I've just responded to Edward Andersson's blog on the Red Tape Challenge proposals to repeal the Duty to Involve with a legally naive, but socially optimistic suggestion that incorporates equality considerations and meaningful deliberative involvement. It's here. What do people on Empowerment Works think?
It's also worth mentioning that the Equality Act is one of those up for consideration under the Red Tape Challenge. If you feel moved to comment on that, you can do so here.
Empowerment Works is a movement of people and organisations committed to building support for community empowerment in the South West and beyond. For more information please visit the Empowering Communities website.
There's an interesting discussion on the scrapping of the Duty to Involve at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/local-government-network/2011/apr/20/discussion-is-scrapping-duty-to-involve-a-good-idea?INTCMP=SRCH
Also Tim Hughes from Involve has posted a very good collection of links about the Duty to Involve, it's here: http://bit.ly/hmG6fA
I've just posted this comment on Edward Anderson's blog:
ReplyDeleteI don’t know so much about the how the Duty to Involve has/hasn’t been implemented, but certainly the duties to promote equality have been very very useful in terms of increasing involvement of equalities groups, and I agree with Michelle that the relationship between these duties is interesting.
The equality duties themselves provided a requirement to consult or involve equality groups in decisions that affected them. This was particularly strong in the disability duty which specified ‘involvement’ over ‘consultation’, though this emphasis was lost when the three separate equality duties were combined in the Equality Act last year.
There has been a legal challenge around involvement using the equality duties. In 2009 Southall Black Sisters took Ealing Council to court over its decision to cut funding for specialist BME domestic violence services. Part of the case hinged on the fact that Ealing Council carried out consultation on an equality impact assessment after the decision had been taken. This meant the consultation was meaningless, and the judge’s statement describes it as ‘a clear error’. Read more about the case at http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/savesbs.htm
See also this guide about the equality duties which includes a section on consultation
http://www.nationalequalitypartnership.org/index.php/keeping-it-legal/
On a separate note I saw this interesting article on the False Economy blog about the removal of duties more generally. http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/the-governments-silent-bonfire-of-the-safeguards
Awareness of the Duty to Involve is pretty low amongst voluntary organisations and we can't see much evidence of its impact, but I was chatting to a local authority officer with responsiblity for working with the voluntary sector he offered another perspective I hadn't heard before. He said that it has been a really useful tool for him to use internally within the local authority to push for community involvement on particular initiatives. It might not be obvious to those outside the authority that involvement was because of the Duty, but he felt it had really changed practice.
ReplyDeleteToby Blume has just written a blog defending the Duty to Involve:
http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/whitehall-watch-blog/reaction-to-plans-to-repeal-the-duty-to-involve