What we want old
We’re calling for new rights and powers that would change where power lies in this country.
People across the UK feel powerless over the decisions that shape their places. Buildings and spaces that could be put to brilliant use by their community all too often lie derelict or shuttered. Public services that should be designed to draw on the contributions and insights of local people are instead shaped by remote officials.
Local people want to take action to improve where they live, but are held back by a system that doesn’t work anymore.
This year, we have a significant opportunity to win tangible power over local spaces, services, and spending. In 2025, the government will pass a Devolution Bill, which will see the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster in a generation. Beyond empowering Mayors and local councils, we want to see the Devolution Bill give new rights and resources to communities.
The Devolution Bill marked a turning point for our campaign. From 2021 to 2024, we championed the introduction of a Community Power Act. But when the government unveiled plans for a Devolution Bill, we saw an opportunity. The very policies we had been advocating for could fit within this new legislation, bringing our vision closer to reality.
And we’re already on a path to success. At the end of 2024, we celebrated our first campaign win. The government confirmed that Community Right to Buy, giving local people a first right of refusal when community assets come up for sale, would feature in the Bill. Now, we’re calling for two more rights that would lead to stronger communities: A Right to Shape Public Services and Community Covenants.
Establish a Community Right to Shape Public Services
We all rely on public services, but most of us don’t feel that we have any real influence over how they’re designed or delivered. The few that do are disproportionately likely to have both time and money to spare. We want the government to take action to ensure that ordinary people can make public services work better for them.
There is strong evidence that public services are more effective when local communities have a hand in the design and delivery. And that community-led approaches are better able to prevent issues from emerging in the first place.
How would it work?
A Community Right to Shape Public Services would give communities the tools to work with local authorities toward better and fairer public services.
When a group of service users or a locally accountable community organisation feels that a local service isn’t delivering for people in the way that it could, they would be able to exercise this new right.
The local authority or relevant public body would then conduct a joint review of the service alongside service users, local organisations, and—where the service is outsourced—the provider.
There would be a set period of community consultation and co-design, which might result in a decision to launch a full commissioning exercise, insource a service, or create a community-led delivery partnership.
Accountable community organisations and groups of service users would be able to trigger joint reviews of services provided by:
- Local authorities
- Health authorities
- Public institutions providing housing and skills and training services, and those with responsibility for local business policy
The accountable organisations which would be empowered to trigger this process would include Neighbourhood Forums, parish councils, and community organisations which have entered into joint-working agreements with their local authority.
The new right would replace the existing Community Right to Challenge created by the Localism Act. This mechanism puts communities in conflict with local authorities, and is viewed as damaging to community-council relations. The Right to Shape Public Services would address the weaknesses in the current legislation and offer a productive pathway for communities to help shape fairer, more responsive public services.
Story: “We put service users in charge of their own addiction services” – Ben Hughes, Essex County Council
What’s the story?
Five years ago, I could see that the outcomes for Essex’s substance misuse services were ok, but they were the outcomes that we as bureaucrats had chosen.
While we paid lip service to involving communities and service users, we didn’t really do it. But I firmly believed that we could achieve more by working with people with lived experience. We had to make a change, we had to grasp the opportunity to do something differently.
Working with people in recovery and in treatment across the system in Essex, we created the charity ‘The Essex Recovery Foundation – Revolutionising Recovery’, entirely chaired and run by people in Essex communities, in recovery and their family members.
Slowly but surely, we are transferring responsibility for all of our drug and alcohol agenda to the charity. This includes control of the budget, and the strategy.
We are also negotiating a seat for the charity on the council’s Health and Wellbeing Board, so they can be at the top level of decision making across all health and wellbeing commissioning.
Power that once sat with a small group of people in the public health team will now sit with the community directly affected – so they can define their own outcomes, allocate their own resources, and work with providers to build a better treatment and recovery system.
Why I support new rights for communities
This has been one of the most exciting bits of work that I’ve ever been involved with. It’s also been a process of ceding control and realising that actually things are going to get better with the community in charge of its own provision, its own functions, and its own services and support networks.
