We invited districts to our recent June round of area forums (except West Suffolk who held a parish liaison meeting which we promoted to encourage attendance, and sent a SALC Board representative that enabled us to make some online notes and promote to our members.
On the topic of LGR and Devolution we have created 10 blog/news articles which have attracted 6,749 views. Our area forums (March and June) have had reasonable attendance and the notes/recordings have had 3,470 views.
We have had 230 views of our Local Councillor magazine which has features on LGR and devolution too.
In early April we issued a survey to establish some information and start to identify and gather some data sets that we wanted to use as part of our engagement with stakeholder activities. We had 72 people complete the survey which is under 20% of our membership.
How familiar are you with the concept of DEVOLUTION and a joint Mayor for Norfolk and Suffolk?
How familiar are you with the concept of local government re-organisation (LGR)?
Are you aware of the initial plans/ideas that have been submitted to government by district, borough and county councils in Suffolk
In relation to our online briefings designed to help explain the changes that are happening, we asked if it would be useful to have more of these. NB: we did have more online briefings in June.
82% said yes
18.% said no
We also asked if you thought these reforms would benefit communities - around 9% said yes, 34% said not, 22% did not know and 35% said it was too early to comment.
In relation to transfer of assets or services:
the types of services and assets included grass and verge cutting/sign maintenance, car parks, environmental management, land. One commented more input in planning decisions.
the type of support was dominated by financial impact followed by training, administrative support. One highlighted that councils should ensure they check with what their community wants - asking them do we want to take this on?
barriers highlighted cost again with concern about raising the precept, but also capacity and in particular for smaller councils, some of whom are not keen to take on more services or assets concerned they might get lost in all this change. There was also mention of lack of enthusiasm to do more and also councillor confidence being exposed to greater commitments.
There were various open-ended questions and these are shared below.
Opportunities reform could bring - read open ended answers here
Concerns about reform - read open ended answers here
Working with SALC - read open ended answers here
General further comments - read open ended answers here
We are passing this information onto districts, borough and county councils so that it is included in their engagement activities. Thank you to everyone who took the time to provide this information.
In relation to the data that we collected which included staffing, precept, assets, services, policies, vacancies - we are adding this to our CRM system and will then see how we can resource plugging the gaps so we have a complete data set. The challenge will then be to keep this up to date via clerks/officers. The advantage of having this data means we can provide information to relevant groups instead of across the whole sector. For example - those who have not adopted the LGA Cllr. Code of Conduct or those who own playgrounds, village greens etc.,