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Double Devolution? Fat Chance Now!

In its 2007 election manifesto the SNP proclaimed that its aim “was to give individuals, families and communities more control of their own destiny”, writes Stephen Maxwell.

This resonated well with a wider SNP theme of National Empowerment embracing a popular referendum on independence, an extended role for voluntary organisations in service delivery, the extension of direct payments to people receiving long-term support to live in the community, the promotion of community owned renewable energy schemes, and direct elections to health boards.

Under the heading New Powers for Communities the manifesto committed an SNP government to greater responsibility for community councils including the option of a £30 per resident budget. It expressed a particular interest in empowering Scots living in areas of deprivation, promising to pilot a scheme giving communities the power to opt for ‘empowered status’ carrying a right to co-manage a proportion of public spending and services in their area. It proclaimed a belief that such measures of empowerment would lead to better service outcomes and build community capacity and self-reliance.

In a policy statement, a Concordat with the Council of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) on (this) significant theme of the party’s manifesto, which was the subject of several months’ post election consultation, (it is clear that) 

•  out go the ideas to give community councils some spending power,

•  out go the pilots for empowered status for disadvantaged communities - and, with them,

•  out goes most of the commitment to direct community empowerment.

Instead the government’s effort is to be devoted principally to the established agenda of capacity building for communities, an integrated programme to develop skills in networking for community engagement, and working with Audit Scotland to assess progress.

Game, set and match to CoSLA, the Concordat and Community Planning Partnerships.

The disappointment ...comes from the government’s failure to acknowledge that engagement in public sector-led structures can never be a substitute for giving communities their own power to act and from its capacity to surrender so casually the cause of decentralisation it champions in its manifesto, in the process leaving Scotland one of the most centralised of all the Western democracies.

No doubt ministers see this concession to Scotland’s councils as a necessary part of their strategy for their first term. But they have other aims to pursue, among them the reduction of poverty and disadvantage and winning public support for independence in a referendum in 2010.

The empowerment of the least empowered of Scots has a vital role to play in achieving both those aims. By compromising the community dimension of their vision of national empowerment the government may have missed an opportunity to stir Scotland’s ambition for wider changes.

See also: Local People Leading