New Power and Place: Part 2
S1, E4: 150 communities with £1m to spend | Wigan’s Deal | Barking & Dagenham | New Operating Models for Local Government | News roundup
Welcome to the fourth edition of The New Power Review.
This edition contains more on how new power might be created, harnessed or encouraged in specific places, with a particular focus on local government. Check out examples from Barking to Wigan below.
And we’ve a round up of new power news: from how 12,000 people helped NASA to fly a helicopter on Mars, to how football fans defeated the billionaire owners and JP Morgan via WhatsApp.
Got a story? Just reply to this email.
New power in places, part two
We continue the theme of local areas and new power. You can see part one here.
💰What happens if you give 150 places £1m each to spend however they like? Or, how can funders encourage local take up of new power?
If you’ve never heard of the Local Trust or ‘Big Local’, its main project, it’s kind of mind-blowing. In one of the biggest National Lottery grants ever, 150 communities across England were each given £1m to spend however they wanted, over 10-15 years. The radical approach aimed to push money and decision-making all the way down to the local level. The 150 places chosen to receive the funding were the areas that had the worst ratio of lottery-tickets-bought to lottery-funding-received. Here’s how they explain themselves:
The project provides residents with some training, some support, and organises peer-to-peer learning, community-to-community networking and the sharing of ideas and experiences. And then it leaves them to get on with it.
It’s not been without its problems — Local Trust says they see a few people in each community (average population: 7,500) shouldering the majority of the work, and there are inevitable disagreements and conflicts about where the money should go. A degree of ‘resilience’ is required, they say. Their groundbreaking project raises broader questions about how disagreements at a local level can be resolved when power is devolved? What are the limits of participation?
In 2019, Local Trust published a halfway report on the project. They also regularly publish new insights from insiders or independent commentators. The local areas have until 2026 to spend their money and determine their legacy. Thinking through what we can learn from this ambitious experiment, it’s success and failures and how we can preserve a long term legacy for what was funded seems important.
“Since that initial leap in the dark, a compelling vision has begun to take on form and definition. We are coming to see that it really is possible for funders to give money and support in completely new and innovative ways, with residents in the lead. It is our aim to share what we have learnt from Big Local far and wide — with government, local authorities, funders, public and private sectors — everyone who wants to make their area an even better place to live.”
Matt Leach, Chief Executive, Local Trust
🤝 In response to brutal austerity, Wigan Council organised ‘The Deal’ to maximise opportunities for residents to take on social projects themselves.
As soon as it was clear that Wigan would face 40% budget cuts over ten years, leaders in the council recognised that there would need to be drastic change. The result was ‘the deal’ between citizens, the council, the NHS and local voluntary groups. The ambitious deal aimed to freeze council tax while still resulting in better outcomes through better performing services and citizens taking over certain projects. An ‘asset-based’ approach looked to supercharge individual and community strengths.
The Kings Fund, a health thinktank, reviewed the deal in 2019, producing a report and short film. They found that, despite austerity, life expectancy improved in Wigan, versus stagnation across the rest of England.
Plenty more has been written on the deal, by seemingly everyone with any interest in local government. Here’s a detailed case study from Centre for Public Impact, and here’s a blogpost by one of the councillors involved, explaining that the deal is still evolving and that there’s more to do to benefit from voluntary organisations.
The story is also one of cultural change within an old power institution — giving power to frontline staff and replacing a blame culture with one of learning. The longer term impact of this cultural shift could be instructive for politics more broadly, and particularly for a Westminster that looks increasingly remote.
“To enable change to happen we needed have the right culture, resources, public support and a steady nerve to follow an untrodden path. Staff were the key to success, and we encouraged them to be innovative (and not to fear mistakes), take a different, “asset-based approach” and have a different kind of conversation finding out what was needed not just what was available. They needed to work across traditional boundaries in neighbourhoods.”
Cllr Lord Peter Smith, Wigan Council
🐶 The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham is experimenting with helping neighbourhoods to organise to meet their own needs.
While the Wigan Deal was partly about a council reorganising itself to, in turn, harness the power of voluntary groups, the Barking and Dagenham approach is to create a kind of middle layer between council and citizens — to create the space for organising to happen. In their words, to get to ‘neighbourhoods made by everyone, for everyone.’
The council has funded Participatory City — a five-year project that provides support to ‘get things going’. That means it finds spaces for projects to work or setup, finds materials and equipment and does the not-fun-but-necessary stuff like insurance and health and safety procedures. All without giant forms to fill in. It hopes to see new festivals, workshops and businesses emerge — and during Covid-19 has switched to online activity organising.
