Social Inclusion - Opening the door to a better Scotland

7. Building stronger communities

7.1 Strong communities are vital to an inclusive society. Strong communities provide a bulwark against the development of social exclusion in individuals and families. Conversely, in some communities the problems of exclusion can become concentrated in a cycle of deprivation, and where this happens the lives of everyone in that community will be diminished.

7.2 Communities across Scotland can be made stronger by effective action on issues like housing, transport and community safety. Excluded communities need to be 'brought back' through effective, comprehensive regeneration based on community engagement and empowerment.

7.3 What are the characteristics of a strong community? First, its infrastructure will be sound: people will live in decent homes, streets and lighting will be looked after, there will be opportunities to find work, to learn, to shop or to have fun within the community, but there will also be good, affordable transport links with other places where work and other opportunities can be found. People will be proud of their community, and will have chances to take part in representing the community or in other community or voluntary activities. The community's schools will be good, improving, and respected. There will be good childcare and pre-school education provision.

7.4 Not everyone may be able to say that they are 'full participants in society'; but support will be available for those who are not and the causes of any individual's exclusion will be recognised and addressed. Crime will be seen as the exception rather than the rule; the police and the community will work together to tackle it. The various agencies responsible for providing services to the community will have a shared view of the community's needs, which will fully reflect the view of the community; and they will work together to serve those needs. This might all be summed up by saying that living in a community should promote the inclusion of its people, rather than acting against it.

7.5 This section looks first at what can help make a community - any community - stronger. It then turns to the specific problems of deprived communities, and considers how these can best be tackled. (The issue of community planning is dealt with in the next section - the social inclusion strategy.)

Housing

7.6 A decent, secure and affordable home is essential to the well-being of every household in Scotland. The quality of homes in which people live can have a real effect on their health, and on their education and employment prospects: but too many people live in homes which are damp, poorly heated and inadequately insulated, or are inadequate for those with special needs. The Government is committed to addressing the inadequacies of Scotland's housing and to this end has allocated £488m in 1998/99 for housing expenditure through local authorities and through Scottish Homes. Scottish Homes is responsible for funding the provision of housing for rent and for low-cost owner occupation, and in particular for supporting and assisting the development of the housing association and co-operative movement. There are many examples in Scotland of new developments, based around the involvement of residents in managing the housing, where major improvements have been made. It is also the case that people who become involved in managing their own housing often find it an 'including' experience in itself, and are then able to build on that experience to participate more widely in community life. The Scottish community-based housing association movement is a prime example of what can be achieved through the empowerment of local people.

7.7 The New Housing Partnerships initiative is fundamental to the provision of good quality affordable socially rented housing in Scotland. The main aims of the initiative are to give tenants greater control in the ownership and management of their houses, and to supplement public sector investment with private sector finance to accelerate the repair and modernisation of properties which are currently in council ownership. Some £45m has already been allocated to councils to develop New Housing Partnerships in the years 1997-98 and 1998-99. Additional resources amounting to £278m over the 3-year period 1999-2002 have recently been allocated.

7.8 Because of its value in promoting community involvement, as well as for the direct benefit to housing services, the Government is also promoting tenant participation; a Working Group on Tenant Participation was established in 1998. The Group published a draft of its National Tenant Participation Strategy for consultation in October 1998: it identifies principles, sets goals and standards and it is hoped that it will help establish a consensus to shape policy and practice in this important area at a national and local level.

7.9 Some households cannot afford to keep their home warm when they need to: fuel poverty. Fuel poverty is linked to cold, damp and mould in housing, which in turn is associated with poor health such as asthma in children and cardiovascular complaints in the elderly. Some households will be taken out of fuel poverty if members of the family find work and household income rises. But the economically inactive, such as pensioners, need help if their living conditions are to be improved.