A Community Right to Shape Public Services would help more councils to realise these advantages. It would engage and empower communities to self-organise where it really matters. It would directly link communities to powers and influences that impact on their daily lives. And it would ensure communities are at the heart of all relevant decision making.
Introduce Community Covenants
Across the country, local councils and community organisations already work together to improve their neighbourhoods. Together they redevelop derelict sites, deliver essential public services, and drive inclusive growth.
But many local organisations struggle with complex funding processes and the need to jump through red tape. This limits their ability to make tangible improvements in their areas.
In other areas, community organisations and groups are shut out of decision-making, even though they play a vital role in organising communities and are trusted by local people.
Community Covenants offer a solution to both of these problems by creating formal neighbourhood-level power-sharing arrangements between councils and local organisations. They would enable local groups to play an active and formal role in shaping their areas, ensuring decisions reflect local needs and harness communities’ strengths.
Community Covenants would make local democracy more inclusive and effective.
How would they work?
Community Covenants provide a flexible mechanism for community organisations and local people to take on more power to shape their neighbourhoods.
These partnership arrangements could be formed between local authorities and a range of “Covenant partners”. This role could be played by a community anchor organisation, Community Benefit Society, Neighbourhood Forum, Parish or Town council, or alliance of community groups.
Covenant partners would be able to exercise a range of rights and powers, enabling them to:
- Help shape neighbourhood plans and local economic plans
- Contribute to budget decisions
- Co-design an approach to community asset transfers with their council
- Request reviews of local public services (through a new Community Right to Shape Public Services)
They would receive capacity-building support to enable them to exercise these powers.
Each Covenant partner would be expected to pass five tests of local accountability, demonstrating their ability and intention to:
- Earn and maintain the trust of the whole community
- Support everyone within their place to participate in community decisions and activities in an inclusive and equitable manner
- Practise ‘dynamic local accountability’ and community leadership based not just on consultations and voting but on ongoing community participation, relationships and local action
- Work proactively to identify and address shared issues and local concerns
- Make decisions so as to promote the interests of local people, rather than institutions alone
“Being able to pilot a community covenant in Market Drayton and co-produce a Family Hub has been described as ‘a gift’ by Shropshire Council, and as an ‘incredible opportunity’ by our community. This will ensure that the scarce resources available are used in the most effective way possible to deliver the greatest impact for our town.” —Charlotte Hollins, Fordhall Farm Manager
Other proposals
A Community Right to Control Investment
Polling conducted for our campaign demonstrates that a majority of the public do not believe that spending decisions reflect their areas’ needs. It showed that people trust community organisations to understand those needs and to listen to their views much more than local authorities or the government.
A Community Right to Control Investment would give those organisations a meaningful say over how public funds are spent in their neighbourhoods. This new power would unlock transparency over exactly how public money is being spent at the neighbourhood-level and transfer control over a share of some funds directly to accountable community organisations.
How would it work?
Where there is an accountable community-level decision-making institution such as a Community Covenant or parish council, a significant proportion of all public regeneration and local economic devolution funds allocated to that area would be controlled and invested directly by that community-level institution.
This could include successor programmes to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. It would also provide a means to ensure that developer-generated funding streams such as Section 106 revenue and the Community Infrastructure Levy are, in future, directly invested by community-level decision-makers.
(Parish councils are currently able to control 25% of Community Infrastructure Levy spending in their neighbourhood: we are calling on the government to extend and build on this precedent.)
This new community right would also provide a mechanism through which local communities could trigger an ‘open book accounting process’ with the council of any spending in their neighbourhood. Once this process was completed, the community would be able to negotiate with the council how and where to exercise greater control over certain aspects of spending. It could lead to decisions being devolved directly to the community in some areas of spending, or to participatory budgeting style processes being carried out.
Story: “Communities aren’t feckless with money – there’s little wastage when they’re in charge.” – Sacha Bedding
What’s the story?
The Annexe is a community organisation in Dyke House in Hartlepool. Over the last 10 years or so, we have worked with the community to find the solutions to their own issues. We are a place people can come to, where they can feel safe, and where we can give a bit of inspiration and hope about what’s possible.
