‘The Community Empowerment Bill is quietly shifting power from Westminster to local people’

This week, the government will pass the most radical piece of legislation you’ve never heard of. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill represents the biggest shift of power from government to communities in a generation. It embeds bold new ownership rights for communities, giving them unprecedented opportunities to take over buildings in their local areas. Sitting alongside a wider agenda of empowerment across government, the Bill represents a historic moment for community power and its potential to change communities across the country.

We know how badly this is needed. Communities have been hollowed out by decades of austerity and cuts to local authority funding. The past decade has seen thousands of community centres, youth clubs, libraries, pubs and leisure centres close their doors. It should be no surprise that official statistics measuring our collective sense of community are in decline – the building blocks that make up a community in so many places no longer exist. Our communities feel disconnected from one another because the very places designed to bring us together have disappeared from under us.

Ownership has sometimes become a side issue in politics, but it shouldn’t be. Who owns determines who decides; power follows ownership. And for decades, ownership in Britain has become more distant, more concentrated and less accountable. The result is an economy that too often works for someone else somewhere else, and a politics that feels similarly remote. Meanwhile, there are political forces seeking to pull our communities apart, but the issue is not who lives next door to us, but who owns our economy, who owns our assets and who has control in our communities. 

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The Community Right to Buy shifts that balance. It introduces a genuine first right of refusal for community groups when assets of community value – pubs, swimming pools, parks, libraries, youth clubs – are at risk of closure and come up for sale, meaning that communities effectively get first dibs before any private buyer. Crucially, it ensures those assets are sold at a fair price set independently, and gives communities a realistic 12 months to raise the funds to buy them. It effectively blocks the private market from buying up local assets until community ownership has been fulsomely explored.

With the passing into law of this new right, we could begin to build an infrastructure of community empowerment, across government and across the country. The government has already made important strides in other areas; the biggest expansion in support for community-owned energy in history through the Local Power Plan and work happening to enable the doubling in size of the co-operative sector are two examples. But there is so much more we could do. The government could choose to use every lever available to push power out of Whitehall and into communities, embedding community ownership not only of local assets but of energy, business, housing, agriculture and more.

The prize of getting this right is great. Through our Community Britain campaign, we’ve been lucky enough to speak to community-owned projects of all kinds in every part of the country. What they all have in common is bringing people together around shared ownership and shared responsibility. They’ve united neighbours across divides, they’ve solved serious local problems together and they’ve fought to make their local areas better. And they all agree that sharing power and ownership is the key to unlocking stronger, healthier and happier communities.

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These projects and these people are the antidote to a dominant political narrative of division and distrust. They’ve not waited for a government to come along and give them permission to change their communities, but creating a more supportive and enabling environment for community ownership to grow and thrive will still make all the difference. 

That’s why passing this law is the beginning of this story and not the end. Unleashing community power in every part of our country will require further political will and action, and crucially development support to ensure that community groups who want to realise their new rights are supported to do so. The co-operative movement has been making the case for community power for a century – we’ve made an important stride forward this week, but there will be much more to come.

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