Published with a fanfare last week the Coalition’s housing strategy has been rather overshadowed by Osbourne’s austerity statement on Tuesday.  But you can see the similarity immediately.  The foreword by Cameron and Clegg does not refer to the housing crisis.  It says the aim of the strategy is “to help drive local economies” and “create jobs” and to “provide a much needed boost to employment” i.e. it is about stimulating private investment and economic growth and secondly to “boost opportunity in our society”.  It is not about solving or addressing the housing crisis; the focus is to get the house builders building again.

Subsidising the house builder

To achieve this, the priority is to “unblock the housing market”, that is to say, attract private investment from mortgage firms to banks back into property.  With the usual Coalition speak, the strategy puts a fair amount of the blame for market failure on the previous government for being top down.  There is not a word of the market itself – the house builders and their land banks (containing up to 600, 000 units potentially) or the reckless sale of sub-prime mortgages that have left 800,000 in negative equity; nor of the landowners asking outrageous prices for land;  or landlords charging tenants exorbitant rents; nor of the banks that will not lend to small house builders – let alone any reference to the property lobby that has written the Government’s new rules on planning and housing finance.

To kick start house building investment the Government is to offer significant direct and indirect subsidies and support to the house building industry.   Direct subsidies include Build Now Pay Later on public land; and a Get Britain Building Fund for small builders.  Indirect support includes an Infrastructure Fund, indemnities to mortgage lenders; planning deregulation; and reducing developer obligations for section 106 and zero carbon measures.

Brazenly, the strategy announces that the chairman of Berkeley Group plc, a company that specialises in market homes, has been appointed to provide advice on to maximise development opportunities on publicly owned land.

Housing need ignored
The subsidy to investors is hidden behind a headline claim that more mortgages will become available by reducing deposits from 25% to 5% for first time buyers, and getting more investment into private rented housing by providing incentives for developers to enter that market.  But will these measures mean that more people will get help with housing, or that housing need or homelessness will be addressed?

Yes for some – but for most people wanting to buy, prices and rents remain prohibitively high, and are likely to increase due to spiralling unmet demand.  Even if you are eligible for a smaller deposit through the new indemnity scheme, there is no guarantee of low mortgage interest from banks and building societies.  With economic confidence at an all time low, this is not a great time to take the risk of a mortgage of any kind.  And the small print is that the indemnities are for new build purchases not for the majority of transactions which are not new build properties.  This shows the extent to which the strategy is focused on house builder profit lines and not on meeting housing need.

Increasing housing inequality
Billions of wealth is locked up in land and property by companies, rich landowners and pension funds, and there is no shortage of land for development, but to get this wealth invested in affordable housing is the problem.  The Government strategy has failed to do this.  It has tinkered, but not dealt with the key blockages of land held off the market, nor the scandal of the house builders build and sell model, leaving local authorities and communities to pick up the bill for community infrastructure and management.  The deregulation of planning and warnings to local councils that should not make schemes “unviable” by making demands on developers will lower the bar on the quality of development even further.

The only answer to this is land value taxation and use of Compulsory Purchase, plus direct public investment in council housing and massive support for mutuals and cooperatives.  Strategic responses such as new towns/eco-towns and overspill towns have been forgotten.  None of this level of thinking is on offer, indeed it is studiously avoided.  In the case of council housing, the Government intends to sell off more by offering larger discounts.

There is strong promotion of neighbourhood planning and community led design but no grasp of the cost to communities of doing this.  It reads like a fantasy from Witney and Chipping Norton where there is lots of local cash with villages awash with retired executives.   This does not begin to rise to the challenge of meeting housing need in urban areas (where 80% of the population live), and where land is in short supply and usually costs a fortune to buy and bring back into use.

The strategy is billed as “ambitious” but in fact is cautious and conservative.  It describes itself as “working with the grain” of the market and that about sums it up.  It is the market that has failed – working with the grain just takes us further away from meeting housing need.

The coalition policy is contained with the draft National Planning Policy Framework released in July 2011. The key policy change at the heart of the document is ‘the presumption in favour of sustainable development’.