7.10 Fuel poverty can be tackled permanently by works to improve energy efficiency. Help is available for low income families across all sectors of the stock through the Home Energy Efficiency Scheme and the 'Warm Deal.' Both provide a package of cost-effective insulation measures which will reduce fuel bills and improve comfort. The 'Warm Deal' is linked to the Government's New Deal: long-term jobless people are taken on to install the insulation measures, and are provided with work experience and training opportunities to help them find permanent employment. The combined annual budget for the two schemes is £12m, and since 1991 about 270,000 homes have been insulated. Almost 200 places have been created for the long-term unemployed.

Transport

7.11 The sustainability of a community will also depend on access to good transport links, particularly by bus, and particularly with sites where jobs are available. The Government White Paper on Integrated Transport in Scotland, 'Travel Choices for Scotland', sets out the Government's strategy for achieving a sustainable, effective and integrated transport system appropriate for the needs of Scotland's people, environment and economy. Central to the new approach will be the preparation of Local Transport Strategies by local authorities to address the transport needs of all their citizens, including the 'transport poor', in a co-ordinated way. Funding will be made available through the Scottish Public Transport Fund; local authorities are due to prepare interim strategies by July 1999, and full strategies by July 2000.

7.12 Bus services are the most practicable and most widely available alternative to the car. The Government proposes to legislate to make it easier for local authorities and the bus industry to collaborate through 'Quality Partnerships' to provide better and more attractive bus services. The partnership concept can be extended to improve the accessibility of deprived communities and groups, building on existing promising initiatives by transport operators. For example, some public transport operators offer discounted travel for participants in the New Deal. A number of bus operators have also piloted 'cheap and cheerful' services to deprived communities which have hitherto been poorly served by conventional bus services.

7.13 Funding is being targeted at helping people living in rural areas, where viable alternatives to the car are frequently non-existent or inadequate. The 3-year package of support announced in the 1998 Budget comprises each year £3.5m for subsidising public transport services, £0.6m for funding community transport projects and £0.4m to assist the survival of independent rural petrol stations.

7.14 The Transport White Paper also announced that the Government will be working with CoSLA and transport operators to develop a Scottish national concessionary fares scheme for blind people. Consideration will also be given to the special needs of disabled people and those travelling with children.

Community safety and anti-social behaviour

7.15 Strong communities also need to feel safe and secure. If crime is not to be a cause of exclusion within a community, there is a need to promote 'community safety'. In other words, action needs to be taken to protect people's right to live in confidence and without fear for their own safety, or the safety of other people. Community safety includes not just crime prevention but road safety, fire safety, the availability of safe play areas, and the prevention of anti-social behaviour. In June 1998, with the support of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, the Government published 'Safer Communities Through Partnerships - A Strategy for Action' as a blueprint for local authorities to take the lead in forming local partnerships, involving the police and other public, business and voluntary bodies who can help take effective action to improve community safety. Many local authorities have already set up these partnerships; others are well advanced. To help local authorities co-ordinate and concentrate resources on small areas with specific problems, The Scottish Office is devoting £270,000 over 3 years to fund three 'Communities That Care' projects, in Easterhouse, Edinburgh and Dundee. Run by a charity established in 1997 on the initiative of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to tackle social exclusion and promote community safety, these three projects will test whether a technique which has worked well elsewhere will achieve the same positive results in Scotland.

7.16 The Government is not letting up on conventional crime prevention measures. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) appears to have been effective in cutting crime - rather than simply displacing it to areas not covered by the cameras _ and the Government CCTV Challenge Competition has encouraged the spread of CCTV schemes throughout Scotland. In the last two years, 53 projects have been awarded grants totalling almost £3.5m and, in the 1999-2000 competition, a further £1.5m will help fund 18 projects from Mallaig to Dumfries, North Ayrshire to Midlothian. At the same time, work to prevent housebreaking and thefts of cars or their contents - which have helped achieve a dramatic reduction in the number of offences - will continue.

