As our motion states:
“community assets act as local hubs and provide important access to information, services, skills and social experiences”.
It therefore asks this Senedd to recognise that “community assets improve community cohesion and allow local communities to take control of shaping the area they live in”, and calls on the Welsh Government to “protect community assets by enabling local people to run and expand facilities that benefit the local community”.
Real co-production lies at the heart of this.
Emphasising the genuinely transformative nature of co-production when leading the first debate here on co-production a decade ago, I stated “it's not just a nice add-on, but a new way of operating for the Government as well as for public service professionals and citizens themselves”.
However, despite this being central to both the Social Services and Wellbeing (Wales) Act 2014 and The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, successive reports, including Audit Wales in January, found that:
“too often, Local Authority work on community resilience is poorly defined and the actions are too narrowly focused”.
Without effective monitoring and evaluation, there is also often push back by Senior Public Officials, who either do not want to share power with the people, individually or in communities, or who falsely claim that this change of approach is unaffordable, when doing it properly will actually save money, by intervening early and preventing problems from becoming crises.
We therefore need to fully embrace co-production, moving beyond rhetoric and consultation to doing things differently in practice, with service professionals, services users and their communities working side by side to provide solutions.
Welsh Government needs to work in partnership with, and empower, the voluntary sector, community groups and other social entrepreneurs to help deliver the solutions to the long-term problems of our most deprived communities.
Enabling Wales will require the development of a long-term, overarching communities strategy to help empower local people and establish asset-based community development as a key principle within community development, empowering the people of the community and using existing community strengths to build sustainable communities for the future - embedding the principles of co-production in the design and delivery of local services in Wales to ensure that services are more responsive to people’s needs.
Funded via a Lottery endowment, national community development organisation Building Communities Trust run the Invest Local programme in 13 local communities across Wales.
They continue to work within three key themes: more recognition and rights, more respect and more investment for communities.
In their briefing to new Members after the 2021 election, they stated
“BCT research with community groups across Wales shows they often feel overlooked and under-resourced by local and national government”.
They have undertaken research on the scale of assets providing public (and private) services run by community organisations, and on community responses to the pandemic.
I joined their “Wales Community Assets Index” Launch Event on Monday.
This Research uncovered 102 previously unidentified ‘Less Resilient Areas’ across Wales.
It shows “that communities with fewer places to meet, a less engaged and active community and poorer connectivity to the wider economy, experience significantly different social and economic outcomes compared to communities possessing more of these assets” and that:
“Communities with fewer of these assets have higher rates of unemployment, residents often do not have qualifications and experience limiting long-term illnesses than both areas typically regarded as experiencing deprivation which do have those assets and Wales as a whole. They also have lower levels of community activity and receive lower levels of funding from both the state and charitable funders despite their social challenges”.
To reduce these place-based disparities, their 6 key recommendations include:
“Welsh Government must create a ‘Community Wealth Fund’ from the Dormant Assets Act.”
AND “must ensure, through stronger guidance or legislation, that communities have a simpler process to take over key community facilities”.
However, despite the UK Localism Act 2011, the Welsh Government has refused to require Councils in Wales to maintain a list of “Community Assets” and to introduce the “Community Right to Bid” for assets of community value, unlike England.
Our motion therefore regrets that there is no statutory right for communities in Wales to buy land or assets as in Scotland, and no right to bid, challenge, or build as in England – and calls on the Welsh Government to protect community assets by enabling local people to run and expand facilities that benefit the local community; and introduce a Community Ownership Fund and Right to Bid.
I move accordingly.