Sustainable Communities Act 2007

Last year a new piece of legislation received royal assent. In a nutshell, it's about encouraging initiatives by central governement through consulting locally and with residents given a key role.By October 2008 the government must ask every council to submit suggestions of ways that it can help residents and local authrities make communities more sustainable. Local authrities must ask residents' opinions of what these suggestions should be.The usual meaningless consultation? – wrong! Your council now has a legal duty to set up citizens panels (drawn from all sections of the community – not just the usual suspects!) and then to try to reach agreement with those panels on suggestions you make and then submit them to the government; and the government has a legal duty to co-operate with local authorities and try to reach agreement on what action it will take on the suggestions. This is the first major reversal in the power structure (whereby all decisions are made in Whitehall) that has ever been enshrined in law. This is a new bottom-up process we fought so hard for, so that the policies to create sustainable communities will be driven by you and your fellow citizens, not by civil servants in Whitehall.So we all need to keep an eye on how Haringey will deal with this and ensure that we're properly involved.