7.17 The police have a vital part to play in helping communities feel safe. The number of police officers in Scotland has substantially increased - by 11% (1,400 officers) in the past 10 years - and they have been relieved of routine duties by civilian support staff, whose numbers have increased by 49% (1,500 staff). The Government's Comprehensive Spending Review, announced in July, should allow the police to keep their staff numbers at broadly their existing level, while improving efficiency to ensure that the maximum number of officers are engaged in operational duties.

7.18 The Government has also acted to bring in measures to tackle neighbour nuisance and anti-social behaviour, to help prevent the excluding effects of anti-social behaviour in communities. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 will introduce Anti-Social Behaviour Orders from April 1999, which the Government believes will prove effective deterrents against anti-social behaviour in the community. It has also made provision under the Act for additional powers for the police to seize noise-making equipment which is disturbing neighbouring households, and for wider eviction powers to help landlords take tough action to deal with drug dealers. In addition to these new statutory powers the Government is taking forward a co-ordinated programme of action on anti-social behaviour, including a new major guidance Circular (Scottish Office Development Department 16/1998) on Housing and Neighbour Problems, which stresses the importance of inter-agency and inter-departmental co-operation. The Government's drug misuse strategy, to be published shortly, will set out objectives and action priorities to help protect communities from drug related anti-social and criminal behaviour.

Excluded communities

7.19 At the beginning of this section a vision of a strong community was offered. Most communities in Scotland, whether urban, semi-urban or rural, approach this ideal in most respects. But in some parts of Scotland whole communities suffer social exclusion. People living there suffer from bad housing, high unemployment, low educational attainment, poor health, high levels of crime and drug misuse, repeat victimisation, and other problems. Where such problems are concentrated they can become mutually reinforcing, a vicious circle. The problems of the community as a whole compound the exclusion suffered by individuals.

7.20 Most such communities are in urban Scotland, although they exist in rural areas too. In the past many attempts have been made to regenerate them through single-focus programmes. However, experience has shown that there is little point in investing in better housing if the residents have no jobs; that there is little point in creating local employment if the residents have insufficient skills to get those jobs; and little point in getting people into jobs if they then leave the area because it has an ugly depressing environment or its reputation is blighted by crime. Deeper analysis of the problems of exclusion reveals that bad housing is occupied disproportionately by unemployed people; that unemployed people have fewer labour market skills and poorer health; and that the children in deprived areas do less well at school. It is not surprising then that in such communities tackling one issue, such as housing or employment, is ineffective. The issues are inter-connected, and cannot be tackled in isolation: a co-ordinated approach is required.

7.21 In Scotland these lessons have been painfully learned. There are many examples of housing-led regeneration which have had to be repeated or abandoned; and of employment initiatives which have failed to get jobs to the people that needed them most. But good progress has been made towards a new approach. The four pilot partnerships set up under New Life for Urban Scotland in the late 1980s have achieved substantial improvements in many of the common measures of deprivation, including significant reductions in unemployment, crime and low educational attainment as well as improvements to the physical environment through investment in housing and local amenities. That is not to say that the partnerships have been uniformly successful, and it is important that lessons are learned from the final evaluation which is currently taking place.

7.22 The key planks of the New Life approach have, however, been widely recognised as the necessary ingredients of effective regeneration - a long-term approach, involving all key partners including the local community, and tackling social and economic problems as well as the physical condition of the area. In 1996, 12 Priority Partnership Areas (PPAs) were set up on the model of the New Life partnerships, and 11 Regeneration Programmes were established in areas of lesser concentrations of deprivation, or to support city-wide regeneration strategies. These partnerships are working at grass-roots level on many of the problems of social exclusion - poor housing, ill health, low educational achievement, high levels of crime, high unemployment - and are implementing projects and initiatives which tackle these problems in a co-ordinated way.

Social Inclusion Partnerships

7.23 The complex connections between causes and symptoms of deprivation and exclusion have led to the comprehensive partnership approach to regeneration. This approach needs to be brought to bear in all the most deprived areas of Scotland. No major area of multiple deprivation should be left to struggle on without the commitment of all agencies to work together with local communities to regenerate that community.