The non-controversial part of this is the word ‘sustainable’ which the framework says means preserving resources for future generations, taking into account economic, social and environmental considerations.

But the concern is whether this is meaningful, or honest, given the overriding concern of the government is growth and development.  In effect, the word ‘sustainable’ equates with any new proposal for development.   The politics are clear, the bottom lines of the  development industry and business will prevail. And if local authorities and communities resist, lawyers for the developers will have a field day in court citing the ‘presumption’.

For a countryside in the South East which is mobilised against new housing this sounds like very bad news– and not what they elected a Tory/Lib Dem government for. As Camilla Cavendish wrote in the Times on 4 August: ‘Building in shires could demolish the Tory vote – relaxing planning rules to promote growth will cause an uproar that could dwarf the row over selling off forests.’

The NIMBYs are up in arms – and  so are many other considered voices. The National Trust, CPRE, FoE and other groups are joining the clamour against the relaxation fearing building in the countryside which they had so relentlessly opposed when Labour was in office.

Thus the Tory-led  growth programme for the South East looks very similar to the Labour one, albeit with more emphasis on business in distinction to Labour’s central government-imposed housing targets. In both cases local democracy gets short shrift.

Indeed, the framework runs straight up against the flagship Tory policy of  localism. The localism voice sits uncomfortably with the presumption voice of government.  How can you have local determination of planning schemes if the national policy is that there is a presumption in favour of giving planning permission – before the community has had its say?  It makes no sense.

What should be the response of the left? In principle, we should support regulation of the land use planning system, but advocate going further to limit land prices and redistribute the benefits of high land values to poorer areas and to local communities. More housing in the South East is needed, particularly affordable housing. But the Tory market-led approach does not ensure balanced communities, affordable homes, decent design and environmental protection because of the presumption rule.

Thus, the need for an alliance to stop the white paper and to address the impasse between the NIMBYs and those who want to see a more socially just land, property and planning system.

Much is made of the opportunity for the voluntary and community sectors to be service providers, but this is plainly a mere sop. The reality is that with the exception of a few very large charities, most third sector organisations, particularly those working at the local level, do not have the infrastructure or capital to take over huge swathes of public service provision.  The government knows this, and inevitably corporations such as Serco, Capital, General Healthcare, and G4S that are already active in this field will step in.

The predatory nature of private companies is hidden behind a government rhetoric of consumer choice but without any guarantee of public accountability or ability of the consumer to hold companies to account.  The contract and commissioning role of local authorities will be hugely important. Very few local authorities, or government departments, have the skills to be commissioners or have the legal and political nous to draw up contracts for the hundreds of services involved.  There is a very high probability of incompetent contract arrangements, poor quality services, over priced contracts, and corrupt relationships between officials and businesses.

The response of the trade unions to the white paper is that it will ‘break up the welfare state’.  They are rightly concerned about the loss of jobs, erosion of wages and conditions and the loss of universal provision of essential services ranging from care for the elderly to social housing to parks and environmental health.

The third sector has been much more ambiguous in its response. The influential Joseph Rowntree Foundation  welcomed the overall direction and applauded ‘the human element that people should be in the driving seat not politicians or bureaucrats’. Other charities and trusts, though some have misgivings about support for a Tory-led government, are excited by the prospect of winning public service contracts.

There is a real danger of a divide being created (and exploited by the government)  between public service workers losing their jobs and conditions, and the voluntary and community sector that is being promoted by the government as an enlightened alternative.

The white paper is also an important part of the government’s austerity programme. For example, the CBI was quick to say that the  public service reforms are ‘crucial for tackling the deficit’.  By this they mean that the reforms enable public services to be provided on the cheap by reducing the level of provision (restricting entitlements), and crucially by offering lower wages and conditions, and by using more volunteers. Costs will be lower but profits greater because payment to companies by public commissioners will assume existing wages and conditions.

