Devolving to Neighbourhoods
What’s the agenda?
The 2008 ’Communities in Control’ white paper, building on the earlier 2007 local government white paper, is giving a major new boost to local devolution. New neighbourhood councils, neighbourhood charters, and new rights to hold service providers to account, are going to build upon the success of Neighbourhood Management. Is Neighbourhood Management effective in reducing the gap between the most deprived neighbourhoods and the rest? How do active citizens and the voluntary sector get to play a key role in local partnerships? What will Local Area Agreements do to give real power to local communities to decide their priorities and what gets funded?
Our Expertise
- Compiling baseline and mid term performance data
- Creating local quality of life indicators against which to track changes
- Auditing community needs and measuring ‘social capital’ using the ONS
toolkit
- Helping LSPs develop better partnership working and track LAA performance
- Evaluating the effectiveness of community and voluntary sector engagement
- Evaluation of project outcomes and programme effectiveness, in area-based regeneration initiatives such as NDCs, CDTs and WNF projects
- Collaboration with our sponsored independent, not-for-profit ’Centre for Community Research’ agency
- Skilling residents to be active citizens, local service auditors and ’mystery shoppers ’