Gloucestershire

Our History

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE EVOLUTION OF RURAL COMMUNITY COUNCILS

Professor Stephen Owen

Chair: Gloucestershire Rural Community Council, 1990 to 1994

Below, through the mist of unreliable memory, I explore some crucial changes that took place in rural community councils (RCCs) between 1990 and 2010 – by taking a couple of perspectives roughly fifteen or so years apart. A sort of time-lapse comparison, but not systematic; that’s not the way memory works. They are disjointed glimpses really. The first perspective is taken from distant recollections of my role as Chairman of Gloucestershire Rural Community Council (GRCC) between 1990 and 1994 – not ‘Chair’ in those days. The second is taken some fifteen to twenty years later when I had rejoined the Board of GRCC as an ordinary trustee and when, at the same time, I was undertaking contract research into rural policies for mainly national bodies, some specifically examining the work of RCCs. I don’t trespass on the present at all; others will have a much better understanding than I do of what’s happening in RCCs now.

The newest – and youngest – member of the Board of Trustees, with a new and demanding full-time job and a young family, I was catapulted into the Chairmanship of GRCC in 1990, still not really knowing what a rural community council was or did. The Board of sixteen members seemed to be a roll-call of the Gloucestershire establishment. It included a former Chairman and a former Chief Executive of the County Council (the latter having served before me as Chairman), the present Chairman and the Chief Executive of Cotswold District Council (the latter serving after me as Chairman – GRCC was rather like a snake devouring its own tail), two Colonels, a Viscountess and a Chaplain to the Queen – and more of that ilk. And after being appointed, which was rather curious, I was taken to be vetted by the President, yet another former Chairman of the County Council and a Major to boot: a sort of laying on of hands. It was clear that neither he nor the Board relished or anticipated much in the way of change – either in rural Gloucestershire or in the running of GRCC.

And there I was, a grammar school boy from a mining community in the West Riding, firmly believing that change was needed in both spheres and very much not part of the establishment. It wasn’t a meeting of minds between us but for some reason it seemed to work well for the four years of my tenure. Perhaps this was a consequence of forbearance on their part and by me not pushing too hard when I might have spoken out more.

Ironically, one of the proudest boasts of RCCs then – and possibly still is now – was that they were independent. Yes, they were – in a way. But what were they really independent from? Could a body dominated almost wholly by the establishment, with significant political and officer representation from local authorities on its Board, realistically depict itself as independent?

And always, hovering in the background and waiting to be asked – and it often was – the killer question:

‘Yes, but what does a rural community council actually do?’

The answer, inevitably, was shot through with bluster and larded with phrases such as: ‘… gives a voice to local rural communities …‘, ‘… helps local communities identify their problems …‘, ‘… articulates the interests of local communities to service providers …’ And, yes, they did do all those things, often pretty well, but the answer often left the questioner just as ignorant as before the question had been asked.

Back in 1990, a lot of organizations were fishing in the same rural pond: the Rural Development Commission, which had recently absorbed the Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas (CoSIRA), the Countryside Commission, County Councils, District Councils, Parish Councils and Associations of Parish Councils (APTCs) – and many others. There was little chance of an outsider – or, indeed, some insiders – being able to understand the specific role of RCCs amongst that prolific range. It wasn’t made any easier in Gloucestershire or, I think, in several other counties, by the established arrangement whereby the Director of the RCC was also the Secretary of the APTC. That was a recipe for utter confusion – certainly on my part – and, indeed, conflict of interest on the part of the Director:

‘So, who are you working for when you say that?’

Or:

‘If we’re paying you a full-time salary, why are you working for someone else during the working day and, by the way, why isn’t that report ready?’

I hadn’t a clue what was going on between the two organizations and, although at first I was hesitant to create too many waves – or even ripples – that was an arrangement I had to bring to a fairly rapid end.

In retrospect, it would be an understatement to say that there was little clarity in 1990 in the way RCCs worked.

By around 2010 the situation had changed significantly and much crisper answers to the question: ‘Yes, but what does a rural community council actually do?’ were forthcoming – and they were persuasive. This was partly the result of the massive shift in the funding of most RCCs that had taken place during the intervening period. Thirty years ago, for example, well in excess of 80% of GRCC’s income came from grants and service agreements. The two largest ‘donors’ were the County Council and the Rural Development Commission (with the attendant but unspoken pressure on the RCC to tread carefully with both of those bodies) as well as all four rural district councils in the county. Within 15 years and by the time I had rejoined the GRCC Board as an ordinary member, that dependence on grants had been reduced to much less than 20% and was heading towards zero. In place of grants, GRCC bid for – and won – contracts to supply services to a wide range of clients, eventually to the value of over £1 million per year, a phenomenal achievement – in which I had no hand. And it was not just a matter of chasing money per se; contract work, rightly, had to fall within the ambit of GRCC’s declared objectives.

