Local Government Chronicle (LGC) by Susanna Rustin, Jan 31

Local Government Chronicle (LGC) by Susanna Rustin, Jan 31 2013
The morning after the police and crime commissioner elections in November, I couldn't resist a
gloating tweet. Six months earlier the Campaign for a Queen's Park Community Council in north
Westminster had secured a turnout of over 20% in the referendum to decide whether our ward
should become London's first civil parish. 68% of the 1608 residents who voted said yes.
In the police commissioner elections, the highest turnout in the country was Northamptonshire's
19.5%. The proof was in: our grassroots, non-party-political and resident-led initiative, conducted
largely by word of mouth in one of the poorest wards in central London, had engaged a higher
proportion of the electorate than one of the coalition government's flagship reforms.
I was proud of Queen's Park that day and I still am. Our campaign grew out of the belief that local
people benefit from active participation in neighbourhood governance. Launching our campaign
for parish status in 2010 against a backdrop of cuts we felt like pioneers. Localism and big society
were the new buzzwords and what could be more localist than fighting for a new community
council, a body formed of elected volunteers who would stand up for their patch?
We have practical aims including support for vulnerable residents, and a track record in running
public meetings following a spate of gun crimes. We have a summer festival and fireworks night to
run. But we also see participation itself as part of our remit. Turnout in elections in Queen's Park is
generally low. Our plan is to persuade more people, and more different kinds of people, to join in.
A 12-strong Queen's Park shadow council is being selected by our chair and vice-chair in
consultation with Westminster City Council. We have a park group, a group fighting to save the
local sports centre from redevelopment as private housing, a newsletter to put together and next
year's elections to plan.
But government plans for the localisation of council tax benefit are our biggest headache. Because
we wanted to be transparent on the doorstep, we told people what the parish precept would buy.
If an average, band D council tax payer paid an extra 85p a week, we said, that would make
£207,000 a year, enough to pay a clerk and office costs, fund community events we believe are
vital for cohesion, and some projects too. Now the rules have changed, and it looks as though
benefit claimants in Queen's Park won't have the parish precept paid along with the rest of their
council tax – because the government is working out the figures now, before our council is elected.
But I'll write about this next time.
Follow @goqueenspark or @susannarustin on Twitter.
LGC column by Susanna Rustin, March 2013.
So now we are 12. Ten months on from our referendum yes vote, the Queen’s Park community
council actually exists. Well, sort of.
We’re called a shadow council, though not officially, as Westminster City Council won’t give us
“formal approval” until next April, when an order is passed enabling the first-ever elections to a
London civil parish to take place, probably be on the same day as local and European elections,
June 5.
Until those elections we have no budget. And we’re obviously not elected, since there has been no
election. We expected Westminster City Council to appoint three of its own councillors to the
shadow council, either our own ward councillors or others interested in our localist project.
But they didn’t, and so we are 12 residents, none of whom has ever been elected to local
government, all of whom live here in Queen’s Park ward and want to play a part in the future of
our neighbourhood.
We 12 were selected via a process that started when the campaign group asked our chair and vicechair to invite applications, and choose what in their judgment was the best combination of
people. Inevitably, some candidates were disappointed.
So what next? The 12 of us meet for the first time this month [March], and will set about forming
committees. Finance will have the ghastly job of thinking through how to cope now that our
projected precept income has been slashed, thanks to measures adopted to compensate local
authorities for the abolition of national council tax benefit. (Last month I threatened to write a
whole column about this but I’ve put this off for now. The good news from everyone else’s point of
view is that it doesn’t affect anyone else in quite the disastrous way it affects Queen’s Park.)
The governance committee will, with help from our friends at the National Association of Local
Councils, swot up on how civil parishes work, and think about next year’s elections: we are a nonparty-political campaign in a Labour-held ward, in a flagship Conservative local authority. Without
political parties, how will campaigns be organised? Will there be enough candidates?
Our neighbourhood planning group has a head start and has already made progress. Lagging
behind is comms. We need to do more blogging, tweeting, talking to the local press. More
urgently, we need to engage local people, stick pieces of paper through letterboxes, tell everyone
what we’re up to.
And we need to start doing all of this as soon as we possibly can.
Follow @goqueenspark and @susannarustin on Twitter.
LGC column by Susanna Rustin May 2013
In Yorkshire and Lancashire during the recent school holidays I kept noticing the achievements of
parish councils. In Arnside a plaque noted that the pier was rebuilt by the parish 30 years ago at a
cost of £25,000. I sat at the end with my family and a crowd of onlookers to hear the siren that
warns the tidal bore is coming and watch the water sweep in.
At Stainforth in the Yorkshire Dales I read the agenda for a forthcoming parish AGM on the
noticeboard while waiting for a local bus, along with news of a recent litter pick by volunteers. In
Settle I found myself quizzing the quiz master at the pub I was staying at about whether he was a
councillor. He said he’d given it up (“thankless task” I think was his phrase), but told us about the
efforts of the Vibrant Settle business group he is active in, to keep the town centre alive.
I know parish councils aren't always models of effectiveness. I'm sure they can get bogged down in
process and become dominated by tricky personalities from time to time. But being reminded of
the concrete achievements of civil parishes was just what I needed after a tricky few weeks in
Queen’s Park that included several hours collecting signatures for a petition against the recent
removal of a children’s climbing frame.