But amid this bad news, there may be political opportunities and openings.  Firstly, the white paper contains contradictions, weaknesses and inefficiencies which will attract vigorous political opposition, not only from the trade unions. Local Commissioning will turn most public services into post code lotteries. Some areas and some groups will do OK, others will lose out. Inequality and unfairness will increase, and some have suggested the reforms will create chaos and mayhem.

It is not just the poor who are dependent on the public sector, but the middle class too, especially in health and social care. This will create political problems for the Coalition. It is also quite possible that when the third sector realises that it is not going to win many of the contrasts, it turn into an opponent of reforms.

All in all it is highly unlikely that the Public Services White Paper will get an easy ride. The left has a huge responsibility to draw together a broad alliance to fight it and restate the need for universal public services.

Just to give one example.  On Feb 15^th Birmingham City Council announced £320 million of cuts by 2014/15 with the loss of 2500 jobs, , including £15 million of grants to voluntary organisations providing “Big Society” services to care for older people and £11 million from children services.

But at last there is growing evidence that local authorities (at least some of them) are not taking this lying down, in spite of the fact that the majority are Tory controlled.

Six local authorities (one Tory) have made a successful challenge to Gove’s decision to cut the Building Schools for the Future programme.  Plans to rebuild 58 schools abruptly cancelled by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in July 2010, will now have to be reviewed by his department.  Although Gove has the final word on the rebuilding plans (and is unlikely to reinstate them), this  challenge is a legal shot across the bows of Central Government.  The heavy handed and some say amateurish approach to shrinking the state by the Coalition, pushing responsibility for huge cuts onto local government, is now under serious legal scrutiny.

Liverpool City Council, one of four Big Society “vanguard” authorities has pulled out saying it’s a cover for cuts.

Another important development revealing the widening splits in local government  between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats was the letter from  90 Liberal Democrat councillors to the Times on Feb 10th complaining about the way that Eric Pickles, the Local Government Minister, has taken a gung ho, even celebratory approach to cuts on local government.  Though feebly supporting the Coalition cuts strategy, the Lib Dem councillors  complained that Pickles need not have done it this way (i.e. front loaded the cuts).  Even the Tory led local Government Association (LGA) has objected to front loading, and is openly critical of the fact that local government is being blamed by the Government for making cuts to the voluntary sector (the underpinning for the Big Society).

Why is local government (at last) waking up to what is happening to local services?  The sound of local protest combined with the sight of local elections just 10 weeks away on May 5^th is concentrating minds wonderfully. The elections are particularly critical for the Liberal Democrats that have a strong local government base built, ironically, upon local action, often about public services, over many years.  This base could be all but obliterated. LD strongholds are in District Councils (over 1000 councillors) and to an extent in Metropolitan Borough Councils (514 councillors) and in and Unitary Authorities (671 councillors).  Over a 1/3 of all these seats will come up or election in May.

The Liberal Democrats are particularly vulnerable to criticism that the belated Liberal Democrat protest about cuts is a cynical attempt to save seats; trying to absolve themselves of the responsibility for what is going on.

Meanwhile the Tories whose stronghold is in the County Councils in England do not come up for election in 2011.  This is significant, and might explain the front loading, since it is precisely these authorities in the shire counties that are cutting severely libraries, transport, social care and youth centres.

An indication of whether the Tory vote has been hit elsewhere will come from results in are the 36 Metropolitan Borough Council where about  1/3 of seats are coming up for election in May.  These authorities are mainly Labour controlled but Liberal Democrats and Tories have 25% of the sets each.  Also the Welsh Assembly elections that also take place in May (where the Tories currently hold 10 seats and LDs 8), will be an important indicator.

Underlying the upsurge in anger is the unequal impact of the cuts.  Recent research by the University of Newcastle for Middlesborough BC show that Northern towns and cities are taking the largest cuts for two reasons.  First they receive the largest amount of government rate support grant because they have the highest levels of deprivation and under the rate support formula they get more head.  At the same time, they receive more discretionary grant for example for regeneration which is being sharply reduced.  These authorities are squeezed as well because they are suffering the highest level of public sector job losses.

