Tory Leicestershire County Council offers to become Big Society vanguard

Governance | Tania Mason | 24 Feb 2011

The Conservative-controlled Leicestershire County Council has written to the Prime Minister to offer to replace Liverpool as one of the Big Society vanguard areas.

Leicestershire’s leader, Councillor David Parsons, wrote that the region had already done much work to embed the localism agenda in recent years, and last year held a number of ‘Big Conversations about Big Society’ around the County to gauge local people’s views on the Council’s ideas for devolving more power to communities.

He also said the Council had invested, through its voluntary sector-led Stronger Communities Board, almost £2m in a programme of work to build social capital, especially in more deprived neighbourhoods.

“Big Society is something we have put significant time, energy and funding into developing and we are fully committed to working with the government and our communities to continue to make this a success, despite the challenges that lie ahead.”

Parsons revealed that he had included a “growth item” of £500,000 a year in its new budget from 2011/12 to support Big Society initiatives. “It is anticipated that a significant proportion of this funding will go directly to communities to enable them to access technical and specialist support for key projects – for example, taking over running services, establishing social enterprises and producing neighbourhood plans.

“We also propose to use some of the funding to provide match-funding for a network of community organisers across the county.

“I would therefore like to propose that you give consideration to including Leicestershire as one of your Big Society pilot/vanguard communities.”

The Council also intends to use £5.5m from its reserves to cushion the impact of national grant cuts for children and young people’s and youth offending services.

The Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council withdrew from the vanguard programme last month saying the scale of public spending cuts in the area made it impossible to build the Big Society.

Click here to read David Parsons' letter to David Cameron.

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