What the RCC did was now clearly defined by the contracts it won and was therefore much more easily explained. GRCC did exactly what it said on the tin – and that was substantial. Nurturing community resilience in response to flooding, assisting with access to health services, deploying village agents to most rural communities throughout the county, guiding contributions to Neighbourhood Development Plans and providing targeted training courses were just some examples of successful contracts won and overseen by a superb troika of managers, all women – almost unimaginable in 1990 – Lesley Archer, Elin Tattersall and Barbara Piranty.

Thirty years ago I had a very clear view – and I still hold it now – that most rural communities needed significantly more development: more homes – specifically homes that people on relatively low incomes could afford – more jobs, more services, and better communications. That didn’t mean simply letting the development market rip but instead applying thoughtful analysis of people’s needs and then implementing policies to deliver appropriate development in response.

At that time, though, almost all planning policies for rural areas – and Gloucestershire was no exception – had a built-in, unquestioning, presumption against development. The approach was almost entirely conservation-driven; that was the mindset of decision-makers in government, local authorities and, despite nominal support for building so-called ‘affordable’ homes in selected villages, it was the mindset of GRCC’s Board of Trustees. The nearest most RCCs came to addressing those sometimes acute development needs was to encourage rural housing associations to build houses in some villages on ‘exceptions’ sites – in the event, no more than a few houses in a few villages across a whole county. A worthy intent, and with occasional success, but for the most part it did little more than nibble at the edges of a serious problem that could only have been addressed effectively by a massive turnaround in government housing policy and local authority planning policies. Despite persistent rhetoric, we are still waiting for that turnaround and in the interim problems in many rural areas have worsened appreciably.

Specifically, one of the most crucial problems facing rural communities was – and remains – the existence of pockets of deprivation, sometimes in a sea of comparative wealth; it’s no fun being poor anywhere, but particularly not in Tetbury. RCCs were never intended to solve this problem. They have never had significant resources to disburse and they have never been in a position to frame policies that determine significant outcomes in rural areas. RCCs have been able to do little more in this regard than run round with a dustpan and brush – an aspect of rural housekeeping they have always done very well indeed and deserve much credit for. Central government and local authorities have that responsibility and so far they have persistently and comprehensively failed to discharge it effectively.

Such misgivings apart, there is no doubt that all those years ago, GRCC, with its comparatively tiny budget and limited complement of staff, punched well above its weight. That was largely down to one person, the Director, Stephen Wright. Actor manqué, with a stentorian voice and the brass neck to go anywhere, do anything, Stephen never held back. He would bluff his way into any meeting, any gathering, albeit offering what he considered to be appropriate deference to the county’s gentry with an almost baroque flourish. Within days of being appointed Chairman – by what process I still have no idea – he announced:

‘Oh Stephen’ (it could be quite confusing), ‘I think you should meet …’

And I was whisked off to see – and was soon on friendly visiting terms with – chief executives of the county and all the rural districts, business leaders, directors of charities and others. We had extremely interesting and courteous discussions. Whether they listened or not, I’m not sure; I would guess that they listened to what they wanted to hear. But they were certainly aware of GRCC; if we were ignored we were not ignored for want of making ourselves known.

Stephen Wright was a great ambassador for GRCC; he opened doors. He was a leader and in those early days, knowing little about RCC work, I leaned on him. But Stephen flew by the seat of his pants. While he was out there banging the drum on behalf of GRCC, I was conscious that the actual running of the RCC, its management and the delivery of its services, had become pretty ragged. That should not obscure the unquestionably good work that GRCC did at the time, particularly the hands-on advice of field workers dedicated to each of the four rural districts and the comprehensive and effective advice on running village halls. But a major review was absolutely essential if the RCC was to fulfil its objectives more fully and more competently

The term ‘professional’ has had a bad press in some quarters in recent years, with intimations of narrowness, separateness and the protection of vested occupational interests, but in the general sense that it connotes work undertaken properly and competently, it remains in my opinion an approach to strive for. The review we undertook and the actions that flowed from it were intended to enable the RCC to become more professional in its work. Amongst other structural and financial changes, many of which proved to be effective in the short and long terms, we created the post of Assistant Director to manage the delivery of RCC services, thereby leaving Stephen to do what he did best – carrying the GRCC flag. We appointed Ros Leigh from ACRE to the post. If I had to pick out a single achievement of which I was most proud, it would be the decision to create that post and to appoint Ros Leigh to it. She was an outstanding manager; she brought professional purpose, rigour and clarity to the work of the RCC – and in the most engaging manner. That, I believe, was the precursor to many of the beneficial changes that have been applied – perhaps with even more success – by others throughout the ensuing years.