These are early days.  Many more cuts and redundancies are to come over the next 12 months.  May 5^th will be an important marker.   A key question is whether local authorities will step further off the political fence and come out fighting WITH the growing numbers of local campaigns against the cuts.  It could then get interesting.

The key policy aims of the Big Society are summarised simply by the government as ‘Empowering Communities’; ‘Opening up Public Services’; and ‘Building a stronger Civic Society’. However, the politics behind these headlines are complex, combining hard-nosed political economy with conservative idealisations of the good society. At the economic level the Big Society is part of a strategy of shrinking the state, cutting public expenditure and accelerating the out-sourcing of public services. At the social level, it aims to create an idealised world where the better off help the poor; where self help, charity and philanthropy replace public services; where neighbourhoods are run like village communities and parish councils; and where ordinary people experience freedom because there is no state bearing down on them.

The Localism Bill

The Localism Bill tackles one key ingredient of the Big Society mix, the idea that the best decisions are made locally and that local communities are best placed to decide on what services they want and how to deliver them. The contradiction underlying this for the Conservatives is that markets do not want to be constrained by local rules and regulations. They prefer uniform national regulations, and as few of them as possible. One of the clearest examples of this is the housing market where developers want freedom to build where they want, not a host of local regulations, hoops and neighbourhood consultations to pass through, increasing their costs and risks.

But in spite of misgivings in business circles, the Localism Bill is going ahead, with a raft of measures aimed at changing the relationship between central government, local authorities, and local residents. The most significant are; ending the security of tenure of social housing tenants; granting a general power of competence for Local Authorities (i.e allowing councils to use their resources in any way they want within national laws and regulations)a; creating a community right to bid for local government services; a community right to develop neighbourhood plans; a community right to build under neighbourhood development orders; a community right to buy public assets; and a right to call a referendum on local issues including the level of the council tax.

Community Rights

The community “rights” set out in the Bill are particularly interesting because the measures tap into the frustrations of many communities with local government regulations and bureaucracies, with public consultations which often appear to have no effect, and with some public services that are unresponsive to local needs. Although this is a caricature, it goes with the grain of politics. And it also taps into the sense that New Labour efforts at revitalising poor communities (through New Deal for Communities, Housing Pathfinders, and Community Asset transfer for example) had had only limited results. And where New Labour had done good things such as encouraging community land trusts, or the community right to buy scheme for land in Scotland, it was too little too late.

Local authority powers

From the point of view of local authorities faced with the need to make massive cuts, there are advantages in being able to reduce staff by out-sourcing, and transferring the costs of running community facilities such as libraries and community centres to community groups. But where local authorities stand on localism is very far from the “village green” idealisations that lie behind some of the localism rhetoric. If there is to be more “community power” it will be strictly circumscribed. Not only is there a deep reluctance to give up power, but also a scepticism that local communities have the necessary skills, or can be trusted.

For local authorities, localism creates complications, costs and political risks. They will have to enable and manage the new community rights, including entertaining tendering from a much more diverse and fragmented range of voluntary and community providers, and helping communities draw up neighbourhood plans. And they will be under a duty to regulate, manage and scrutinise the whole process. They will be the ultimate gate-keeper and accountable body. There will be legitimate demands on them to help facilitate the process with funding and staff time. This could be a political and bureaucratic quagmire, raising expectations of community power and self help to unrealistic levels. It will also be costly. Instead of the Localism Bill reducing bureaucracy and costs and increasing “freedom” for local action, an entire swathe of new bureaucracies, regulations and financial scrutineers will be created to establish and manage the system.

Limiting Community Rights

Each Right in the Bill is carefully proscribed. The example of community rights to make neighbourhood development orders and neighbourhood plans is instructive. A neighbourhood development order can give planning permission with or without conditions for development. However, the orders must be approved first by the local authority. They do not give communities the right to act outside the Local Planning Authority. Orders can be brought forward by designated bodies – parish councils in rural areas and neighbourhood forums in other areas. However, neighbourhood forums will only be recognised if they are regarded by the local authority as representative and constitutionally valid.

