Lambeth has just launched a major public consultation on our plans to become Britain’s first cooperative council. The proposals are built on Labour’s experience of running the council for the past four years and they outline how we will protect frontline services and make them more responsive to local need. That means handing more power to communities and service users and reshaping the relationship between citizens and public services in favour of ordinary people.

Labour’s proposals were trailed in the Guardian back in February, months before David Cameron launched his ‘Big Society’ proposals. There are some superficial similarities, but there is a fundamental difference at the heart of the two models. The Tories want to roll back the state, while Labour wants to change the role of the state. For the Tories, Big Society is all about small government. It seeks to close down public services and hand them over to charities. In Barnet the Conservative council was more blatant than Cameron has been about his plans. They described the Tory approach as ‘EasyCouncil’ comparing public services to a budget airline, with a basic, no-frills level of service available to the majority while the wealthy few can pay more for upgrades to better quality. That two-tier, pay-twice Tory model is unacceptable to anyone who cares about social justice and in Lambeth we reject it out of hand.

Labour’s cooperative model is different from the Tories’ Big Society and EasyCouncil models. It came about as a result of Labour’s experience running Lambeth council since 2006 when we took over from a Tory-Lib Dem coalition. We set ourselves the objective of listening more to local people and acting on what they told us. And what they told us was they wanted more control. That happened in different ways in different services. In housing, we support more tenant-managed estates than any other council, and the best of these deliver better housing management at lower cost. We opened the country’s first parent-promoted secondary school, Elmgreen School, in West Norwood, and found it was so popular it became one of the most sought-after schools in the borough even before it opened. On a tough inner-city estate plagued by gang violence we helped the community set up a peer mentoring scheme that won national awards after achieving the highest success rate in the country for preventing reoffending. We set up a local environmental scheme that handed local groups the tools to clear up patches of derelict land and turn them into community spaces, and can barely keep up with the demand. We handed a disused launderette to residents on a local estate and they turned it into a community building where they now run a hugely successful children’s centre. Time and again local people showed us they want to get involved and, when they do, they deliver outstanding success.

It struck me that what all these models have in common was a set of values: fairness, accountability and responsibility. These are cooperative values and they have a long tradition in the history of communities in our country. The outcomes are fair because they meet local needs; the services are directly accountable to local people; and the new models differ fundamentally from what went before because of the responsibility that an empowered local community takes on. The model works differently in different localities and across different services, but the values behind it remain the same.

Now we want to see how far we can extend this model across public services in Lambeth. We have published a consultation paper called ‘The Cooperative Council: A new settlement between citizens and public services’. It sets out our ambition to protect and improve public services, and it outlines seven approaches that we believe underpin our cooperative council model. These are: the need for strong, democratic accountability; tailoring services to meet the needs of individuals and communities; empowering citizens to play an active role in their community; improving local employment opportunities to tackle poverty; reshaping the settlement between the citizen and the state; bringing services closer together so they work better for individuals; providing better value for money. In each of these areas we outline our thinking and invite local people and outside experts to help us answer questions that remain unresolved as we work towards a final model.

The consultation will identify a number of services where we can launch new pilots later in the year. As these pilots grow we will learn from them and apply the lessons both within those services and across other services as we roll out the cooperative model. We expect residents to benefit in a number of ways. They will have more control over the services they receive and over the place where they live. They will get better value for the money they pay – and by value I mean both financial value and community value. They will receive services that are more responsive to local needs. They will be part of a strengthened civic society.

I believe this is an exciting moment for local government as we step up to the challenge of the looming cuts in public spending. It will not be enough to simply cut back services, charge more or ration services only to the most vulnerable. We need to find a new way to deliver public services so we can protect universal provision as far as possible, but also adapt to a changed world where society is more complex and people expect more choice and control. Lambeth is helping to reshape the settlement between the citizen and the state with more power handed to the people. It’s a bold and exciting agenda based on cooperative values that have been part of the Labour party since our party’s birth. I extend an invitation to the people of Lambeth and our friends beyond to join us as we explore how to protect public services and build a stronger civil society, not rolling back the state but changing its role for the better.

Lambeth’s Cooperative Council consultation document is available here

Photo: jackhynes 2007