Last week’s Community Empowerment White Paper gave us the Government’s views on ‘empowerment’. Many of the suggestions were concepts the best councils have already been incorporating for some time.
Huge benefits are claimed for empowerment. It is seen as resulting in better services – but it is also claimed to increase community cohesion, individuals’ skills and confidence, and trust in local and national government.
But does it actually work?
This is harder to answer. Extensive reviews have all decided it probably does, but that it can’t be proved.
Ipsos MORI’s view is there are positive benefits, but one must have realistic expectations. People who feel they can influence local decisions do tend to be more satisfied with their area. But feeling safe, not having problems with gangs, drugs or vandalism, and knowing your neighbours have more impact on how happy people are with their areas. Some areas which appear to be models of empowerment, have fairly poor results on quality of life. Our surveys also reveal that feeling you can influence things if you need to are more important than actual involvement.
CLG also needs to remember that having lots of people who want to get involved locally is often more a sign of failure than success. Time and again in our work for local councils we see people are more likely to want to get involved where they are least satisfied with local services.
Which leads to another key question – do people actually want to be empowered?
Only a small minority want to be actively involved, with a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, and the vast majority in the middle, who would like more say, but not much more responsibility.
So, we consistently see that around 80% will support more community involvement when asked, around one-quarter will say they personally want to get more involved – but when it comes to it, only 1-2% act.
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