Similarly, neighbourhood plans can be brought forward only by designated neighbourhood forums or parish councils and the plans cannot override existing local authority plans. Even the form and content (and documentation) of neighbourhood plans will be proscribed by the Secretary of State. Both neighbourhood orders and plans must be examined by an independent inspector and then put to a local referendum. Only if the referendum is approved (and there are lots of complications to be sorted out here), will the Orders or Neighbourhood Plans go ahead.
The right of communities to bid for community assets is similarly circumscribed. Local authorities under Labour were urged to create lists of public assets (land and buildings) that could be transferred to community groups (at market value). Under the Localism Bill, there will be a community right to bid for public assets. But as under New Labour, each local authority will decide itself what is an asset of “community value”. Local groups can seek to add public land and buildings to this list but in the end the local authority will decide whether an asset is on the list or not. The critical point of principle is that the community itself will not be able to decide which assets are of “community value”.

What is striking about these examples is the strict gate keeper role of local authorities with very little opportunity for communities to side step local councils and go to national government if they think their proposals for plans, orders, asset transfer, or tendering are opposed or obstructed by their local council. This right of appeal was an important option under previous local/central arrangements. Thus, it is likely that where community rights are exercised with the approval of the local council, they will get a fair wind; but where they do not, they will go nowhere.

An opportunity for the left?

This analysis suggests that potential (within the measures of the Localism Bill) for radical community actions that aim to change or overturn local cuts or privatisation of services or housing policies of local authorities and central government will be limited. In spite of this there may be opportunities to use the new Rights to put forward alternatives to local council or government policy, including generating local referendums and drawing up “people’s plans” for disputed land and buildings.

If local authorities actively take sides with the community against central government cuts and public service reforms, exercising community Rights might be a useful way to establish local alternatives which can challenge government policy. Given that most local authorities are currently under Conservative control in England, and local government is generally very compliant, this does not sound a likely scenario in the short term. But if Conservatives (and Liberal Democrats) lose control of councils in forthcoming local elections, and the political temperature over Coalition policies rises, this may change, although by then much of the damage to local public services will have been done – with libraries, youth facilities, and care homes sold, and public services reduced.

Conclusions

At present the Bill is likely to help better off communities who are organised, have their own resources and are supported by Conservative councils. It give further strength to communities opposing new housing (particularly affordable housing) in their neighbourhoods, while it will be of much less help to hard pressed communities in both urban and rural areas fighting for social justice and against cuts in services, jobs and housing. The outcome will be increased inequality and fragmentation.

Many on the left have been arguing for years that deprived communities should have more power . But for the left “more power to local communities” means grass roots community organising and action; a quite different community politics to the top down community control that the Localism Bill will bring about. The Localism Bill encourages community power but it is strictly conditional; if local initiatives conform with Tory led policies, there will be devolution of power to local communities, albeit subject to quite stringent conditions. If communities use the Rights to challenge the policies of the local authority, the authorities have the power to simply block them. However, the complexity and contradictory nature of the Bill and its inevitable variety of application from place to place and over time, means that Localism could turn out to be more of a hostage to fortune for the Tories than they imagine.

Tory ideology can be summarised as broadly ‘anti-state’: shrinking the state, cutting investment in public services, and creating a world in which the voluntary, charity and community sectors would be encouraged to deliver as many services as possible. Most Tory-controlled councils have already outsourced youth, leisure and social care services to voluntary/community consortiums. Some community organisations welcome this, believing they can deliver services better and empower local people in a way that local authority service departments cannot.

This approach to community is not justified exclusively in small-state or free-market ideological terms. One strand of Toryism longs for community in a pastoral pre-modernist sense, another emphasises community participation, individual ‘liberty’ and freedom from government interference.

