I grew up and still live in Blakelaw, Newcastle upon Tyne, which is the inner city ward I represent as a councillor. There is no finer place on earth, but our community is struggling. Government cuts to Newcastle council’s budget have decimated our public services and communities like ours are among the hardest hit.
The housing estate
In Blakelaw we have taken matters into our own hands. It all started in the run up to the May 2012 local elections, while I was canvassing to be elected as a councillor. I helped to campaign for a resident-led redesign of the 165 housing estate in Blakelaw, which had long been blighted with problems of antisocial behaviour and low level crime. Many of its problems were the fault of its 1960s design – a grid pattern of concrete blocks without communal spaces but with “rat runs” that are typically difficult to police.
I feared that unless we worked out how to improve it, the estate would be bought up by a private developer, flattened, and turned into private flats that the current residents would not be able to afford.
Residents and councillors came together to form the Blakelaw ward community partnership, a charity to build and support strong and sustainable public services, social enterprise, new jobs and resilient communities. Assisted by a £10,000 grant from the Design Council, the partnership came up with a plan to fix some of the estates’s issues, and we persuaded the council to spend £2m to implement it.
Community activities
Redesigning the housing estate was just the beginning of our social revolution. With the support of the Blakelaw and North Fenham community council, two local primary schools, social housing provider Your Homes Newcastle and many other partners, we have been able to deliver some remarkable results.
We have projects to support young residents, including a code club to teach computer programming to the next generation. We have activities for older residents, a local creche, environmental services to support the council, apprenticeships and community allotments. We also have gardening schemes, a community cafe and a project led by local charity, Hearts with Goals, to install defibrillators into every public building in the ward.
All are delivered as public services for public benefit. This is not David Cameron’s big society, which demands that people do something for nothing; this is about building sustainable public services that meet local need.
The library
Three years ago it was announced that our much-loved local library would close due to coalition government cuts. The Blakelaw partnership negotiated with the council to keep the library open while we worked on plans to fund it. We had already taken over the running of our local community centre, next door to the library. After redesigning the centre, reinvigorating it with new services and activities to better serve our community, we were able to rent out some office spaces and use the proceeds to fund the library.
The post office
Things are about to get even more exciting. Two years ago our local post office – located in an area densely populated by elderly people – was under threat of closure. The current postmaster, who runs the post office out of his small newsagents shop, wanted to retire. It was therefore necessary to move the Blakelaw branch – but initial plans placed it well out of reach of residents, many of whom rely heavily on the post office for pensions payments, for example. We campaigned with local residents to keep our post office local, and succeeded with the support of our MP Chi Onwurah.
The next step was to work out where to put it. By January 2016 it will be relocated in our community centre and library. But we also wanted to overturn the post office model, where profits flow into the pockets of the owner. So, over the past two years, we have also developed a plan to bring our post office into public ownership. The Blakelaw partnership charity, of which every resident of the ward is a member, will run the post office and plough the profits into public services for the community.
And we aren’t finished yet. We are exploring other social enterprises and opportunities to protect Blakelaw ward residents from the savage cuts being imposed on local council budgets. Our community has engaged in a peaceful revolution by embracing the awesome power of taking matters into our own hands and just doing stuff.
It has been difficult at times: getting the council to agree to stump up the capital funding; convincing people of the benefits of such a radically new way of working; democratising decision making. But this is sink or swim time for local communities. If we don’t work in this way, everything will be decimated by cuts and we will end up with nothing. The housing estates, the library, the post office – all these things would have gone.
Our socialist post office is a model we hope will inspire other communities to act in peaceful defiance of a government obsessed with austerity. There is another way, and it’s called socialism: we can achieve more as a community than we ever could alone.
David Stockdale is a Labour councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne representing Blakelaw ward. He tweets at @DavidStockdale
Sign up here for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday. Follow us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic
