Stephen Williams, Communities and Local Government Minister, discusses the new £2 million Delivering Differently in Neighbourhoods fund to help communities provide better local services.
There are many ways of creating better services but part of the answer comes by local authorities empowering communities to take ownership of an issue and allowing them to solve problems themselves.
We want to see more local authorities providing services like Devon’s Snow Warden scheme. Devon County Council extensively salt their roads during periods of heavy snow but their focus is on the major routes which carry the most traffic. That means in extreme weather smaller communities can find themselves snowed under.
But the Snow Warden allows local communities to be able to muck in and help with some of the lesser used roads if they would like to. Snow Wardens co-ordinate the volunteers and deliver training to community volunteers. That’s better for everyone. It’s more efficient for the taxpayer but it’s a better service too because the residents of villages who know when roads need to be gritted more than the man or woman miles away in the town hall.
With schemes like this in mind, earlier this month we announced a new £2 million, 2-year fund to help local authorities create better services by getting communities involved in running them.
We want to help councils work smarter and provide more of the services that make a difference to peoples’ lives. We want to allow authorities to provide higher quality and more focused projects which eliminate waste. And, we want to help empower authorities to deliver a whole host of services to people how they want them to be delivered – at a local neighbourhood level.
A new fund, Delivering Differently in Neighbourhoods, will provide unringfenced grants of up to £90,000 to successful authorities and, depending on the breadth and quality of the applications, will have scope to support around 25 projects.
We want to see innovative projects which really benefit people around them, like the Fresh Horizon’s library programme in Huddersfield. There a large residential area is served by a sleek and efficient library service which has managed to lower its costs incredibly by co-locating and running the library alongside other services – namely a credit union and adult advice service.
As a result the library has been secured for the local community for the foreseeable future and is providing much better value to the public purse.
There are a whole host of ways in which local people can make their communities better and, not only that, people want to be empowered to make that change. That’s why this government has provided them with the tools with which they can.
If you would like to find out how you can get involved more with helping in your local area visit the My Community Rights website.
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