The term "rights" seems to be on the lips of politicians with greater frequency as each day passes. The Open Public Services white paper is littered with the word: democratic rights, the right to choose, the right to data, patient rights, parental rights, and the rights to challenge, buy and build.
On the surface, it may therefore seem as if the government is indeed concerned to furnish us with a whole raft of entitlements, with the aim of "empowering communities". However, when you consider the responsibilities of our elected representatives that are being taken away with the other hand, the one outstretched may not appear as heavily laden as it once did.
The Department of Communities and Local Government recently published its best value statutory guidance, setting out expectations of the way authorities should work with voluntary groups and small businesses when making funding decisions. At a single page, it is a model of the bureaucracy-light approach with which the government is so enamoured.
There has been a "cautious welcome" from the large representative bodies such as NAVCA and ACEVO. On the positive side, it requires authorities to consider environmental and social value alongside economic cost. It also refers to Local Compacts – agreements between authorities and the voluntary sector – and puts the three-month notice of funding decisions that is an element of the national Compact on a statutory footing.
Their caution, however, is a result of the government's stated intention to remove another piece of guidance – the 58-page Creating Strong, Safe and Prosperous Communities – and the associated duties to involve and prepare a sustainable community strategy (the duty to co-operate and local area agreements having already been withdrawn).
The duty to involve requires an authority to provide the representatives of local people with information and opportunities to have their say that go beyond consultation. What we will be left with instead is the duty to consult, which states simply that an authority must consult representatives of local people.
What this amounts to is the replacement of supposedly "bureaucratic" duties on authorities with rights for communities. Your council will no longer have to demonstrate that it understands your interests and needs, but you will have the right to make them clear by making a challenge to run a service – and enter into a procurement exercise alongside the likes of Serco and Capita. The problem is, being afforded a right isn't enough – you have to be able to exercise it for it to mean anything. This is one of the reasons that we've heard so much about free schools teaching Latin and offering training in etiquette. People who went to schools that taught Latin are more likely to be equipped to navigate the free school system, and create them in their own image.
For any right to be of use it needs to come with information, advice and guidance. To be fair, the government does seem to recognise this. The public services white paper continually mentions the role of "champions", independent groups and local authorities whose role it will be to ensure that "consumers" – not citizens – are well informed and represented.
However, the vast majority of the work of ensuring that people are in a position to exercise their rights is undertaken by not-for-profit groups. Groups that, according to NCVO, will lose almost £3bn over the next four years as a result of government funding cuts.
For example, Planning Aid England helped more than 100,000 people over three years to have a say about planning decisions. In December 2010 they received a letter from communities and local government minister Greg Clark, stating that £3.5m of funding would cease four months later. Without state funding, how are organisations going to continue providing information and representation to people – often the most vulnerable – so that they are able to exercise their rights?
I'm sure the government has faith that "social enterprise" will fill the gaps, but many of these services are simply never going to be profitable. Which is why the "social enterprise" model is so questionable. I heard of one recently that makes a profit from providing breakfast to schoolchildren who don't have it at home. I thought, who pays? It can't be the parent or the child, that simply wouldn't make sense. It must be the school, which is funded by the state. How is that different to a state-funded charity?
It is therefore unclear who is going to ensure that we are able to exercise the newly bestowed rights the government is so eager to hand us. The other "champion" it suggested was local authorities themselves, but if they're the ones cutting services in the first place, will they consider it their duty to help us oppose them?
Dan Sumners has been a policy officer in the not-for-profit sector for seven years. He blogs about politics, philosophy and writing. Views expressed here are in a personal capacity
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