Thank you for reading my blog. I’m really pleased to have launched the White Paper 'Communities in control: real people, real power' today.
This White Paper is really important to me - it marks a significant shift of power into the hands of communities and local people. Lots of good work goes on across the country already but there is more to do if we are really going to make a difference to the numbers of and ways that people can get involved in local decision making.
We want to make these changes because we believe that local people are capable and willing to take difficult decisions and solve complex problems for themselves. It is right that at the centre, we should set national priorities and minimum standards and make sure that resources are distributed fairly but we don’t have the all the answers when it comes to deciding how things should done on a street by street basis.
The White Paper is split into key questions that we think people are asking and over the next few days I want to cover some of these things in more detail but as an overview the document covers the following topics:
- being active in your community
- access to information
- having an influence
- challenge
- redress
- standing for office; and
- ownership and control.
Please read my blog for the next seven days to keep up-to-date with the latest news on what we're doing on empowerment. I’m going to blog until Friday 18 July 2008. Please send me your comments via this blog, or posting a comment on our discussion forum. You can also keep up to date with empowerment news by following our seven day twitter channel which will run alongside the life of this blog. I hope to hear from as many of you as possible.
Tomorrow I will give you an update on how the launch went and my initial thoughts on reactions so far.