The potential for every community to have a way of gathering, organising, and having a voice.
Research | 22.01.26
“There is opportunity to think how [parish and town councils] can be reimagined, appreciated and supplemented with new democratic governance arrangements to embed the historic and committed role that parishes and town councils have played over generations in English democracy.”
Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Discussion Paper on Town and Parish Councils, published by LPIP in association with Citizen Network and Middlesex University.
The Government’s Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill has promised to bring neighbourhood governance to every place in England. What this might look like is not clear. One of the tensions is between ‘neighbourhood governance’ being where ordinary people shape what the council does, and ‘neighbourhood governance’ being where ordinary people come together to do things themselves.
There is definitely a place for local councils to involve and engage communities more. But for the big councils that isn’t governance by the neighbourhood. It’s governance of the neighbourhood. The ownership, the agency, the control, is still held by the local authority.
The exception is the small-scale council - parish councils, town councils, community councils. These are councils owned by the community. They aren’t beholden to national Government and don’t have to implement particular policies. Their income is only from what is raised locally, through an addition on council tax and things like community centre hire. The councillors are voluntary and the staffing numbers only go above a handful in the larger parishes and towns.
The argument for the role of parish and town councils in devolution is set out in a discussion paper co-written by Dr Jason Leman (Citizen Network Fellow and Neighbourhood Democracy Lead) alongside Dr Amy Burnett (University of Middlesex and LPIP fellow) and Dr Dan Ozarow (University of Middlesex and Mayor of Elstree and Borehamwood Town Council). They talk about how parish and town councils can complete the picture of devolution and neighbourhood governance. There are three key things that need to change to support this:
As the Government consolidates local government into large unitary authorities and strategic regional mayors, its vision of involving communities is for the councils to turn their ear to the neighbourhood or village and listen to communities. The problem is that there is not a vision for how the communities themselves are empowered to speak up. Half the picture is missing. Parish and town councils can complete that picture. They hold the promise of being a voice of the community that stands independent, confident, and able to engage as equals with the unitary authority. A platform for action by the local people to solve issues in their place.
