Active Citizenship

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, last night I had the privilege of attending a visit to Parliament by the Bite the Ballot campaign. Around 100 young people were here in the House to campaign and encourage other young people to get involved in the political process. It was an uplifting event.

However, some stark figures were presented to us by Bob Worcester from Ipsos MORI. At this year’s general election there was a 65 per cent turnout overall, but of young people under 25 only 44 per cent turned out to vote: 50 per cent of men, but only 39 per cent of women, which itself demands some deeper understanding. Of course, active citizenship is not just about voting every so often, but voting is nevertheless the cornerstone of our democracy, which is why citizenship education is so important in our schools, to help to reverse that decline in turnout.

For more active citizenship to be achieved, local neighbourhoods are the place to start. That is where most people are interested and confident in getting involved. There are three ways to encourage active citizenship in the neighbourhood that I should like to draw to your Lordships’ attention. The first is participatory budgeting, which we brand in Newcastle upon Tyne as “U decide”. It was launched four years ago by the Newcastle Partnership, with £280,000 of neighbourhood renewal cash. Now in our fifth year, there have been some 20 projects involving 11,000 people with more than £4.5 million of public funding allocated. “U decide” is used to address issues from community cohesion to open space improvements. It is used with communities of geography, interest and identity. Some examples from recent projects include an environmental improvement project in the Lemington area of Newcastle, which engaged more than 600 people in considering environmental issues and then went on to involve more than 800 people, including 400 pupils, in decision-making on which neighbourhood projects to support, all through a public ballot. Another example from “U decide” is a project to engage the city’s unpaid carers of adults in defining actions and interventions to improve their quality of life and then allocating resources to meet those needs. There has also been a project using police authority funding to build trust and confidence in one of the most deprived and disaffected estates in the city. The outcomes here have shown that, given real voice and choice, people will engage, and that there are tangible outcomes to be achieved in terms of improved relationships and better service delivery.

For me, the outcomes of participatory budgeting are that it builds social capital, targets spending more effectively and leads to closer working within a neighbourhood by public and third-sector agencies. In the context of reduced public spending, it is extremely important that more citizens become involved because they will understand better what is and is not possible, what things cost and how things should be prioritised.

My second example is volunteering in neighbourhoods, with the particular example of public libraries. I remember some years ago a county councillor in Bedlington, Northumberland, Ellen Mitchell, telling me how she led a group in establishing their first local library in the late 1940s. They found a room, they built the shelves and donated their own books as stock to get things started. It was the equivalent of the big society in those days. There are many similar examples from an era when Governments tended to match-fund voluntary effort, rather than do everything themselves. In the context of spending cuts over the next few years, we could find that we need to encourage volunteers to work in our local libraries in support of trained staff. This could keep libraries open when they might otherwise be closed. It would also provide experienced people to help in, for example, IT training and local and family history. We should remember how that library service started. It was not all about big government, but about voluntary action supported by the state. This is increasingly the way in which we may need to go to protect the library service and several other, similar local services, perhaps in the leisure field.

Is it possible to engage people? I think it is. School governing bodies explain how they have been heavily supported by volunteers over the years and are a model that can be followed. More people will volunteer if it is clearer to them how to do so.

A third way to increase active citizenship in neighbourhoods lies in neighbourhood planning across public services as a whole. Getting people involved in thinking about health services, community safety, job creation, leisure facilities and housing needs can lead, in turn, to neighbourhood-based problem solving, setting priorities and creating stronger community life through more citizens simply being involved in the process and then supporting each other. Engagement and capacity building starts at a local level, but has to be led by local government, as the only body with a democratic mandate to draw in other public sector and third-sector bodies alongside it.

That is why I am worried by any trend towards the atomisation of public services, and their delivery, rather than localism. Localism brings public services together under one umbrella, led by local government, which derives its mandate from the ballot box. Atomisation gives greater control to Whitehall in allocating budgets, through its system of budgetary silos. That is why I believe we must empower our neighbourhoods to define those public services that they need and then see them delivered through devolution of power. That would encourage more active citizenship which, in turn, will help to create stronger communities and neighbourhood and, one hopes, the rise in turnout at formal elections that we seek so much.