If the Government’s vision of how a local authority should operate had to be summed up in one word, it would probably be ‘partnership’. Viewing the local authority as an ‘enabler’, with the actors being voluntary and community bodies and local agencies, it believes these partners can achieve more together than they can do if they work on their own. Central to their approach is the relationship with the local community, whose priorities and aspirations must be identified and reflected in the area’s future plans.
Each local authority area has a Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), a forum of partners which includes representatives from business, community groups and public agencies such as Primary Care Trusts. It oversees the Community Strategy, which should ‘promote and improve the social, economic and environmental well-being’ of the area while ‘contributing to the achievement of sustainable development in the UK’. This Strategy takes the form of a broad, long-term vision to which are added some specific outcome targets related to priorities, with a consensus about what the area should look like in 10 or 15 years time reached by consulting widely.
The Community Strategy provides the basis for the more detailed Local Area Agreement (LAA). An LAA is made up of outcomes, indicators and targets aimed at improving performance on a range of national and local priorities. These priorities are grouped around four themes or ‘blocks’:
- Children & Young People,
- Safer & Stronger Communities,
- Healthier Communities & Older People, and
- Economic Development & Enterprise.
The relevance of the LAA to London Food Link is that by addressing food issues, a local area could go a long way towards achieving the health and environmental outcomes included in the Agreement. As the Mayor’s Food Strategy shows, meeting the challenge of working towards a sustainable food system for London has potentially profound health and environmental benefits. It is unlikely a Community Strategy will feature the word ‘food’ (as it can only focus on key themes identified by local people), though the LAA may mention ‘diet’, but it should certainly be possible to convince the LSP board or coordinator to give the issue very close attention, making use of the flexibility for a local approach that is one of the cornerstones of the Government’s ‘agreement’ with the authority. For example, the Government puts forward ‘Being Healthy’ as a possible outcome for the ‘Children & Young People’ block. Improving food and cooking education in schools and increasing the number of children eating healthy school meals would be a genuine step towards achieving this.
As for influencing the content of an LAA, it could prove useful to target the Community Strategy where it is being ‘refreshed’ at the same time. The LSP can be contacted to find out how to contribute ideas to this or any other aspect of their work. As the partnership has to involve community organisations in planning and decision-making there ought to be opportunities to put issues of concern on the agenda. Where the Strategy has already been agreed, the priorities already outlined in it can be examined carefully to see how they justify allocations of funding (or time) for food initiatives. LAAs are not set in stone and will be reviewed, so this means that if food is not mentioned in it currently, there will be opportunities to include it in the future. On the flipside, if food is already mentioned in your LAA, it is important to make sure it is not omitted in future reviews.
Health, social inclusion and regeneration are all areas LSPs want to engage with, just as London Food Link does. In theory at least, the increasingly ‘joined-up’ nature of these partnerships, added to new freedoms to use their resources as they think best, could lead to real progress.
Case Study: Greenwich’s LAA
To see what completed LAAs look like have a glance at those of Greenwich and Hammersmith & Fulham (London’s two 1st round pilot authorities), both of which are online.
Greenwich provides a good example of specific food-related targets and indicators. Under the ‘Healthier Communities and Older People’ block, perhaps the most eye-catching indicator is ‘Increase numbers of community food initiatives in Neighbourhood Renewal areas with BME and other disadvantaged communities including 6 new fruit and vegetable co-ops and 10 new cookery clubs.’ In addition, supporting the aim of using schools to improve children’s nutrition is a target of ‘Halting the year-on-year rise in obesity among children under 11’ with a subsidiary indicator of ‘50% of schools reaching locally agreed ‘gold standard’ for promoting childhood nutrition and increased levels of physical activity through the healthy schools programme by April 2008’.
Greenwich, whose agreement was signed off in March 2005, stressed the importance of themes that cut across all the blocks (the Economic Development block did not exist then): food issues certainly support outcomes in all the current blocks. It sees the LAA as a ‘rolling’ agreement, refreshed annually: therefore it is always possible to identify new food-related targets.
If you don’t know what a Local Area Agreement is you might find it helpful to see the Government’s own explanation www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1161635 on what they are and what they are supposed to do.
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