How thrilling to think our Community Council might one day be named on a plaque by a new
playground, bench, tree or public space! How pleasing to think beyond terms of reference and
standing orders to when we can actually start doing something on the ground…
But that’s not fair. The 12 of us on the temporary council are busy forming ourselves into
committees, electing chairs, struggling with minutes and worrying about our non-existent finances,
but that’s not all that’s going on.
The Queen’s Park summer festival will go ahead as usual thanks to funding from our ward
councillors, and volunteers are working on a new plan for the park. A delegation led by our chair
Angela Singhate visited Westminster city council leader Philippa Roe in her 17 th-floor office in
Victoria last week, and came away feeling we had given a decent account of ourselves – even if she
didn’t agree to transfer any assets over straightaway.
A few years ago I realised I admire the people who run quizzes, organise petitions, fundraise for
new piers. Or pick up other people’s litter, as my dad does. Getting involved in the community
council campaign here in Queen’s Park was, for me, about trying to be more like them. Just a year
now until the London’s first parish council is elected and we all find out what grassroots
government can really do.
Follow @susannarustin and @goqueenspark on Twitter
Column for LGC by Susanna Rustin October 2013
Creating the first civil parish in London is exciting. We are pioneers, and know our project is special.
No one has done what we are doing in Queen’s Park before and if we pull it off, by making a
tangible difference to our neighbourhood and the people in it, we might become a case study,
even a role model. And if we fail? Well… others can learn from our mistakes.
But for how long will we be London’s only parish, our nearest neighbours in the home counties?
When we launched our campaign three years ago we learned of other London groups who were
thinking about parishes. There was one in Wapping, another in London Fields, discussions in
Kilburn and at Coin Street on the South Bank.
Back in 2010, when the political talk was about the Big Society - when it wasn’t about cuts – setting
up a parish council seemed an on-message thing to do. When I visited a parish in Bradford and
wrote about it for the Guardian, decentralisation minister Greg Clark told me he looked forward to
a “great revival” of parish politics. Conservative MP Rory Stewart said: "If the big society is about
something distinctive, it is about local democracy and communities organising themselves.”
But the trail went cold. The 2011 Localism Act granted a general power of competence, and some
enterprising parishes have since developed affordable housing and other schemes. In Queen’s Park
we were offered support by a senior civil servant and invited to speak at a Department for
Communities conference. Liberal Democrat local government minister Don Foster visited us.
Last month he announced measures intended to make campaigning for new parishes less arduous.
In future 7.5% of local electors must sign a petition rather than 10%, and local authorities will have
less time to respond. There is even funding of up to £10,000 for campaigns.
But while these changes are welcome, what is missing is a sense of direction. Foster’s
announcement went under the radar. It feels as though no one in government cares much about
parishes either way. No wonder that, for now, more civil parishes in London are not happening.
Of course we are small fry, compared with the big-spending principal local authorities fighting their
own battles with our massively centralised state. But still, every politician who talks about
decentralisation or localism needs to have an answer to the question: where does your devolution
stop? What is the lowest level at which people need to be organised and represented
democratically?
In Queen’s Park, our answer to that question is: the civil parish.
Follow @susannarustin and @goqueenspark on Twitter
LGC column by Susanna Rustin Nov 21 2013
Success! Queen’s Park Community Council won’t exist for another six months, yet we’ve managed
to raise £60,000 to fund improvements to our well-loved but ill-equipped local playground. We
submitted a joint application with Westminster City Council back in the summer, following
meetings that brought together members of the parish council development group, Friends of
Queen’s Park Gardens, the council parks department, ward councillors and the landscaping
company that looks after open spaces in the borough. The discussions and form-filling took hours. I
danced across my office when we learned it had all been worth it.
Sita Trust, the charitable wing of waste and recycling company Sita, is the source of this much
needed investment in play equipment for the 7+ age group, and I can’t tell you have pleasing it is
to have embarked on the process of spending this money. Back in January an old but serviceable
steel climbing frame was removed from the park without warning. Disbelief turned to anger as
local parents including me realised there was no plan to replace it. We organised a petition and the
local paper published before-and-after pictures, the latter a depressing tableau of bare earth and
disgruntled children swaddled in hats and scarves against the freezing weather.
But once we had identified Sita Trust’s Enhancing Communities fund as a plausible solution we
established a good relationship with Westminster officials. They have embraced some if not all our
notions of what the new playground might be, and we are confident that when it is completed
next year it will be vastly better. In keeping with the community council’s commitment to
maximising engagement, we are planning a focus group at a local school and a consultation that
goes beyond notices pinned up with an email address to write to.
Bringing investment into our neighbourhood was always part of the plan for the community
council. As yet we have no formal target, but in order to justify the additional tax residents will pay
to fund the council, we need to show we can raise money as well as spend it.
So far so good. We have shown we can put a good pitch together. But while no one could begrudge
the kids of Queen’s Park a decent play area – our ward is around two-thirds social housing with
pockets of acute deprivation – it worries me to think of all the other areas suffering budget cuts,
particularly to facilities for children, that won’t be so lucky. I hope Queen’s Park Community
Council will prove to be an innovative, sustainable, entrepreneurial response to the public sector
cuts that brought about our campaign in the first place. But we are not the solution.
Ends

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