The Labour Party Conference once again visited the city of Liverpool this year, bringing together hundreds of politicians and organisations from across all sectors to discuss and explore a vision for a Labour Government.
In collaboration with the VS6 Partnership and Locality, VSNW held a fringe event titled “Thriving Places: Scaling up the local VCFSE role in Community Regeneration” at St Nicholas Church overlooking the River Mersey in Liverpool city centre. Our panel was made up of VCFSE sector leadership including Gill Bainbridge (Merseyside Youth Association and member of the VS6 Partnership), Tony Armstrong (Locality), Warren Escadale (VSNW) along with our event Chair Sally Yeoman, Vice Chair of VS6 and Chair of VSNW (Halton & St Helens VCA).
The purpose of our fringe event was to explore community regeneration under a Labour government, particularly the role of the VCFSE sector within building thriving and healthy communities.
It starts with children and young people
Gill Bainbridge kicked off the event from a children and young people’s perspective, with a key message of the critical need for person centred approaches with long term investment to make positive generational change. Gill believes that in order to achieve this we need to start with young people and provided a background to how today’s “austerity generation” have been left exposed to the consequences of political decisions. Particularly, children growing up in the most deprived communities have been hit the hardest. The impacts on young people of cuts to funding and closures of key community youth services, alongside the diminishment of the Every Child Matters agenda, have been exacerbated by recent COVID and cost of living crises and has overwhelmed VCFSE organisations left to pick up the pieces.
European funding was key in filling this gap in supported and, despite its bureaucratic nature, it was essential in being able to direct support to those most in need. However, the UK-Shared Prosperity Fund, the post-Brexit replacement for EU funding, has been less successful with a 40% reduction in funding for Liverpool alone creating a perfect storm of less funding but increased demand.
Gill would like to see proper long-term investment in place that is not one size fits all but instead wraps around the needs of individuals and communities. Secure 10 year funding contracts would enable organisations to properly invest in their services and communities without barriers of short term contracts, allowing the retention of key staff and forward planning. Investing in our children and young people is where we will achieve the generational change that is needed to build thriving communities across Liverpool City Region, and without this we are at risk of going round in circles.
The community empowerment revolution
Tony Armstrong shared Locality’s vision for community regeneration through a lens of hope, optimism, and ambition at a local level. Building on Gill’s previous points, Tony talked about how “the system” is fundamentally broken and how as community organisations we have the skills and knowledge necessary to develop a more sustainable, community driven system that works for everyone, not just those at the top.
Tony put forward the idea of a community empowerment revolution in which we can build sustainable food systems, develop community owned energy, provide opportunities for children and young people and eradicate health inequalities. To do this, we need to build stronger local economies, provide great locally ran public services, and decision making made locally with genuine community conversations. Tony also echoed Gill’s point around 10 year contracts, going further to state that trusted local organisations shouldn’t need to have to go through a competitive tendering process alongside private sector organisations. We are values focused organisations; therefore, we should be seen as partners, not suppliers. Similarly, it should be easier for publicly owned buildings to be owned and ran by the community, for the community.
Key pillars outlined by Tony to achieve this vision include having good local funding streams and investment for the VCFSE sector, developing good partnerships within communities that decide how the investment is allocated, community ownership of buildings and energy, and ultimately the need for local decision making powers. The full community empowerment vision will be published by Locality very soon and will contain further details on how we can work over the next 12 months to make this vision a reality.
Building the right relationships
Warren Escadale reinforced the points already made on what is needed to regenerate our communities and explored how we can work with key partners and public sector organisations to develop a well organised VCFSE sector. To do this, Warren laid out five key proposals for achieving this:
Spend better – VCFSE organisations know what works in their communities, they understand their communities better than anyone and quite often are already providing services to meet these needs. Public sector organisations need to trust in our sector, and rather than reinvent the wheel when it comes to services they should focus on increasing capacity in what we know already works, with longer term investments.
Build capacity in communities – Double devolution needs to happen to give communities more opportunity and power to make decisions for themselves.
Deliver social value – There needs to be better, more focused ways of delivering social value in communities. A community levy on public sector contracts with dedicated investment into the VCFSE sector is a critical method of being able to deliver this effectively and sustainably.
One workforce – Our problems are not siloed, so why are our workforces siloed? We need to better integrate our public sector and VCFSE sector workforces to provide more efficient services for our communities and to be able to truly adopt a person-centred approach
Nurture the VCFSE ecosystem – Any investment into the VCFSE sector must nurture our ecosystem, help it grow healthy and sustainably for the future, both at a place level and also regionally
These five are early proposals getting ready for local, mayoral and national elections in the next 12 months, and forerunners for conversations at VSNW’s annual conference on 22nd November at the Village Hotel, Warrington. ‘To book your place to attend our conference, ‘Building Wealth in our Communities’, please click here
VSNW, VS6 and Locality would like to extend our thanks to those who attended our event. We hope you found it useful, inspiring, and hope that you are able to use the conversation had to help influence your politicians and counsellors locally.
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