7.24 New partnerships - Social Inclusion Partnerships (SIPs) - will be established to take forward the regeneration of those communities. These partnerships, like PPAs, will be the vehicle for co-ordinating the actions of partners at a local level: they will be expected to implement a long term strategy to which all the relevant local partners, including the local community, are committed. Existing PPAs and Regeneration Programmes will also be expected to evolve into Social Inclusion Partnerships.

7.25 A similar co-ordinated approach needs to be adopted in tackling exclusion wherever it occurs. Most socially excluded individuals and families do not live in obvious concentrations. So, under the SIPs initiative, co-ordinated, partnership initiatives, which look at the issues from the perspective of socially excluded people, rather than of individual agencies, and which are responsive to the needs and views of local communities and communities of interest, will be created outwith areas of multiple deprivation. Some of these will be in rural areas. Others will target excluded client groups, where that appears to be the most sensible approach.

7.26 In developing and taking forward local strategies, SIPs will be expected to apply the principles of the Government's programme to promote inclusion; in particular, the partnerships will be expected to address the long-term prevention of social exclusion, for example through work with children and their families.

7.27 The Government is providing funds to support new Social Inclusion Partnerships through the Urban Programme (£48m over the next 3 years), but partners will be expected to bend their own mainstream programmes to support the work of the partnerships. The key challenge in taking forward the Social Inclusion Partnerships will be to ensure that partnership works and that genuine co-ordination and joint-working develops, both within the partner agencies and between partner agencies and the community itself.

Listening to Communities

7.28 One of the reasons that single issue approaches fail is that they are conceived by those responsible for a single function as a solution to problems which are multi-dimensional. Often the only people who understand all those dimensions are those who experience them - the excluded community. For this reason it is essential that communities are placed at the heart of decision-making about initiatives being designed for their benefit.

7.29 The Government is committed to putting this theory into practice, by building community participation into its flagship programmes like New Housing Partnerships, New Community Schools, Healthy Living Centres and Social Inclusion Partnerships. It is supporting new community-based approaches to tackling crime through the 'Communities that Care' programme. The 'Giving Age' initiative will aim to change attitudes towards community activity, increase the number of volunteers, and draw people from a wider range of social and economic backgrounds; and generally empower communities. The Government is also promoting tenant participation, and published a draft of its national tenant participation strategy for consultation in October 1998.

7.30 At the same time, there is a recognition that community participation does not just 'happen', and that there is a need to develop new, more effective mechanisms for supporting meaningful involvement.

7.31 With resources of £3m over the next three years, the new Listening to Communities programme will develop the potential of local communities to participate in decision making processes that affect their lives, and identify new ways of testing community needs, aspirations and opinions. It will also address the need for information and training, both for individual community members, and for partner agencies who are engaged with local communities.

7.32 The programme will test out new approaches, but also built on what has already been found to be successful through experience in regeneration partnerships, community based housing associations, and other community programmes and initiatives. A seminar was held in November 1998 to bring together policy makers, practitioners and community activists - those with real experience of involving communities - to take stock of what has been tried and tested up to now, and consider what new approaches are required for the future. The ideas and suggestions generated from the seminar are being carefully considered, to ensure that the proposals for the programme, which will be announced shortly, will fully address the multi-faceted needs of community development and participation.

7.33 The broader subject of how communities can be made more 'inclusive' - whether by widening community participation in decision-making processes, or by increasing participation in voluntary and community activity - is the subject of one of the Action Teams established under the social inclusion strategy. This Team will, by 30 September 1999, survey current best practice and make recommendations on what more could be done to promote participation within communities on an individual level and, collectively, in the decisions that affect them. This is described in more detail in the next section.