So, with Ros Leigh’s appointment, GRCC’s gain was ACRE’s loss: ACRE!

In the first week of my new role in 1990, I asked the question: ‘What is acre?’, not knowing it was yet another amongst a bewildering array of acronyms. I was given an explanation but I was little the wiser. It appeared to be just as difficult to describe what ACRE did as it was to describe what RCCs did. But whilst I was asking that naïve question, most RCCs were asking the more pertinent question: ‘What should ACRE be?’ And the various, conflicting answers to that question revealed a fault line running throughout the RCC movement, a fault line sometimes characterized by less than polite discussion.

I remember attending, as a rookie Chairman, the annual RCC-wide conference at Stoke Rochford in the early nineties. There was backstairs intrigue, coded language, explicit hostility, direct confrontation; there were even rumours of hanky-panky – how well-founded, I’ve no idea. It was as though I had turned up at a political party conference.

It all seemed to hinge around two conflicting models of what ACRE should be, each with its fierce adherents. The first model saw ACRE as the handmaiden of the RCCs; it should have no authority to act except with the agreement of the whole RCC movement. It existed only to represent the interests of constituent RCCs. This view was held with what seemed to me to be alarming tenacity by, I think, a relatively small number of RCCs.

The opposing view was that ACRE should have a degree of independence from RCCs; it should take a lead on rural policy matters and be an active player on the national stage.

Yes, I know those are inaccurate simplifications, but they capture the essence of the conflict as I saw it. I was a moderate – and quiet – adherent of the second view. It seemed to me at the time that the ‘rural agenda’, as it was continually referred to, could only register meaningfully at the national level if ACRE were an effective player alongside other national bodies, not always looking over its shoulder for permission from the whole of the RCC movement. That seemed to me to be the realpolitik of the situation. And given the strictures I outline above with regard to the desperate need for policy changes to be implemented at national and local authority levels, it seemed to me that only the second option had any hope of generating, or even influencing, that significant change. But I was new; I kept my head down and the same arguments seemed to rumble on for years without resolution. Perhaps they still do.

One disappointing feature of my evolving experience of ACRE was that, at that time, I never really met its Director, Malcolm Moseley. This was a shame and something I regret because later he became my closest and most revered colleague when we worked together for 10 years as professors in the Countryside & Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, a period during which we gained an intriguing external, or at least semi-detached, perspective on the work of RCCs.

Malcolm and I undertook contracts for government departments, the European Union, the Countryside Agency and others at the national level. Some focused specifically on the effectiveness of RCCs, including the preparation for Defra of a good practice guide for RCCs in using a tool to gauge the economic outcomes of their work – a way of measuring as well as describing what RCCs did. This could be viewed as a counter to the often repeated and glib mantra of community development to which I have never subscribed: that the process is the product. The product – an outcome other than the process itself – is crucial.

It was very clear from the external perspective we took that RCCs were trusted, particularly by local rural communities. There are resonances here with, but perhaps more accurate than, the notion of RCCs as independent bodies. Some of them, as well as being trusted, were also leaner, more flexible and more effective in delivering certain services than some district councils. From the perspective of a semi-detached contract researcher, it seemed that by combining an increasingly professional approach with the emotional commitment of the voluntary sector – and holding onto a crystal-clear view of their own objectives – RCCs performed on a par with, and sometimes outstripped, many smaller district councils. They proved to be very effective. And in that regard it is particularly interesting that in recent years GRCC, for example, has successfully extended its activities into urban as well as rural communities, quite sensibly not differentiating between them where their problems are very much the same – and potentially linked in their resolution.

Looking back over thirty years, dredging the memory, the mists cleared for a while and certain things stood out more sharply with hindsight than they ever did at the time. The greater clarity of RCC activities – what RCCs actually did – was the most outstanding. But another aspect of RCCs, not explored above, was fascinating. A characteristic GRCC shared with most types of organization, whether public, private or voluntary, only became recognizable with the passage of longer periods of time. There seems over the years to have been a continual fluctuation, switching between, on the one hand, the need to focus energy and resources exclusively on core objectives and then, by contrast, to diversify activities, thereby capturing a wider range of opportunities, often with the motive of boosting income – and then switching back again in response to an over-extension of the RCC’s capabilities. From a distance it can almost be seen as a slow, continuous pulse in the evolution of RCCs.

This partial, fragmented and highly personal review, has indicated – at least to me – that RCCs became very different entities in the way they worked during the period between 1990 and 2010 – but without losing commitment to their enduring overall objectives. Most importantly, and running as a thread throughout all the changes to their working practices over thirty years, has been a relentless – and impressive – trait of RCCs: their dogged and undimmed determination to improve the lot of rural communities.

Gloucestershire Resources