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What will successful community empowerment look like? The most eye-catching headlines about local democracy at present are around rekindling the relationship between the major political parties and elected mayors – and what the new mayor of London may say or do, once the protective bubble wrapping is cut away. A quiet revolution beckons for the foot soldiers too. The Department for Communities' An action plan for communities: Building on success, asserted the developing role of councillors in empowering and engaging with communities. The Councillors' Commission identified the need for engagement to make communities feel more positive about their power to influence public bodies, and gave ‘neighbourhood' or ‘frontline' councillors a vital role in making this happen. Community empowerment has been core business for local authorities for some time. Paul Martin wrote this a couple of weeks ago on this site and he is bang on the money. Whitehall is a latecomer to the party, and what it offers local government on the topic of community need is perhaps limited. The empowerment White Paper on its own might fall short of making strides towards greater powers of accountability for councils, but the Government's response to the Councillors' Commission has to bring to a conclusion the move towards empowering local councillors and, as a result, communities. Changes represent significant challenge for frontline councillors. First, alongside new empowerment tools such as the councillor call for action and petitions, how do we ensure frontline councillors are totally confident using the welter of information available to them when making tough, visible, decisions on the part of, and importantly with, neighbourhoods? Second, in the assessment age, just how do we measure the impact of empowerment on communities, and the role that councillors play in it? The Audit Commission's paper In the know rightly says that when information is used well, public services improve. Councillors are not exempt from this and information is hardly in short supply. Good-quality decision-making in an empowered world needs to be about striking a balance between how empowerment mechanisms articulate community views and the messages emerging from research data. Add to the mix informal community insight and scrutiny findings, and the potential complexity becomes apparent. Frontline councillors need to effectively analyse and interpret this information, judging its relevance and quality along the way. An over-reliance on these skills at the expense of others, however, will deliver neither community nor councillor empowerment. Knowing when and how to draw on the services of support officers, and what to demand by way of intelligent information provision, is also crucial. So, at the other end of the process, what is to be done about measuring the impact of – councillor – empowerment? Working out what to measure is relatively straightforward. Getting more people involved in democracy, improving both recognition and favourability of councillors, increasing satisfaction with services and delivering efficiencies through tailoring services to local needs are all measurable goals. The problem arises when you consider that the majority of these can be affected by a council's wider push to engage with communities. Viewed negatively, a cumbersome framework designed to assess the performance of members from on high appears alarmingly before your eyes. So why measure? Evaluation should be about empowering councillors and building capital in communities. It should let frontline councillors set their own criteria, which make sense to them, their officers and their communities. Of course, the chance for wider knowledge transfer is not to be passed over, which makes the inclusion of a limited number of objective and universally-applied success factors a necessary evil. Even in the last five years, the capacity to marshal information has leapt forward. We now need to ensure it can be analysed and interpreted in high-quality and consistent decision-making. Andrew Collinge is director of policy and public affairs at the Local Government Information Unit

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ECONOMIC GROWTH

How can we make community empowerment work?

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