Community anchors
NAVCA welcomes the Government's proposals on community anchors,
although we do so with reservations. It is, for example,
unrealistic to expect that there will be sufficient investment to
achieve anything like England-wide coverage. For this reason
community anchors will remain an aspiration for most neighbourhoods
and parishes in England.
Community anchors can deliver community development and the
involvement of local people and community groups in neighbourhood
affairs. However, community anchors in neighbourhoods will not
deliver this across a city or a county and will need to be linked
across the area if they are to feed into local governance
structures. NAVCA believes that strong and high performing local
infrastructure organisations are essential to linking community
anchors across a local authority area and achieving sector
engagement in the local area agreement and the local strategic
partnership. Indeed, in some places the LIO is also a community
anchor; this is especially true of smaller urban areas.
We are concerned at the Government's emphasis on asset development
and enterprise as a means to sustainability. We believe that,
whilst earned income ought to be a key element of any third sector
organisation's business plan, it is unrealistic, not to say
simplistic, to expect them to generate all their own income through
trading and the use of capital assets. In many instances community
anchors will need revenue support; for this reason we reject the
language of grant dependency and contend that the use of grant in
support of local community action is as important as income
generation - a view shared by local authorities.
Community anchors must be assessed so that they are clearly
accountable to local people and not self-appointed bodies. It is
essential, for example, that the constitution supports the election
of local people to the governing board.
In some circumstances LIOs provide community anchors. In
Scarborough, North Yorkshire, for example, Coast & Moors
Voluntary Action (CMVA) has, for many years, been active in
disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Scarborough, Whitby and Filey,
latterly as part of a wider regeneration team with the borough
council. Resident participation has been at the heart of the work
of CMVA and, as a result of its advocacy work, it has become seen
as a community anchor organisation. For the past five years CMVA
has been working with the local community on the east side of
Whitby to plan a new £1.5m mixed-use community building, which will
open in 2008. In the autumn of this year, CMVA will open a
community café on the Eastfield housing estate, which will provide
a meeting place for residents as well as training opportunities for
local young people in partnership with the school. This follows
intensive work to engage residents in planning the future of
Eastfield over several years, most recently the ongoing Community
Action Planning in Eastfield programme to look at possible
community gains from a proposed new 900-home housing development
adjacent to the current estate.
The policy positions on this page have been approved by the NAVCA
Trustee Board.