Tag Archives: big society

Stand and deliver

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve got a lot of time for the tens of thousands of people up and down the country who get involved and make a difference in their community as local councillors. That’s a lot of people, in a lot of places, doing a whole lot of stuff. I for one […]

Big Society and community organisers

A few weeks ago I attended and participated in the national conference of the Society of Local Council Clerks in Durham. We work closely with the SLCC – who are the professional body for around 8,000 local council clerks – and whose national conference is always for me a highlight of the autumn conference season. […]

Big Society #4: The importance of good governance

To quote the now infamous line during the General Election TV debates:  ‘I agree with Nick’. Except in this case it’s not Nick, it’s Rory – more specifically Rory Stewart, the new MP for Penrith and the Border and Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on local democracy. NALC is currently working with the […]

The Big Society #3: The community right to build – do we know if it will work?

The Big Society reform that has currently got lots of discussion and confusion swirling around it is the Government’s plan to introduce a ‘Community right to build’. All the ambitions sound, in both Big Society and localism terms, spot on. The big and radical idea is that if a community agrees that it wants to […]

The Big Society #2: Strengthening local leadership

Okay, so one of the things the Big Society thing revolves around is an agenda to empower communities to come together to address local issues. This is to be achieved by giving new powers and rights to neighbourhood groups, quoted by the Coalition Government as the ‘little platoons’ of civil society and the building blocks […]