Working for Communities

7.34 The partnership approach has been developed to achieve the integration of regeneration and other special initiatives. Some of the progress made by regeneration partnerships has been in putting right weaknesses in basic services, revealed through community participation in the regeneration effort. And weaknesses in basic services, such as housing and estate maintenance, are among the more well-known threats to the sustainability of successful regeneration. The challenge is to ensure that these basic services, on which excluded people everywhere rely for their quality of life, are delivered in a co-ordinated way, and are accessible and responsive to the needs of the people for which they are provided. There is a need to try out new approaches to the delivery of local services, to achieve greater integration at the local level and greater accountability to the communities which they serve.

7.35 The 'Working for Communities' programme, will support a number of pathfinder initiatives designed to test out new ways of integrating local services and giving local communities more say over the pattern of service provision. Two early pathfinder initiatives have been developed and are being implemented in West Edinburgh and Easterhouse. Up to 10 additional pathfinders will be designated in March 1999 from 22 areas with regeneration partnerships or local partnerships in rural areas who have been invited to submit proposals.

Re-connecting communities

7.36 Excluded communities may lack the connections to wider society that characterise strong communities. But they do not exist in a vacuum. Their fate is shaped by forces in the wider employment and housing markets; and by policy decisions taken elsewhere, in the city centre or at council headquarters. Strategies for promoting inclusion need to be informed by and attuned to this wider context. The challenge is to connect the people in those communities to the prosperous, vibrant and enriching life of the city from which they are excluded.

7.37 There is a need to ensure that the policy framework makes connections between strategic plans and local action, so that the needs of excluded communities are properly addressed. In our major cities, the Government has asked city-wide partnerships to draw up strategies for the city as a whole, which identify how excluded communities will be brought into the life of the city. For example, the Glasgow Alliance, a city-wide partnership of key agencies formed in July 1998 out of the former Glasgow Regeneration Alliance, has developed a comprehensive city wide strategy for Glasgow which will be launched shortly. This will set a context for the regeneration of particular areas by developing a vision for the future role of the city as a whole. The main regeneration agencies have been asked to look carefully at the existing budgets at their disposal (£1.5 billion), and to identify the best way of delivering the sustainable regeneration of the city within those resources.

Local anti-poverty action

7.38 As has been noted, tackling poverty is a fundamental aim of all the action in the Government's programme to promote social inclusion. But poverty can be, and in many places is being specifically tackled at a local level, through initiatives such as food co-operatives, credit unions, local transport schemes and Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS). Energy Efficiency schemes can also be particularly important for those on a low income, as part of a wider fuel poverty strategy. Such initiatives have a significant contribution to make alongside the efforts to prevent poverty described elsewhere in this strategy.

7.39 Government and other public agencies face the challenge of building on what has worked in the field of local anti-poverty initiatives, and to support their wider application. Some of this work is already underway. The Government's Credit Union Task Force is exploring ways in which banks and building societies can work more closely with credit unions in providing financial services to the poorer members of society. The Task Force is also looking at how the range of services provided to customers could be widened and the credit union movement as a whole could be expanded, whilst at the same time retaining the focus on those with lower incomes. The Task Force will report later this year.

7.40 The Scottish Community Diet Project (SCDP), funded by the Government, was established in October 1996 to develop a more focused, strategic and co-ordinated approach to improving the diet of low-income communities. This was one of the key recommendations contained in 'Eating for Health: A Diet Action Plan for Scotland', published earlier that year. The work of the Project has been warmly welcomed by communities and the Government is to continue funding the SCDP for a further three years until September 2001, at a level totalling over £0.5m. This will enable the SCDP to build on the foundations laid in its first two years and to undertake an enhanced programme of work.

7.41 The impact of local anti-poverty action has been chosen as a subject for one of the Action Teams established under the social inclusion strategy. A Team will, by 30 September 1999, survey current best practice and make recommendations on what more could be done to support local anti-poverty action. This is described in more detail in the next section.

