BTCV Handbooks Online

Book:	Local Action
Chapter:	Effective partnerships
Section:	Working with local and regional government
Metadata:	Details	Buy this book

Local government provides a key range of contacts for your group, not only because they often own the land you want to work on. Local authorities may

provide grants,
offer support through both environmental and community departments,
provide you with permissions to make changes to your site,
influence development locally and regionally.

As local residents you can use your status as a constituent to lobby for practical environmental change.

Local authorities are organised differently all over the UK so this section is deliberately vague about titles and boundaries. If you want to know which individual or department you need to talk to in your area you will have to do a bit of local research. Use the council switchboard, they are pretty good at finding the right person normally, or try their website. If you are really stumped ask your local councillor.

Most of England and all of Scotland and Wales is now managed through unitary Authorities. They manage all your local services including parks and open spaces, footpaths and support for community groups. Some parts of England still have a two tier system of County and District Council; if this is the case then the responsibilities are divided. In some parts of the UK there are Town or Parish Councils; councillors are unpaid but they often have a paid clerk and sometimes a gardener or handyman. They levy a small precept as part of the local council tax, to be spent in their area and often make grants to projects that will benefit the local area. They can also help small environmental groups with grant applications, and are sometimes able to set aside some of their maintenance budget to help you manage your plot.

There are two ways to access the Local Authority, through officers (the employees) and through elected members (councillors). You usually start with the officers who actually run the services, but do keep your councillors informed. They can often help you out if you get stuck.

Councillors

Most local authorities are moving to a system of cabinet government where a small group of lead councillors take many of the decisions that were previously made at large council meetings, and the bulk of the other councillors focus on work within smaller groups of wards. These smaller ward groupings - often called ward forum, or neighbourhood forums - can be very important for you as they often have a delegated budget, small in council terms but large by your standards.

If you can convince your ward councillor your group's project is of value to local people the ward forum may help to fund you, often quite quickly. Councillors are very often supportive of community environmental projects because they can see you want to take positive action to improve the area, and much of their time tends to be taken up with complaints. In Wales you can also work with Welsh Assembly members, most of whom are keenly interested in positive action within their constituencies.

Officers

You will need to work with a range of council departments. There may be environmental workers of some sort who can offer you help and advice on practical things to do with your site. You might find these in Parks and Countryside, or Planning, or Leisure and Recreation, or Environmental Services - keep looking. They may have a small budget for grants. Less obviously most councils employ people called something like Community Support Workers, they are there to help groups get started - all sorts of groups, playschemes, tenants and residents groups or youth clubs. They can sometimes offer start-up grants to groups, and probably more importantly are a mine of information on all sorts of other activities in your area, other people to contact, advice on how to involve young people, translation services for minority languages, disability access specialists, halls for rent and subsidised council services. All these things will vary from place to place but it is worth finding out what help you can get.

When you have talked to these people start looking for the Healthy Walking Officers, who are promoting health walks in partnership with local Primary Care Trusts, and the Community Safety Officers who are working in areas with the police to make areas safe by improving access and lighting so people feel safe when they are out, Rights of Way Officers who are drawing up Local Transport Plans and responding to the need for safe routes to school. Even though budgets have been cut drastically over the past ten years, many councils still have sums of money they could spend on environmental work, but you need to be creative about where you look for it as there is often not much in the pot labelled "environment".

Useful local networks

Local Authorities now all have Local Plans, or Community Plans, drawn up by a series of consultations with Electors and Community Groups. Local Plans are supposed to help the council prioritise spending. They also work with networks called Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) that are made up of members of the council, elected individuals, representatives of other significant bodies like the police and local NHS Trusts, representatives of local business through members of bodies like Chambers of Commerce, and often members of subsidiary specialist Partnerships. Sometimes the other Partnership members are not voting members of the LSP but attend meetings to offer advice. The Partnerships cover a range of subjects but the two areas you should find out about are the Voluntary Sector Partnership and Environmental Partnership; they won't exist everywhere, or have the same names, but if they do you should find out about them. They are good ways to find out what is going on locally and how you can help each other. This is also the best way for you to influence the council and its spending decisions. If there are lots of groups in the Environmental Partnership saying the environment they live in is important enough for them to want to do something about it, things are far more likely to change than if groups try to act alone. The best place to find out about these is usually through the council website.

Biodiversity Networks

Many areas have biodiversity networks, often formed as a way of drawing together the information they needed to write the Local Biodiversity Action plans (see Conservation - a learning experience). You may wish to join these if your site is important for wildlife, or may want to ask their help to find out what you should do when you start managing your site.