Shadow Social Justice Minister and North Wales MS Mark Isherwood has challenged the First Minister today over reports highlighting the need for community empowerment to be strengthened in Wales.
Questioning Mark Drakeford in this afternoon’s meeting of the Welsh Parliament over Welsh Government policy regarding community empowerment, Mr Isherwood referred to a number of reports highlighting Wales’s weaknesses in this department, including one which found that Welsh communities are the least empowered in Britain.
Calling on the First Minister to respond, he said:
“As I've repeatedly stated here since the UK Localism Act 2011, the Welsh Government has proven strangely averse to implementing its Community Rights Agenda. And although the well-being objectives in the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 include people contributing to their community, being informed, included and listened to, too often this hasn't happened because it's not been monitored, because people in power don't want to share it or to understand that this would create more efficient and effective services.
“ January's Wales Co-operative Centre discussion paper, 'Communities Creating Homes', states ‘Wales is trailing other nations in the UK when it comes to community ownership rights’, adding that the policies in Wales do not offer ‘quite the same empowerment as enjoyed by communities in England or, particularly, Scotland, as they either focus solely on assets and facilities owned by public bodies or necessitate the direct involvement of a public body to implement the power’. And the Institute of Welsh Affairs's recent 'Our Land: Communities and Land Use' report ‘found that Welsh communities are the least empowered in Britain’, and community groups in Wales told them ‘about an arbitrary, demoralising scenario with little real process for communities to take ownership of public or private assets’.
“How do you therefore respond to calls in both these new reports for the Welsh Government to strengthen community empowerment and ownership rights?”
In his response the First Minister said he “does not agree with some of the points that are made in some of those reports.”
He added:
“See, this is where he and I differ. His view of community empowerment is simply to hand things over to somebody else. Our view of it is that a partnership arrangement with the help of a public body can continue to be available to groups who, in taking on the running or the management of community assets, need to have - this is one of the conclusions of the report that we instigated into community asset transfer - the continued interest and engagement of a public authority able to help them with what are sometimes onerous things that are taken on.
“And where this is done well, as, for example, in Labour-controlled Flintshire County Council in the Member's own area, you have a council that publishes a register of all potential asset transfers, gives information about the current level of expenditure, the usage and the occupancy rates, has an app that provides a potential community group with an up-to-date condition survey. That is the sort of community empowerment that I think we talk about and mean here in Wales.”
Speaking afterwards, Mr Isherwood added:
“So everyone else is wrong and only he is right. This is dangerous. As he chose to mention Flintshire, I only wish I didn’t receive so much casework from constituents in Flintshire stating that their statutory rights to be included and listened to are being ignored.”