CCPS Home » Policy » Hot Topic: New Localism

Community Planning

What is Community Planning

Community Planning is a mechanism by which public services can be responsive to and organised around the needs of communities.  According to Scottish Executive guidance, the two main aims of the process are

• Making sure people and communities are genuinely engaged in the decisions made on public services which affect them; allied to

• A commitment from organisations to work together, not apart, in providing better public services.

The process was established formally in Scotland by the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, but had been in place in some areas of Scotland for some time before this.

What does community planning look like on the ground?

Neither the 2003 Act nor the Scottish Executive guidance were prescriptive about how community planning partnerships(CPPs) should be set up.  Local authorities have a duty to establish community planning in their area, and to involve statutory partners (enterprise, health, police, fire and Strathclyde Passenger Transport) but it is up to the community planning partners what form the partnership takes.  This has resulted in a wide range of different CPP structures across the country.  Most CPPs have a strategic board at the highest level, and a number of subgroups; some have subgroups organised on a thematic basis, while others have chosen to focus these subgroups on a geographical area.  Information on relevant sub-groups in each area is available to CCPS members on the local authority pages of the CCPS website.

Is the voluntary sector involved with community planning?

The voluntary sector is not a statutory community planning partner, but the Scottish Executive guidance states that “local authorities, in their initiation and facilitation of the community planning process, should consult and cooperate with a wide range of interests including community and voluntary organisations, whether delivering services or representing a specific area or interest which may be locally based or, where appropriate, a regional or national organisation. This could include a wide range of bodies such as: young people and youth work bodies who already make a valuable contribution to the planning and provision of services through their involvement in youth forums and their active citizenship; environmental bodies, rural bodies, consumer bodies; sports and cultural bodies.”

Progress on and formats for doing this have varied across the country, with several CPPs reporting difficulty in finding a suitable vehicle for meaningful voluntary sector involvement.  Most CPPs have someone from the voluntary sector on the strategic board (generally someone from a CVS or similar) but involvement at the subgroup level is patchier. CCPS has attempted to assimilate information on current structures for voluntary sector involvement in community planning in each of the local areas; this is available to CCPS members on the local authority pages of the CCPS website.

In many cases, CCPS has been informed that these structures are subject to change, as the structure of local voluntary sector infrastructure organisations is likely to change.  The Scottish Government has asked local infrastructure bodies (CVS’, volunteer centres, social enterprise networks and social economy partnerships) to consider their structure as part of the development of local voluntary sector ‘interfaces’. Part of the brief for these local interfaces is that they should provide a linking role between the voluntary sector locally and the community planning process; special mention is made within this of the need to ensure that national voluntary organisations are able to feed in to the process.  Local areas have been asked to report on their intentions in developing an interface and, where information is available, CCPS has summarised the plans within the information on current communtiy planning structures available to CCPS members on the local authority pages of the CCPS website.

If community planning has been around since 2003, why the interest in it now?

The role of community planning has been given a boost by CPPs’ responsibility, from 2009 onwards, for the development of Single Outcome Agreements; community planning is the route through which voluntary organisations and members of the public are encouraged to get involved in the SOA process.  The jury is still out as to what impact SOAs will have on service delivery and budget allocations (some clarity might be had on this after the second set of SOAs are published in June, and CCPS will be analysing these documents), but some voluntary organisations are already eager to have an input to the process, in their roles as both service providers and campaigning organisations.  You can find out more about Single Outcome Agreements by clicking on the link at the x of this page.

So what do I do if I want to get involved?

Within your organisation, you may wish to consider

• Which CPPs you wish to get involved with
• How community planning looks in those areas
• What you wish to achieve by becoming involved, and where within those structures you can best do this
• What capacity you have within your organisation, either nationally or locally, to get involved

Information on the local authorities pages (CCPS members' only) of the CCPS website may provide a useful starting point; there you can find, copies of the first and second iterations of the SOAs, links to community planning websites and contact details for CPPs and subgroups, particularly where there is already voluntary sector involvement.