The Tory conversion to community politics marks an interesting change from its neoliberal promotion of individualism because it appears to support some degree of collective action to achieve social goals. This is significant even though that collective action is often ‘nimbyish’ (involving opposition to development in their own leafy back yards but not near poor neighbourhoods) and has a conscious political aim of using community action as a vehicle to agitate against ‘Labour’ policies, such as many of the campaigns against the proposed Eco-Towns.

In power, the Tory view of community will almost certainly be different. For example, will a local Conservative council support a community campaign against commercial development if a Tory central government is giving local authorities financial incentives to agree to developer proposals? Will a Tory central government impose nuclear power stations, airport runways and major commercial schemes if local people are opposed? From this perspective, the current Tory opposition to the third runway at Heathrow appears to be opportunist in the extreme.

New Labour’s position on communities and community empowerment is different from that of the Tories but it is also complicated and often contradictory. Until the economic crisis, Labour had no overt agenda for reducing the size of the state, although the mechanisms of the state were diversified to embrace a wide range of local and regional bodies and partnerships. This was partly to satisfy a democratic principle of devolving decision making, and was also a pragmatic response to public impatience with centrally driven politics.

Local and central government and community organisations all saw advantages in forming central/local partnerships. Many community and voluntary organisations took advantage of government and lottery funding opportunities and have engaged with the plethora of community initiatives launched by the government. Although some have reservations about being drawn into government bureaucracy and target chasing, there are few organisations in the third sector that have stood outside it all.

In his book The Future of Community (Pluto, 2008), Dave Clements argues that community has been fetishised by the Labour government, which has tried to ‘fake’ civil society by creating the illusion of community power where none exists because in reality it is entirely managed by the state. There is some truth to this in the profusion of empowerment strategies and the widespread feeling that people do not feel empowered by the measures.

Tory positioning on community empowerment has received an intellectual boost from the Tory guru of localism and community empowerment, Phillip Blond, a self styled ‘Red Tory’. He argues that both socialism and monopoly capitalism disempower working people, and the answer is free markets and community power expressed through voluntarism and community initiative. ‘Community-based problem solving will finally put an end to the bureaucratic age,’ he claims. This is music to the ears of Tories who denounce Labour’s centralised target setting culture.

Yet some of this is reminiscent of the adoption of the communitarian idea by New Labour in the 1990s. Communitarianism was promoted by an American, Amitai Etzioni, who argued that citizens had responsibilities as well as rights and that by self help and self organisation they could create a more democratic and empowering welfare state.

It is arguable, however, that, contrary to both Blond and Etzioni, the market economy works against community empowerment and local democracy because economic decisions (both private and public) are taken far away from localities and are normally not susceptible to local action alone. Moreover, rather than reduce ‘box ticking’, the community empowerment agenda has itself created a new bureaucratic age of target setters from charitable funding bodies and government departments. It has ended up ‘empowering’ large numbers of auditors, accountants and business planners instead of stimulating community organisation and action.

This may get worse. Faced with the economic crisis and plans for major cuts by Labour if it retains power, it is likely that the third sector will be called upon to take on welfare state functions in a similar way to the Tory strategy, and will become ever more drawn into the commissioning and procurement culture of government.

You have to go back to radical community thinkers and activists such as Paulo Friere and Saul Alinsky to find a different model of community action. Their community organising was open about the political aims of meeting community needs by challenging the power of the state and the market. Empowerment (measured by concessions won) was the result of intense community pressure and political organisation, sometimes involving nonviolent direct action. Power was not given but fought for.

These interventions, whether of the Alinsky kind or the citizen empowerment kind, assume that there are ‘communities’ out there, either with shared interests or neighbourhood based, that want to engage in action to defend their interests. The existence of communities of this kind is disputed by some observers. For example, Ash Amin, in an article entitled ‘The Good City’ in Soundings (2007), sees ‘irreconcilable differences’ among people rather than ‘empowered neighbourhoods’.

Asset-based community development

One UK example of community engagement that demonstrates the complexity of these politics, and the opportunities for either radicalism or disempowerment, is the so-called ‘asset-based community development’ movement. In plain language, it involves community ownership and control of land and buildings that have been transferred to or acquired by community based organisations from public authorities, charities and in some cases private estates.