Here’s the longer pitch from Participatory City Foundation’s Tessy Briton. Organisers claim that over 150 projects have been created, involving 5,000 people so far: about 2-3% of the council’s population.
“Instead of a network of micro-organisations, with a small number of people attached to each, which can become fixed (and even ossified), you instead have an adaptive system of participation. While the projects and networks themselves are constantly changing, the idea is to co-create a stable system that reliably generates high levels of positive outcomes, over the long term, built into the public infrastructure, much like libraries or roads….In practical terms it means that the participation system is able to work with and adapt to the realities of people’s lives.”
Tessy Briton, Participatory City
🖥 This kind of approach might represent a ‘new operating model’ for local government, according to Nesta and Collaborate CIC.
Nesta and Collaborate brought together a range of local authorities to develop a range of ‘new power’-like principles for how councils need to work now. They considered: how to best think about risk, how to maximise the value of the existing assets in the community, and how they might measure things differently. From their PDF report that includes 20 case studies from councils, here’s a sexy diagram:
And the asset-based community development bit — i.e. working with the strengths of local communities — gets its own report here.
🤗 A lot of new power stuff sounds like good old cooperative models of working. Over 32 councils have joined a Cooperative Councils Innovation Network — providing more stories of projects that empowered residents. Here are two.
Staffordshire County Council kickstarted a local project that was taken over, expanded, and is now entirely run by, volunteers. Leek Community Cupboard began as a project to provide £3 bags of fruit and veg on an estate. It’s now run by volunteers across 60 villages, still providing food bags, as well as children’s activities, clothes and advice. Financial support comes from councillors’ community funds. More here.
York City Council trained 76 volunteer ‘health champions’ who in turn have mobilised over a thousand people to exercise more. The project takes advantage of the champions’ local knowledge and connections to encourage their peers to exercise more, to create new activities or to help signpost neighbours to useful support. More here.
These are just some of the initiatives taking place across the UK that harness different forms of new power, blend it with old power and are at the forefront of adapting our institutions. What have we missed? Drop us ideas, thoughts and stories by replying to this email.
A roundup of the rest in new power
🪐 NASA flew a helicopter on Mars using software open to the public and co-written by 12,000 people.
‘Ingenuity’ has now made three successful flights on Mars. The software that it runs on is based on open source — i.e. anyone can write and edit it. As Basia Cummings put it:
“You’d imagine the software used in space exploration would be heavily armed and guarded. Well, not anymore...It’s a long way from the space race...a marked shift from the competitive and proprietary world of space travel we’ve known until now – the spirit of the hackathon meets the final frontier.”
Most software now includes elements from open source development. One contributor to such software told ZDNet:
"Much like dropping a pebble in a lake, your small contribution then ripples out to have a much larger impact. That's one of the beauties of open source, someone else can take your good work and make it even more powerful and meaningful."
🚓 A movement is developing around #KillTheBill with plans to protest the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill on 1 May.
There’s no single group in charge and there’s no ‘coalition agreement’. Organised via social media with some light coordination by Sisters Uncut, people are rallying around the #KillTheBill hashtag on Twitter and Instagram and will be in the streets on May Day.
⏳ Extinction Rebellion is back and harnessing new power to push the climate to the top of the political agenda.
With a clear goal, some simple principles of engagement, little hierarchy and lots of self-organising, the campaign had significant public impact in 2019. XR owned the news agenda for two weeks, shifted the sense of urgency on the climate crisis, and saw the issue climb up the public’s political priority list. That was before Covid-19 came along. Now they’re back and planning to shift the agenda again. But how do you organise a significant protest in a socially distanced way? Instead of organising 1,000 people to come together in one place, you organise 1,000 places with one-person protests.
⚽ JP Morgan and a handful of billionaires were defeated by football fans organising with zero budget over WhatsApp.
News of the European Super League leaked on a Sunday lunchtime. Within hours, representatives of fan groups had joined a WhatsApp group called ‘ESL’ and promptly organised and mobilised as hard as they could to defeat the proposals. The Guardian had the possibly-slightly-romanticised story.
The outrage over the concept of such a ‘super league’ — some of the wealthiest football clubs in Europe going it alone to maximise their TV revenues — isn’t a surprise to The New Power Review, which featured community-ownership as the future of new power in football just days before the ESL announcement. TNPR: always ahead of the curve. Tell your friends to sign up.
That’s all folks. Coming soon: look out for a takeover by pirates, and our next theme will be on new power in businesses or at work. Stories or ideas always welcome.
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