A Community Right to Manage: The Localism Bill

The Waterways Project has developed an expertise in how A Community Right to Manage could be applied to our environmental infrastructure. But the implications of such an idea are potentially far broader.

The Decentralisation and Localism Bill sets out three new ‘community rights’ which aim to enable the process of ‘decentralisation’.  The Waterways Project believes that an additional Community Right to Manage is required in order to deliver effective localism.

A Community Right to Manage has the potential to reconnect communities with their environment and support sustainable economic development.

The key new ‘rights’ set out in the Bill provide exciting new opportunities for communities.  They are described in the guidance accompanying the Bill as follows:

Community Right to Challenge – giving communities a right of challenge to run local authority services

Community Right to Buy – giving community organisations greater opportunity to identify and bid for assets of value to them, from which they can deliver existing or new services

Community Right to Build – giving local communities the power to take forward development in their area without the need to apply for planning permission

A Community Right to Manage could be considered a rationalisation and extension of two existing proposed rights:
- the right to challenge (with regard to services)
and the right to reclaim land (announced this week and specifically relating to unused land in public ownership).

It also provides a community access to assets without requiring a change of ownership as required by processes such as asset transfer or the community right to buy.

A Community Right to Manage provides a realistic mechanism through which communities can get involved in the provision of public services. Its inclusion in to the Localism Bill is thus an important step in realizing the goals of the localism agenda.

The Waterways Project hopes to engage partners who can contribute to our thinking by looking at the applicability of A Community Right to Manage to other areas of public service provision.