BID: Empowering residents within housing estates to adopt sustainable behaviours
- February 2024
Social Return on Local Council Provision
Creating an effective measurement tool
Principles met
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Community leadership and a new role for councillors
We will explore ways for councils to act as a platform for helping the community to contribute to local outcomes, and to re-think the role of councillors as community connectors, brokers and leaders. -
Democratic engagement
We will support the active engagement of the full range of residents in decision making and priority setting. -
Innovation
We will embrace innovation in how we work with local communities to drive positive change. -
Learning
We will capture and ‘expand’ the experience and learning from individual projects and approaches in order to encourage broader application of co-operative principles within individual member Councils and across the Network. -
New models of meeting priority needs
In exploring new ways of meeting the priority needs of our communities we will encourage models, such as co-operatives and mutuals, which give greater influence and voice to staff and users. in designing and commissioning public services and in determining the use of public resources.
About the project
This paper looks at how Woughton Community Council are working to find a simple, technology-driven solution to assessing the wider social value of their services, addressing its purpose, challenges and achievements so far.
Local councils (town, parish and community councils) are the tier of government closest to the people. With over 10,000 local councils in England and around 100,000 councillors elected, the sector is a significant and increasing player in the delivery of essential local services and support.
Traditionally, this tier of government has been responsible for things such as allotments, dog bins and churchyards. As principal authorities have faced reductions in funding and in turn, cuts to frontline services, we have seen the local council sector step in to provide a far wider range of support. In Woughton, a wide range of services are provided that would fall under the umbrella of ‘social’ services or support; youth, community food projects, a wellbeing service.
This CCIN supported policy prototype aimed to develop ways of gathering data and then creating a technology based tool to deliver social values for services, with a longer-term aim to ‘personalise’ this, to allow other local councils to tweak the tool to evaluate their services.
