Councils are becoming more open to let local communities take over public properties, but what are the risks - and rewards?
Custodianship of public buildings in many cities and towns is increasingly passing into the hands of co-operative trusts, as local authorities struggle to find the funds they need to maintain them.
The idea of 'asset transfer' from local councils into community ownership, encouraged by the last Labour government in its report Making Assets Work, published in 2007, has received strong endorsement from the present government. The argument is that community energy and creativity - not to mention money - can be harnessed to bring new life to public buildings which might otherwise face uncertain fates.
The idea has certainly worked in Headingley in Leeds, where much effort by local people has transformed an old primary school, unwanted by Leeds city council, into Heart, a bright modern arts and enterprise centre with community facilities and a popular drop-in café. As delegates at a recent Locality conference on community-owned civic buildings heard, it has also worked in communities as different as Toxteth in inner city Liverpool and the small Pennine town of Hebden Bridge. In both these cases underutilised Victorian-era town halls are now community owned and managed.
Lesley Jeffries, the chair of Heart's parent organisation Headingley Development Trust, talks of the five years of hard work which culminated in the successful transfer of the old school from Leeds council. The trust, an active member of both Locality and Co-operatives UK, has gone all out to attract support from different parts of its community and now has over 1,000 members, each of whom has paid £5 membership fee. As a result, Jeffries says, people have a sense of Heart being theirs. "Being a membership organisation means there is a strong feeling of belonging, which sadly people don't feel about local authorities."
She says the activities led by the development trust have enabled Headingley to rediscover a sense of community pride after a difficult period when a growth of multiple occupancy in the area, with short-term lets to student population, had seen a rise in anti-social behaviour. "Headingley has turned a corner. Although it's not out of the woods yet, it's brought back a feeling of joy. It's a nice place to live," she says.
The impetus behind successful asset transfers has so far generally come from the bottom-up, although increasingly some councils, faced with large property bills, are proactively looking to encourage the trend. The difficulty with this approach is that unsuspecting and resource-poor community groups could potentially find themselves becoming guardians of problematic buildings - not so much asset transfer as liability transfer, perhaps.
There are other important issues to address. The development of local government structures in the late 19th century provided a ready-made democratic mechanism for ownership of public buildings. Can community ownership, perhaps structured as in Headingley through a community co-operative, adequately deliver the same degree of democratic accountability?
Locality's lead officer on asset transfers Annemarie Naylor believes that it can, although she acknowledges that the risk of 'capture' of erstwhile public buildings by unrepresentative cliques does exist. Councils should be cautious, she says, of passing assets to single-interest groups or to organisations such as faith groups which may not necessarily be open to all. She praises the minority of councils in England who already have asset transfer strategies in place which explicitly have this proviso as policy. Successful asset transfer means maintaining properties for public benefit, she says.
For Jim Brown, independent co-operative consultant and an adviser to the Community Shares Unit at Co-ops UK, any organisation interested in negotiating an asset transfer has to demonstrate that it is genuinely representative of its community. "It's a question of legitimacy. If you're going to persuade the local authority that they should transfer the asset to you, you have to have a mass membership.". He adds that his recommendation to a group in south London he was advising was to try to attract as many people into membership as turn out to vote in local elections. Then, he claims, local councillors and officers would rapidly begin to pay attention.
Brown also stresses the importance of membership being open to all, the first of the seven internationally agreed co-operative principles. Although by no means all community asset transfers are to organisations which would identify themselves as part of the broad cooperative movement, Co-ops UK reports growing numbers of membership applications from community co-operatives.
A further advantage for community groups which choose to incorporate as 'bencoms', community benefit societies incorporated under the Industrial & Provident Societies Act (the legislation used by most though not all UK co-operatives), is the ability to raise capital from members in a community share issue. This was the route followed in Headingley where the development trust attracted over £100,000 in member capital, as part of the £1m capital needed to undertake the refurbishment of the old school. A similar way forward is currently being considered by another Leeds-based initiative, the Friends of Bramley Baths, who are taking over responsibility for a swimming pool in west Leeds through an asset transfer from the council at the start of 2013.
Raising money from supporters through a community share issue helps reinforce an organisation's credentials as genuinely representative. But as Jeffries makes clear, if asset transfer is to protect public buildings for the very long term, the task for co-operative organisations such as hers is to ensure that the procedures introduced at the start to ensure accountability and good governance remain effective over time. Already, she says, some people who use Heart don't know the full story of how the building was saved by community effort. "We've got to start recruiting the younger generation," she says.
Posted by Andrew Bibby
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