Labour’s plans to protect public services in Lambeth

By Cllr Steve Reed

The Labour Government and Conservative and Lib Dem parties nationally have signalled significant cuts in public spending after the general election. The cuts facing local councils could be greater than 20% overall, despite some health and education services being protected. This means all councils are looking at how they can deliver services differently in future – either by reducing the cost, charging more, rationing services only to the most needy, or closing services down.

The Tories in Barnet have come up with a plan to offer no-frills public services along the lines of budget airlines like Ryanair. What that means is minimal or sub-standard services offered to most people with better services only available to people wealthy enough to pay more for them.

That kind of two-tier, pay-twice Tory model is unacceptable to a progressive Labour council like Lambeth. We are developing a different model that aims to protect high quality affordable services for everyone. We want to achieve this by empowering the community with more involvement in delivering some public services.

Lambeth’s Labour council has already been pursuing this community agenda since 2006. We have opened the country’s first – and so far only – parent-promoted secondary school, a community-led alternative to an academy. We have more tenant-managed estates, a cooperative model, than any other local authority. We are leading nationally on the personalisation of care budgets, handing control to care users. We are working towards the country’s biggest asset transfer by setting up a community trust to take control of the Old Lilian Baylis school site in Kennington and run it as a community sport and youth hub. We run some cutting edge environmental programmes that give tools to local communities to transform blighted public spaces and promote sustainable living. And with Coin Street Community Builders on the South Bank, Lambeth is home to one of the country’s biggest and most successful cooperatives.

Reductions in funding mean we need to drive this agenda forward even faster. What’s common to all these initiatives is that citizens take control. The model draws on the cooperative values of fairness, accountability and responsibility so we are calling the model the ‘cooperative council’. It’s these underlying values that will be key to shaping a new settlement between the citizen and public services that will help protect frontline provision.

Cabinet Office minister Tessa Jowell has been advocating a role for modern mutuals within a reshaped public sector and, as a Lambeth MP, she has been hugely supportive of our work locally. It goes without saying that cooperatives and other models of mutual provision have a long and proud tradition in the history of the Labour movement.

We believe this cooperative model will protect frontline services from cuts that would otherwise result from central government funding cuts. It works by empowering citizens and communities to take more responsibility for running some services themselves, freeing up resources to guarantee services for the most vulnerable. In some cases that means allowing people to set up cooperatives to run local services, in others it means giving the community the tools they need to do the job. That not only saves money, it helps build stronger communities, local leadership, and more flexible services that meet local needs.

Lambeth will consult our public-sector partners about our plans in March. We will also set up a Citizens’ Commission to involve residents and service users in discussions about this new way of delivering public services. The Commission will report back in April. If Labour wins the council elections in May we will finalise agreements with partners by July so we can launch Lambeth as Britain’s first co-operative council in August.

The Commission will explore a range of ideas and ways of taking things forward. These are not set in stone, but may include:

* An ‘active citizens’ dividend’ that could reward residents who are involved with organisations that help deliver community-based services with a council tax rebate.

* Neighbourhood cooperatives – allowing residents in a given ward or neighbourhood to run local community facilities.

* Citizen-led services – allowing service users or local residents to ballot on turning certain local services into local cooperatives, such as children’s centres or youth centres.

* Supporting more housing cooperatives under residents’ control and ownership.

It is clear that all council services – indeed all public services – will face spending cuts over the next few years. Tory councils like Barnet or Hammersmith and Fulham are using this as an opportunity to sell assets, cut services and make quality services available only to those wealthy enough to pay for them. Conversely, Labour in Lambeth is developing a progressive alternative that seeks to shape a new settlement between the citizen and public services, championing public ownership instead of privatisation but without the dead hand of old-style statism.

By empowering communities and service users and offering them more responsibility we can protect frontline services and build stronger and more cohesive communities at the same time. It’s a response anchored in the traditional Labour values of cooperation and mutualism that offers a chance to reshape public services for the better.

Steve Reed is Leader of the Labour Council in Lambeth.