Why community enablement matters

Community engagement is a term local government is rapidly becoming familiar with. Here, Professor Donna Hall CBE, explains why it works and is now a necessary shift rather than a radical option.

Professor Donna Hall CBE is the former Chief Executive Officer at Wigan Council where she introduced the well-known partnership with residents called The Deal. While community engagement is now a term the whole of local government is becoming familiar with, the partnership Wigan sought to make with its residents in 2014 was then ground-breaking. Hall is currently Chair of the think-tank New Local which works with a network of around 70 local authorities which she says are all keen to “unlock community power” and also Chair of the Bolton NHS Foundation Trust which works closely with the community and voluntary sector to harness engagement.

For Hall, this way of working is what comes naturally, having always had a passion for personcentred approaches. “It works. People think ‘I haven’t got time to do all that community engagement, I’ll just do things to them’ but then you can end up doing the wrong things. We’ve got to start thinking person-centred and applying it to all aspects of transformation and policy making rather than just coming up with new projects that overlay on the existing dysfunctional system,” she explains. For Hall, it starts with listening to people with lived experience and finding out what is going wrong.

The Deal began when Wigan Council commissioned Hilary Cottam, author of Radical Help, to look at 25 families in one of the more deprived parts of Wigan and map out the interventions they’d had over a ten-year period. “We were spending around a quarter of a million per year per family and the worst thing was that at the end of the year they were in a worse position than they were at the beginning. What we had done was process them through a very fractured system and continually reassess and refer them to other bits of the system, whether it was the NHS, mental health, drug and alcohol services, criminal justice, housing. We had spent 80 per cent of our time on the assessment and referral of them, rather than building a relationship with them, finding their strengths, and building on those strengths and taking that asset-based approach that we know works.”

As part of The Deal every public servant was trained how to deeply listen to citizens and in anthropology and ethnology – the study of why people do things and how communities work. “Very often we process people in our minds before we even meet them, we think ‘I know what you need, you need a day centre or a minibus to pick you up’ without even meeting them or asking them,” Hall says.

The Deal also sought to transfer council-owned assets to the community and build a more trusting relationship with the community and voluntary sector. “A swimming club came to us and asked if they could take over a pool we were going to close. It was amazing because they knew where to target to market and how to diversify their offer to meet community need. With support they were able to make a profit where we might have made a loss for ten years,” she adds.

“We completely shifted the relationship we had with the community and voluntary sector in Wigan. We micromanaged them before The Deal for tiny amounts of money, we spent more monitoring them than we had given them and we made judgments about what we thought was needed in a local community without really asking the sector for their ideas. We would write a commission specification and get them to bid for it, but they didn’t have the skills or time because they were busy helping people in a very practical way. Then we basically turned it on its head and said we will trust you to deliver this, we will give you the money upfront and it completely changed the nature of the relationship between public services in Wigan and the community and voluntary sector and for the first time they could see that trust was there,” she says.

Community models in healthcare

Now Hall is Chair of the Bolton NHS Foundation Trust where she is working on Integrated Care Systems, which is about giving people the support they need, joined up across local councils, the NHS, and other partners. Bolton is also set to become a Local Care Trust, which delivers more integration between social care and the council, mental health and the hospital foundation trust so it acts as one team. “We have created something called the Home First team which is a team of people in the hospital whose job it is to get people home as soon as they are medically well enough and to make sure they have the help they need, whether that is home adjustments or someone helping them in a practical way, re-enablement services or connecting them into local community and voluntary groups that they might be interested in – things that will keep them socially connected and feeling like they are part of the local area. It is very much a community-based model and we work very closely with the community and voluntary sector to do this.

“We also have a lived-experience panel at the hospital and people who have had had issues with drugs and alcohol or experienced homelessness, for example, we will involve them in the design so rather than just take the complaints when we get it wrong, we really proactively upfront involve them in the service design, the commissioning specifications, working with the clinical commissioning group, the NHS foundation trust and the council so it is informed by actual lived experience,” Hall adds.

Hall believes the shift in relationship between public service bodies and its residents and the community and voluntary sector is essential. “I think the idea of unlocking the power of communities is growing and becoming a big thing. This is definitely the future of local authorities,” she concludes.