Posted on April 20th, 2011 by Tim Hughes in Other news
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ShareThisThe 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:
- Have you found the Duty to Involve helpful, harmful or irrelevant in your work?
- What do you think the impact will be of repealing the Duty to Involve?
- What do you think the impact will be of repealing the Creating Strong, Safe and Prosperous Communities guidance?
- 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At Involve, we’ve written a couple of blogs on the subject, one by me arguing that the Duty should be repealed and one by Edward Andersson arguing it should be made more specific.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).