Rural exclusion

7.42 Social exclusion occurs in rural areas as in urban areas. It tends not to be geographically concentrated, however, and high and low income families often live in the same communities. Three social groups are consistently affected by rural disadvantage - the elderly, the young, and low income households.

7.43 People in rural areas are more likely than those in towns to be in seasonal, insecure or poor quality jobs, reflecting a lack of employment opportunities. For example, even if employment is available in a town 5 or 10 miles away, bus services are unlikely to provide the regular morning and evening connections required. In many rural areas, therefore, people depend on car transport: a study published in 1998 found that 89% of households in rural Scotland have a car. This can be a major drain on resources in low income households.

7.44 There is a general understanding that social exclusion in rural areas is different from that in urban areas. The limitations of the Scottish Area Deprivation Index in rural Scotland are known, partly because it relies on factors such as the number of empty houses (generally there are few empty houses in rural areas and yet social exclusion still exists.) In England, the Rural Development Commission has been developing clusters of indicators (that is, taking a number of relevant indicators together). Early indications are that some of these clusters work well, while others do not. Work is on-going, and it should be possible to build on this to develop indicators which are appropriate for rural Scotland. The Scottish Office will be taking work forward on this through the Scottish National Rural Partnership.

7.45 Clearly, there are many differences in the social, economic, cultural and political features of rural areas, as well as the physical differences in accessibility and peripherality, that are likely to influence the process of social exclusion in rural areas. Most research on social inclusion, however, has tended to have an urban focus, and we do not have a detailed understanding of the operation or the experience of social exclusion in rural areas. Without this fundamental understanding, attempts to develop appropriate policy responses that are targeted specifically at the problems of social exclusion in a rural context will be hindered. A research 'thinkpiece' will be commissioned shortly as a first stage in working towards an improved understanding of social exclusion in rural areas. The research will comprise three main tasks: to assess current knowledge of social exclusion in rural areas; to suggest possible areas for further work; and to set out implications for policy and action in rural areas for consideration by the Action Teams.

7.46 Although rural areas share many common characteristics, there is considerable diversity within rural Scotland. The successful delivery of policies to deal with social exclusion in rural areas will need to take account of this diversity at a local level. In August 1998, the Government published 'Towards a Development Strategy for Rural Scotland: The Framework'. This describes the ways in which the Government intends to ensure that policy at the national level is sensitive to rural needs, and set out a framework for the formulation of 'rural development strategies'. It proposes that such strategies should be the responsibility of partnerships operating at the local authority area level and involving local communities through local partnerships or other methods of outreach. Rural development strategies will be a key means of identifying the main social exclusion issues for a particular area, and of identifying ways of responding to those problems. It is likely that the partners involved in rural development strategies will also be those with social exclusion responsibilities. Delivery of social inclusion objectives will therefore be integrated with the framework for rural development; it is also anticipated that the rural development strategies will be fully integrated with the Community Plans being drawn up by each local authority.

7.47 The Government have already taken action to assist some of Scotland's most remote and fragile rural communities. It launched the Initiative at the Edge in November 1997: communities involved are Uig, Bays, Lochboisdale and Eriskay in the Western Isles; Westray and Papa Westray in Orkney; North Sutherland; Ardnamurchan; and Colonsay. The Initiative brings together the main Government agencies - Scottish Homes, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (and the relevant Local Enterprise Companies) and the Crofters Commission - in a way which encourages a strengthened, integrated approach to tackling the uncertainty facing fragile communities. It will deliver services in a way which is of maximum benefit to the community. The communities themselves are now engaged in the process of developing proposals for their areas.

Conclusion

7.48 We have now considered the four key strands of the Government's programme to promote social inclusion - promoting opportunities; tackling barriers to inclusion; promoting inclusion among children and young people; and building stronger communities. We now turn to the programme of work developed by the Government and the Scottish Social Inclusion Network, aimed at ensuring future action to promote social inclusion has the greatest possible impact: the social inclusion strategy.