There’s this idea that poor people are lazy, feckless, they eat takeaways, waste money and deserve what they get. It couldn’t be more wrong. In Dyke House, people care deeply about each other and about the future of the neighbourhood, and when they’re given the right opportunity and support they’ll do amazing things.
We’ve been successful because we work side by side with the community, we listen to people, and we understand the real needs.
What’s stood in your way?
There’s about £1bn a year spent in Hartlepool by our statutory sector. To be frank, it’s hard to say that this money is being well spent. Talk to people here and they’ll ask: “where does it all go?”
The big investments round here go on things that just don’t touch the lives of people in Dyke House – airports, business parks, ring roads and the like. There is a disconnect. The question is how are we going to connect all this investment with people in the poorest communities. If it’s done top-down, without the involvement or influence of the communities in question, it’s just not going to work.
How would a Community Right to Control Investment help?
You can’t come in from outside this community and go round telling people what to do, thinking you know best how to spend public money and what’s going to work. You’ve got to ask them. And you’ve got to trust them. And if you do, you’ll find people are really careful with these investment decisions. There’s very little wastage when communities are in charge of money. A Community Right to Control Investment would mean people in Dyke House, at long last, being trusted to find the right solutions for themselves.
Story: “We want us – not developers – to take over our youth club” – John Lockson
What’s the story?
Our local youth centre is facing closure and the building is being sold off under austerity measures. We want to take control of the building either as a community asset or to buy it and run it to meet local needs of local young people.
What’s standing in your way?
Backed by a corporate sponsor, we are proposing a rescue package to bring it back into use for the community, but we struggled to compete with outside developers both in terms of up-front finances and time.
Even on smaller scale, we started a youth football programme in the local area during the summer and ended up with around 60 local children taking part, however, we have been trying to get access to deliver our sessions inside at the local Youth and Community Centre since September 2021 but we’ve faced barrier after barrier, passed from pillar to post, asked to produce endless documents, put our staff through costly training and issued with cumbersome checks.
I have the voice of my community, I have the backing of two community football clubs and the backing of a major local property developer. What we need now is to understand how we do it.
What difference would new community rights make?
My area is one of the 10% most deprived in the country. It’s suffered from a rise in local anti-social behaviour, knife crime and county line exploitation. Young people need a place where they can be heard, where they feel they have a voice, where they can socialise with their peers, meet positive role models, create and realise positive aspirations and believe they have a way out of deprivation beyond their control.
A Community Right to Buy would give us the legal protections – and the time and support – that we need to take this much needed local asset into community ownership and ensure young people have what they need. A Community Right to Shape Public Services would mean those people most in need of services actually have a seat at the table when they are being designed. And a Community Right to Control Investment would ensure that the real needs of young people in my neighbourhood were taken into account when public money is being spent.
I don’t think devolution of power has gone far enough. Let us determine the future of vital community assets to meet local needs. We owe it to our children, we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to each other.
Establish a Community Power Commissioner
This independent officer would be charged with ensuring action is taken across central and local government to uphold new community rights and powers, enable the formation of Community Covenants everywhere, and generally unlock community power.
They would:
- Evaluate the government’s performance in unlocking community power.
- Support politicians and civil servants to consider how unlocking the power of communities might enable them to achieve their goals.
- Provide oversight of Community Covenants, including through acting as an independent appeals mechanism both for local people who feel that a Covenant arrangement isn’t working well and for prospective Covenant partners who feel that their application to form a Covenant hasn’t been dealt with fairly.
How these proposals tie into one another
These measures are intended to complement and reinforce one another. The new Community Right to Buy, Community Right to Shape Public Services, and Community Right to Control Investment would each provide a basis for action which would be supported and enhanced through the formation and work of Community Covenants. Meanwhile, the Community Power Commissioner would both drive the formation of Community Covenants and work to ensure that the government upholds communities’ rights fully and effectively.
These changes are the missing piece of the devolution puzzle. They would build a clear and trusted track along which power can be devolved from Whitehall to regions, local areas and all the way to the neighbourhood level.
There is already a large and growing movement of people around the country taking action in their communities. These policies would remove some of the institutional and legal barriers in their way. And, by changing basic assumptions about where power lies, they would also help inspire others to take action so that ultimately every neighbourhood in the country is supported to take control of its future.