In the first week of August last year, my local council in Denbighshire discussed ways in which they could seem closer to the communities they purport to serve. I read the minutes of that meeting with incredulity. That said, I was grateful to the council in one respect. At least their discussion was laid bare in the minutes of that meeting. We were thus given an insight in to some of the real issues which they consider to be important.
Since that meeting they have done a good deal to affect their popularity with the local population. I would imagine that the announced closures of the Sun Centre, Nova Centre, North Wales Bowls Centre and Llanbedr primary school (to name but a few) will have done little to enhance the public perception of them. The role of this or any other council though is surprisingly not as they seem to see it. It is not (and never has been) a popularity contest. As far as I'm aware, their role has historically been to augment and support what the local community is already doing for itself. During my life time, there appears to have been a different understanding of their role. When reading pieces in the local media and opinions on various media, I could be forgiven for thinking that the council are here to do everything for us. We only need to step back briefly to see the naievity of this proposition.
Another big change has occured during my life time. The council today is a lot bigger than it was in my childhood and I believe this will be true for you wherever you happen to live in the UK. With that growth in size has come a growth in power. It is palpable. What is surprising is that massive business decisions are being made by people with limited experience to make them. I'll qualify that. To be able to make key business decisions costing millions of pounds, logic alone dictates that a semblance of business experience is required.
When you're running your own business, you are only spending the money you have generated. Thus even for a comparatively small business, all spending decisions are questioned and analysed before they are executed. If that decision is a bad one, it can ultimately result in the end of that business as a viable concern. That is reality for millions of small and large business people every day in the private sector. But imagine if you were running a business charged with spending public money instead. When you're spending your own money, you tend to be rather more careful with it. When it's someone else's money, the dynamic changes.
Recent decisions executed by my local council are testament to that fact. If the decisions were being made with their own personal money in mind, those decisions would not be the same as those which they have made since last August. That is reality. That is why I believe more strongly than ever in trusting the local community to make decisions for themselves. Nobody will know their local community like they do and the extent to which they value their local community will dictate the wisdom of the financial choices they make. In other words, I believe the time has come for local government in the UK to be radically revised. Not for the sake of revision but for the sake of the real people who make up the communities.
I have watched recent events at Plas Madoc Leisure Centre with great interest. When the council announced their intention to close the facility, the local people soon got together to do something about it. They did so because they valued the facility in terms of their community. These are people with very little wealth but a robust sense of community. They knew that if they stuck together, they could get around the problem in spite of the council. Running the facility as a community trust independent of council involvement will free them from existing constraints and enable them to have a leisure centre which works most appropriately for their community which they know better than anyone else. Their action is not political per se. It just makes sense. Thay have recognised the worth of the leisure centre to their community on a variety of levels and are prepared to do what is necessary to make it work for them. It has been inspiring to see how they have set about their challenge. Their initial disappointment at being let down by their local council soon turned in to a focused group intent on overcoming the challenge. The £40,000 per annum being currently paid for the lease of a photocopier might be reviewed by the local community?
I don't know if there is such a thing as a measure of community but if there is, Plas Madoc in Wrexham would score very highly. In the end, it will always come down to people joining forces for those things which they hold ear within their own communities. Waiting for the council to come along and do it for you is a misapprehension which has somehow filtered in to our psyche. We need to let it filter out and remind ourselves of how powerful we can be as communities in our own right.
I have written a lot recently about town centre regeneration. Just like Plas Madoc leisure centre, the future of my town centre is entirely in the hands of the people. If they value it in terms of their local community like the people of Plas Madoc have with their leisure centre, they will do what it takes to support and grow it. The future of my high street and your high street comes down to personal choice. If it matters sufficiently in terms of the community where you live, you will support it and take pride in watching the growth not only of your local high street but also your local community. As the people of Plas Madoc have proved so admirably in recent weeks, all this can be achieved if people join forces and contrary to popular belief, it's ok to effect change for the better without council involvement. I've seen photos of Denbigh high street recently from my childhood and although much has changed since those days (there are more cars and more people work outside of the locality), people are still people. We can have that high street again if we want it bad enough. I feel my local high street is already on the up but I also feel it will go in to overdrive if more of the local population make the informed decision to get behind it. Surely it's a win-win situation?
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