What engagement means
As a baseline, engagement means having conversations with our communities about the opportunities and the challenges, if we are going to deliver services that are efficient, economical and fit for purpose; never underestimating the importance of the voice of our community in helping us to get it right.
It also means accepting alternative viewpoints and understanding how we use experience and opinion as an evidence base in how we make decisions and help shape the services we deliver.
Local Context
Our Council Plan sets out a framework for action over a financial year, based on the workstreams within the organisation, the ambitions of local communities and the priorities of local Elected Members as representatives of the community voice.
A large part of our focus in that document is improving the wellbeing of people in the Scottish Borders and making our region a more sustainable and better place to live, work and visit. By setting out our intentions we aim to be transparent about what we are doing and why, and provide a landscape for our citizens to engage and influence the priorities of that plan as we move forward.
Under the new Operating Model we want to support and empower people to achieve strong, active, resilient and sustainable communities and realise opportunities for improving people’s lives as active partners in our process.
We will review this Plan every year to make sure it covers the biggest issues for the Scottish Borders and shows what it is that we need to prioritise.
National Context
At a national level we are guided by policy which aims to empower citizens to be an active voice in their communities.
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act came into force in July 2015. It brings with it rights that enable communities to have more say in things that affect them.
As part of that, participation requests are a way for communities to get involved in improving services provided by public sector organisations. The Act highlights that communities aren’t just geographical but can be made up of people that have something in common, for example a group of older people, the LGBTQ+ community or a men’s group are all included.
Community bodies such as Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisations (SCIOs), or other formally constituted groups, can take on land or buildings that are owned by public authorities through asset transfer where it can be shown that doing so would benefit the community. This feeds into opportunities for Place Making and offers opportunities for us to support communities to have conversations amongst themselves on what priorities they see, and create plans which can feed into our thinking and development of policy.
The Scottish Government itself has a set of broad National Outcomes including that we live in communities that are inclusive, empowered resilient and safe. Recent consultation on reviewing Local Governance under the Democracy Matters work will further shape the national picture.
The National Standards for Community Engagement are a set of principles designed to improve and guide community engagement and offer a framework to build good engagement against. We will adopt those standards and benchmark against the national picture.
"Community engagement is a way to build and sustain relationships between public services and community groups – helping them both to understand and take action on the needs or issues that communities experience."
National Standards for Community Engagement
We will evaluate our community engagement against the National Standards using the Framework set out on VOiCE Scotland. This Framework can be used for planning, monitoring and evaluating community engagement activity (appendix 1). We will be transparent and publish the results of our evaluations on our consultation hub.
Christie Commission
Although it is more than 10 years since first published, the findings of the Christie Commission are as relevant today as they were then. The report identified that the delivery of public services can be “top down” and unresponsive to the needs of individuals and communities.
That model is where decisions are made by those in power and has been the traditional approach to public services. Effective engagement flips that to a grassroots approach, where decision making is community led.