Leading Sheffield councillor calls for more ‘citizen control’ on decision-making

Coun Fran Belbin, who chairs the council’s governance committee, said: “It’s obviously a sensitive issue. There are lots of pieces of work we’ve found ourselves apologising for or looking back and clearly seeing things going wrong.

“Nine out of 10 times there was a lack of involvement at an earlier stage.”

She said that changing the way the council works is a vital piece of modernisation: “I think we do need a whole council approach. We’ve got some really good work happening.”

Coun Belbin referred to the People Keeping Well partnership, which brings the council together with the NHS and voluntary sector groups. Community-based support works alongside people to prevent and delay them needing to access health and social care services.

She said that the council and NHS are working increasingly with large and small community groups, including funding their work. “They have a far better reach with communities and tend to have a far better understanding.

Partnership

“It is a way of working that is far more attractive and engaging.”

City Goals is a major project that the council has initiated, bringing together a partnership to look at how to shape the future of Sheffield.

Coun Belbin said: “It’s not just the usual suspects doing some goals and a bit of consultation and a bit of feedback, it’s a well-led and organised piece of work.

“Collaborative conversations took place in communities, led by Voluntary Action Sheffield, in order for community groups to facilitate conversations. It focused on seldom-heard groups, not just those who shout loudest and feel confident.

“It got to quite a different place because of that. They (the goals) already feel as if they have been strongly influenced by groups who wouldn’t take part in those conversations.”

Recently the Burton Street Foundation, a Hillsborough-based organisation that supports people with disabilities and does other community outreach work, took part in a City Goals conversation at its base that also involved Madina Mosque and Sheffield Poverty Truth Commission. It was led by Martin McKervey from Sheffield Property Association.

Impact

Coun Belbin said: “It brought three different groups of people together and produced quite different conversations to what we’d have.”

Pitsmoor Adventure Playground also led a discussion about what Sheffield could do for the next generation. Coun Belbin said: “We need young people’s voices in there. So often we’re making decisions that will have the biggest impact on them – changes five to 10 years down the line.”

An online survey about City Goals that ran on the website www.sheffieldcitygoals.uk had more than 1,500 responses.

Coun Belbin concedes that many people think consultation is a waste of time as issues under discussion are generally a done deal anyway, which is why she is keen that the council talks to people earlier in order to help shape decisions as well as respond to council plans.

This is particularly important when people may have to make changes to their behaviours.

She said that type of approach could have avoided many problems around difficult issues such as those that have arisen in Hillsborough and Graves Parks, as well as the low-traffic neighbourhood schemes.

Power

The council is speaking far more now about co-producing and co-designing projects with communities involved from the start.

Coun Belbin is also keen on the idea of increasing citizen control – “giving power up and putting it in the hands of citizens”. She said the council will increasingly use the whole spectrum of ways of involving people on different issues, it’s a case of deciding what is most appropriate for each situation.

Communities will get more power to commission services that they need, working alongside the council.

Inevitably, that means changing the whole culture of the way the council works and getting officers to understand how that affects the way they work.

Rather than just getting a pot of money from the government to deliver services, councils have to put forward bids to fund big projects and these determine how money can be spent and when it must be spent by.

Coun Belbin said: “Often they are working within really restricted parameters, putting in funding bids in limited circumstances that have to be spent in a matter of time. That affects how much involvement you can do.

“Part of that is people we are working with understanding that. If we are sharing that information, citizens can help with conversations.

“We’ve got to move away from a paternalistic way of doing things for people to doing things with people. We are stuck in a way of the council doing it all and people voting for us.

Essential

“It isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential.”

She added: “People are already litter picking on the streets, looking after parks. They need to have a say in how services work, bringing in a lot of valuable experience and lived experience.”

As someone with a background in the community sector, Coun Belbin said she knows how much experience and expertise is out there.

“Quite often, it feels as though they are shut out of these decisions. There’s possibly more expertise in the community than in the council.”

She said that is where commissioning other groups to deliver services makes sense, especially at a time where council budgets are increasingly stretched. Coun Belbin said that the council must understand that community sector groups need funding in order to survive.

The sector can also help to tailor services to different communities – for example, a family from the city Somali community will have a different set-up than a white British family.

Experience

“Specialist knowledge comes from lived experience,” she said. “In youth services, really successful youth organisations often grow out of the communities they serve. They have a really good understanding of those communities.”

Coun Belbin also wants to commission organisations such as the charity Involve, which did some engagement work with communities. It found that people do want to become involved with council projects, being listened to rather than being presented with a ready-designed scheme.

She said: “That report was done 18 months ago. I’ve been asking to see it. I’ve been really keen to get it to the committee, people have been talking about this stuff for the last couple of years of the governance committee.”

Coun Belbin said that it is a key piece of work helping to point the way forward for the council.

The authority has been making changes to its committee system since the city referendum last year voted to get rid of the cabinet system in order to involve all 84 councillors in more decision-making.

She stressed: “What we do in the Town Hall isn’t the be-all and end-all of what’s happening in Sheffield. We need to be a lot more involved in what’s happening in our communities.”

The city’s six local area committees (LACs) are meant to be one way of bridging that gap between the council and its citizens but Coun Belbin said it mustn’t end there.

The LACs are just one part of the bigger picture.

The point is to convince Sheffielders that they can trust the council to deliver on such ambitious promises: “Every time you put a survey out, people say ‘what’s the point, they’ll just do what they want to do anyway’,” said Coun Belbin.

“We’ve done consultations where really it doesn’t feel like a real consultation – the money is already allocated, it just feels really shallow.”