Happy birthday?

By Bob Jones
Chief Executive of Watford CVS

Hertfordshire is approaching its millennium: the first recorded use of the word “Hertfordshire” is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of 1011.

From one perspective, the LAA provides a framework for Hertfordshire’s communities and partners to come together and pool their knowledge and resources to lay plans for the County’s future. Surely this is A Good Thing?

Seen from another perspective, the LAA process creates a monolithic structure that undermines pluralism and places the county’s fate in the hands of unaccountable market researchers and statisticians with mysterious rituals and practices.

I suspect that the voluntary sector will always have mixed feelings about any central government attempt to structure local democracy.

In the LAA process, there are 198 National Indicators. The voluntary sector can play a role in the delivery of all of these, but here I want to focus on just National Indicator 4: the percentage of people who feel they can influence decisions in their locality.

This is an important issue: if people feel excluded and powerless, then democracy is in serious trouble. In a healthy community, people must feel empowered and engaged in democratic processes.

But many people see this as a “zero-sum transaction”: that if power increases in one place it must necessarily reduce elsewhere. This model of empowerment concerns me as I believe it is flawed and is doomed to failure.

The model is flawed because “empowerment” is not a scarce physical resource like oil or gold. “Empowerment” is an abstract concept and (as with “love” or “goodwill”) there are infinite and limitless reserves of empowerment. In any given community at any given time, it is perfectly possible for everyone to feel they can exercise greater control over the decisions that affect their lives.

The “zero-sum” approach is doomed because it is an adversarial model that invites people to compete over who gets the biggest slice of pie. It would be naive to ignore existing power structures and vested interests, but it is surely self-defeating to build an empowerment strategy around these competing interests.

It is all a question of balance, proportion and partnership. The fundamental question is: what sort of community do we want?Do I want to live in a society in which everyone participates in democratic processes, respects those processes and respects the rights of their neighbours? That sounds pretty good. Even better if there is a strong sense of community cohesion, a commitment to equality, a focus on individual freedom and responsibility and a systematic approach to protecting the environment and fighting poverty and ignorance. Yes! Sign me up! I want to live there!

Do I want to live in a society in which different interest groups compete daily to assert their entrenched views and impose their wills? Do I want the agenda set by powerful media barons and unaccountable political strategists? Do I want to live in a society where people are segregated and defined by their religion, class, race, salary, sexuality, age, health, postcode? Where success and failure is measured by public opinion polls? No, I don’t. It sounds like a living hell. Count me out.

In the LAA, so much seems to rest on a knife edge and the only way to influence things is to get involved.

Let’s all hope we have some real successes to celebrate in 2011!