteer and get involved seems to be rooted in a sense of personal self-interest. People are more likely to get involved in their local community ‘if I felt strongly about an issue’ (40%), ‘if it was relevant to me’ (33%), ‘if I had more time’ (28%), and ‘if it affected my street’ (25%).

These findings are commented as follows by Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society’s Parliament and Government programme, and co-author of the report:

‘The momentous events surrounding the election and its aftermath has left people feeling more interested in and knowledgeable about politics. But they have not been roused to get more involved in it – the majority prefer to remain spectators. Even at the local community level only one in 10 say they are certain to volunteer. People say they are interested in being more engaged locally but on the whole are not willing to actually commit to activities. They are not very altruistic. It’s self-interest that motivates them to action: when an issue affects them or their community in a personal way.

This raises interesting questions for the development of the Big Society. A clear focus on the local and the personal is where the Big Society has the greatest chance of succeeding. The concept needs to avoid political associations, focus on the local and personal, and emphasise ‘community’ rather than ‘Society’. Given that the public are less knowledgeable about how things work locally than they are nationally a strategy to address this knowledge deficit is also needed.’

Big Society policy must understand the importance of motivation and power

Posted on March 18th, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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The Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) has released a new research report on the role that small community groups can play in delivering the ‘Big Society’. Some of the key findings of the report confirm some of the emerging findings from the Pathways project, as presented in the document Strengthening participation: learning from participants we produced last November.

The report highlights that if community groups are to be involved, policies to engage people in community action need to be informed by a more sophisticated understanding of how and why community organisations operate. It notes that people primarily take part in community action for very personal reasons rather than from a sense of civic duty, and questions whether this can be co-opted to deliver particular policy objectives. Voluntary action for many is about social needs, ‘fun’, doing something different to the ‘day job’ or taking action about something that directly affects them.

The report also finds that there were major concerns among organisations involved in this activity that the Big Society agenda would create greater inequalities, by favouring communities with the resources to engage. The research identifies a need for policy to be informed by a much stronger analysis of power relations within and between communities and the state. Where government has been successful at directly motivating people to act, anger has also played a major role as the anti-Iraq war demonstrations or the more recent demonstrations against increased tuition fees show.

A 4-page summary of the report is available here.

To nudge or not to nudge

Posted on March 7th, 2011 by Diane Warburton in Archived related news
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Involve has published a briefing drawing on a House of Lords round table event to consider influencing public behaviour towards sustainability through three new approaches to behaviour change: social marketing (‘nudge’), deliberative engagement (‘think’) and legislation (‘shove’). The briefing and the round table were produced in partnership with the DEA (Development Education Association) as part of their Global Learning Charter programme. Although aimed primarily at sustainable development practitioners, the briefing could also be of interest to wider audiences interested in behaviour change through public engagement. The briefing concludes that the most effective approaches to public engagement in tackling climate change would be through a mix of these three approaches.

The Pathways project has a quite different perspective on supporting participation, towards sustainability and beyond. The project focus is not on individuals changing but on providing better opportunities for individuals, based on learning from the research. The target audience for the findings of the Pathways research is those willing and able to take action (by participating or providing opportunities for participation), rather than targeting through psychological profiling or segmentation. And the project focuses on enabling people to define what they see as appropriate actions, rather than suggesting what is the right thing to do. Nudge, think or shove? Shifting values and attitudes towards sustainability raises all these and more challenging questions that can very usefully feed into future thinking about participation.

Participation: trends, facts and figures

Posted on March 4th, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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NCVO launched this week a new publication called Participation: trends, facts and figures. Aimed at practitioners and policy-makers searching for information on the state of participation in the UK, this publication draws together trends, facts and statistics relating to participation from a range of different sources. The publication addresses the following key questions:

  • Who participates?
  • Where do people participate?
  • What do people participate in?
  • Why do people participate?

It looks at whether there has been decline in participation over the last decades and includes some international comparisons. It also examines in more detail a number of specific participatory activities (membership, giving, volunteering, timebanking, ethical consumerism, political participation, local governance, campaigning and direct action and protest).

Three decades of household giving 1978-2008

Posted on February 22nd, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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The Centre for Charitable Giving (CGAP) and The Centre for Market and Public Organisation launched last week a detailed analysis of household giving in Britain since 1978. It’s a really thorough piece of work looking at how charitable giving has changed over time. It will hopefully inform the forthcoming White Paper on charitable giving, philanthropy and social investment.

Here are some of the main findings in the report:

  • The millennium year marked a turning point in the long-term decline in the proportion of UK households that give to charity. Roughly a third of households gave to charity in 1978, but by 1999 this share had fallen to roughly a quarter. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the proportion of givers has averaged over 28 per cent.
  • Average donations have increased in real terms over three decades. Looking at the whole population (both givers and non-givers), donations have more than doubled – from £0.96 per week in 1978 to £2.36 per week in 2008.
  • Looking only at givers, donations have gone up three-fold – from £3.05 per week in 1978 to £8.66 per week in 2008.
  • But there has been no change in donations as a share of total spending for more than 20 years. Households today give 0.4 per cent of their spending, exactly the same as they did in 1988.
  • Charitable giving is largely recession-proof. Donations have typically grown in times of economic growth and have not fallen at the same rate as the economy during recessions.
  • Charitable giving increasingly depends on elderly donors. The over-65s now account for more than a third of all donations, compared with a quarter in 1978. Higher giving among older age groups may reflect the values and beliefs of these generations.
  • Better-off donors now account for an increasing share of total donations. Today, the richest ten per cent of donors account for 22 per cent of total donations, compared with 16 per cent in the early 1980s.
  • At the same time, poorer givers are more generous in terms of the proportion of their total budgets given to charity. The poorest ten per cent of givers donate 3.6 per cent of their total spending to charity, compared with 1.1 per cent for the richest 10 per cent.

Power and making change happen

Posted on February 3rd, 2011 by Veronique Jochum in Archived related news
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I’ve just received a report – Power and Making Change Happen-  by the CarnegieUK and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which reviews their programme of work on power.  Bizarrely, I can’t find it on either organisations’ websites but it can be downloaded here.

The report provides a practical tool and framework for analysing power and achieving social change. It also looks at how the organisations that took part in the programme used power analysis and what changed for these organisations as a result of their involvement. We’ve mentioned in the past other publications that look at power frameworks but the main advantage of this report is that it actually examines how organisations have used these tools and to what effect.

The second chapter focuses on the successes and challenges of the process that was used (selection criteria for recruiting organisations; workshops for participating organisations; one-to-one support; introduction to power frameworks and analytical tools; stakeholder workshops to share learning; and self-documentation). The feedback provided in this section is very timely for the Pathways project as we’re currently organising participatory workshops in the three local case study areas to present findings and explore with local stakeholders what they mean in practice.

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