Community action was a social movement making its name in part by campaigns for land and housing in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period, public and private landowners sought planning permission for commercial development or road schemes and the like, vigorously resisting demands to retain or expand lower value social housing and community uses.

Famous campaigns such as Coin Street Community Builders on the South Bank, Covent Garden Action Group and North Kensington Community Trust in London won against the odds, often with the help of a handful of sympathetic local authorities or as a result of prolonged planning battles. In Scotland, there were radical movements for community takeover of landed estates.

These campaigns were part of wider community politics in the 1970s and 1980s challenging the policies and actions of public authorities. They demanded the redistribution of power and resources in land and housing markets, and, following Alinsky, did not hide under a cloak of non-political community development.

Partly due to the success of this community politics, there was a steady growth of community-led development initiatives during the 1990s, leading to the creation of umbrella organisations such as the Development Trusts Association (DTA) and Community Land Trusts (CLTs). The government (particularly since 2003) became supportive of these ideas and encouraged initiatives with funding and policy support. In 2007, the government set up the Quirk Inquiry into asset-based community development, which came out in favour of the concept and urged the government to back it. The government then set up funding and legal mechanisms (such as the Asset Transfer Unit) to facilitate land transfer and gave funding to organisations such as the DTA.

In spite of this, many local authorities remain sceptical about the capacity of the third sector to acquire and manage assets over the long term, although local authorities are currently being invited to submit proposals to government for asset transfers to the community.

The new spirit of co-operation by government has several causes. First, it reflects the fact that the sale of local authority property assets (part of shrinking the local state) is now a major plank of government policy – and is a policy shared by the three main political parties. Second, it is part of a citizen empowerment agenda – an attempt by New Labour to reinvigorate its local base and local democracy. Third, it is a response to focused pressure from the third sector that has wide political backing.

The movement is now at a turning point. In one direction, organisations such as the DTA and CLT are demanding more transfers of public assets to the third sector at heavily discounted costs (costs being the key barrier to community ownership) and an extension to the whole of the UK of the ‘community right to buy’ scheme, which gives rural communities in Scotland a right to buy landed estates coming onto the market.

On the other hand, is the community sector playing into New Labour and Tory hands as willing partners in asset sales and reductions in direct state services? The DTA, for example, is calling for more state funding and a legal ‘infrastructure’ to make asset purchases and property management possible, but at the same time, this may entangle asset-based community development in government bureaucracy and political control.

A classic case of this dilemma is the recent invitation by Glasgow City Council to local groups to take over 11 community centres to save them from closure, with the resulting furore that this is really about cuts, with impossible conditions of transfer placed on community bidders.

Returning to the general question of whether asset-based community development is a progressive movement, it is notable that while some poor communities in the UK have a presence in the asset-based community development movement, many others do not. Is asset transfer limited to particular types of already empowered professionally assisted communities, while the majority of deprived neighbourhoods do not have this capacity?

Is there a principle of community ownership?

A key question that concentrates the mind on the politics of the new community action is whether there is an absolute right or principle of community ownership. For example, why should public authorities give up their long-term ownership of land and other assets, in principle for the public good, for the sake of potentially short-lived and parochial campaigns? Surely, local authorities should have the right to say no if they do not agree with the aims of a particular community group.

The biggest concern is that localised community provision, however successful, does not produce universal provision of jobs, housing, or social care; nor does it enable universal democratic involvement. It is patchy, partial and to a degree divisive because some areas get some benefits while others do not.

On the other hand, community action that has progressive political aims can build community confidence and solidarity. It can change the policies of the local state so that it improves its universal provision (for affordable housing for example) and can challenge power in a way that the New Labour community empowerment and Red Tory community action and voluntarism cannot.

The key test for the left about the community empowerment agenda is: what is it part of? Is it a progressive movement for justice and meeting needs, or is it essentially conservative and parochial, facilitating a reduction in welfare provision, and acting in the end an as obstacle to justice and equality?