More than bins and potholes: celebrating local councils this election day

People across England are heading to the polls today to cast their votes in local elections. Roughly 2,600 seats across 107 of the country’s 317 councils are up for grabs.

According to the media, issues like potholes and bin collection are likely to sway these votes. While this may well be true, councils do a whole lot more than fixing roads and collecting rubbish. They play a rich and vital role in all our lives, providing more than 800 services locally – from schools and care for the elderly to libraries and local planning.

Local government is the level of democracy where people have the most effective opportunity to participate in decisions that affect their lives. In the best places, councils listen deeply and engage meaningfully – putting communities in the driving seat not just on polling day but all year round.

With that in mind, today feels like as good an excuse as any to broadcast some of the many ways councils are transforming their places with the help of community power.

A new approach to town centre regeneration in Test Valley

From giving residents a blank sheet to determine the council’s priorities, to making statutory consultation processes interactive and fun, Test Valley Borough Council has completely rethought the way it takes decisions. Extensive deliberative engagement with communities now shapes strategies for regeneration, corporate plans and visions of place.

In the market town of Andover, for example, the council worked closely with the community to create a shared vision for the physical, social and economic regeneration of the town centre. Over 4,000 people took part in creating a masterplan. This involved deep and sustained community engagement over a period of years. Rather than a one-hit conversation, the council made a commitment to continuous dialogue, providing a broad range of opportunities for people to share their views.

Test Valley Borough Council’s Salena Mulhere says: “It’s not just the community’s team’s job or the councillor’s job. How we work is to ask ourselves what local people want and need and to engage with them. At every point, in everything we’re doing, we’re checking in with ourselves and saying, well actually, how do we know that that’s what that community needs?”

Changing Wakefield’s future one conversation at a time

In 2021, Wakefield Council started to develop a new vision and culture for public services, with the aim to “become a place where our every move is informed by community needs and ideas.”

At the heart of this was a Big Conversation with residents to find out what they liked about their area and what would make things better. Over 100 ‘conversationalists’ were trained in appreciative inquiry before heading out into the community to have more than 1,300 face-to-face chats across the district.

People from all walks of life signed up to be conversationalists, including children, young people, elected members, residents and staff from the council, NHS, voluntary sector and housing associations.

The conversations happened in places that traditional engagement activity doesn’t always reach – at the school gate, on the touch line at football matches, over Sunday lunch, in factories, festivals, libraries, language classes, concerts, clubs, galas and garden centres.

Wakefield Council’s Jim Leyland says: “These conversations have been powerful in terms of shaping not just services, but how we engage with people. We’re talking about the art of conversation, but this is a bit more than that. It’s about really trying to understand people and communities and the histories and stories that they have.”

Putting the community at the heart of service design in Essex

In Essex, the county council made a bold decision to transform how it commissioned drug and alcohol services – transferring power and resources to the community by setting up an arm’s-length body led by the people it seeks to support.

Now a registered charity, the Essex Recovery Foundation (ERF) has responsibility for the allocation and spend of more than £9.5-10 million a year. Service users are empowered to create their own strategy and define their own outcomes. From recovery cafes that help build connection, to speaker bootcamps that equip people with the tools and confidence to share their recovery journey, ERF supports people to use their voice to influence how services function for them.

Power that once sat with a small group of people in the public health team now sits with the community directly affected.

Essex County Council’s Ben Hughes says: “Co-production has become the buzz phrase of the moment, but what we’re trying to do is actually empower the community to drive the direction of travel.”

Tackling inequality in Islington

The sixth most deprived borough in London, Islington is a tale of two halves. Behind its affluent façade lie sharp inequalities in income, opportunity, access to services and health, with life expectancy varying by up to eight years between the richest and poorest parts of the borough. 

The council launched Let’s Talk Islington to fundamentally change how inequality is tackled locally. More than 6,000 residents of all ages engaged in the initiative, sharing their perceptions and experiences of inequality and their priorities for Islington.

The tiered approach to engagement included an open survey and community workshop. It also involved participatory projects with target groups where data was lacking or there were particularly acute levels of poverty. The council ran documentary film making workshops with the LGBTQ+ community, puppetry with young people with special educational needs and disabilities, storytelling with older people experiencing poverty and lunch clubs with school children in deprived areas.

The local knowledge and insights gained through Let’s Talk Islington have been built into the council’s 2030 plan setting out a roadmap for a more equal future for the borough.

Councillor Nurullah Turan says: “This needs to be much more than just a shiny 18-month initiative. This needs to be a long-term process that really drives change…Ultimately, we’re talking about a culture shift, a systems-level shift, that will translate down to making Islington a more welcoming and safer place for everyone.”

New Local’s network helps councils like this learn from each other’s approaches, while our practice team works one-to-one to help embed transformative ways of working.

Featured photo by Red Dot on Unsplash

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