Creating urban parishes
The health of the body politic depends on the health of its basic cell, which is the parish or neighbourhood, the only level of local government that people can readily identify with, and one which largely transcends party politics. One of the surest ways to bring about urban renewal would be to create parish councils in the cities - local people are the best experts on the needs of their areas; and it is no accident that one of the biggest and most successful unemployment schemes in Britain (with 150 workers) was run by a parish-scale council, Llanelli Rural Community Council in Dyfed, with projects for church and chapel restoration, a watchdog anti-vandalism patrol, pamphlets about local history and a garden clearance scheme for elderly people.
The Association for Neighbourhood Councils very much hopes that the Secretary of State for the Environment will reconsider the Local Government Boundary Commission's depressing recommendation against urban parish councils for Birmingham.
'One of the surest ways to bring about urban renewal would be to create parish councils in the cities'
But what more can be done to promote parish identity and development in the cities?
Parish mapping
One proposal is to extend the 'Parish Mapping' project to the cities. Parish mapping involves identifying the boundaries of your parish or neighbourhood; celebrating these boundaries by walking around them, 'beating the boundaries' as you go - copying old rituals such as upending children at significant boundary points; then involving local schoolchildren and others in drawing up a map of what people most value in their local area, and fixing this map in as prominent a place as possible, for instance by painting it on the wall of the community hall. A further possible extension of parish mapping is for local people to draw up a 'future map' of what they would like to see developed in their area. But for the basic scheme, see the booklets 'Parish Maps' and 'Parish Boundaries' (each L1-75 incl. p&p), from Common Ground.
Parish rates
At present, part of the Boundary Commission's reluctance to recommend urban parish councils is that there is no legal upper limit to the rates such a council can set. A new maximum 3p urban parish council rate would be fair, allowing the average-size council to collect about L100,000, or one and a half per cent of the total rates bill. The Institute for Social Inventions proposes as a further safeguard the principle that there should be no parish rates without the voter having a say in the allocation. The parish council could produce a regular leaflet in which local projects needing funding would describe themselves, and voters would then select which projects to support (see the chapter on Taxation for more on this).
- The Association for Neighbourhood Councils, Baskerville House, Broad Street, Birmingham 1 (tel 021 200 1027).
- Common Ground, 45 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9HJ (tel 071 379 3109; fax 071 836 5741).
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