Draft Community Asset Strategy

This consultation is now closed and the results of the responses have been analysed and were reported to the Assets, Regeneration and Growth Committee on 1 June 2015.

A revised Community Assets strategy has been produced to take account of the consultation responses, and a detailed implementation plan will be developed over the summer 2015 and reported back to the Assets, Regeneration and Growth Committee in the autumn.

You can see how we have acted on the results under ‘We asked, You said, We did’.

Overview

Barnet has a dynamic and diverse voluntary and community sector (VCS), which the Council wishes to encourage and support. Many community groups benefit in some way from the range of properties in the council’s portfolio, whether they use space in a large office block, or a small community hall.

We recognise that when managing these properties we have a responsibility to make them work for you – to deliver best value. We recognise the social and economic contribution that voluntary and community groups make to the wellbeing of the Borough and so, although the Council currently faces financial constraints, we need to balance the financial return we get from our assets against the social and community value we gain by using our assets to support the VCS.

We therefore need to make a distinction between those assets from which we are seeking a purely financial return and those where we are trying to balance the value we get from their community use against their headline cost. As part of our wider review of the Council’s asset portfolio, we are therefore preparing a Community Asset Strategy, which looks at how we can best use our portfolio to support the VCS.

Throughout this document, where we discuss ‘assets’ we are referring to physical assets – land, property or buildings. The Community Asset Strategy will have in scope only those assets which are owned by the Council.

Why We Are Consulting

We want to make sure the Community Asset Strategy does all that it can to help the Council sustain a strong and vibrant voluntary and community sector. We want to ensure it meets the needs of local communities, including local voluntary and community groups, as far as possible and where appropriate. We are therefore seeking your feedback, at this early stage, on our current proposals for the future of the community estate in Barnet.

We have prepared an initial discussion paper, the Proposals Paper, which sets out what we think are the main issues surrounding the current use of community assets in Barnet, and puts forward a series of policy proposals for how the Council should use its estate to support VCS groups in the future.

We want to hear from local residents and VCS groups about these proposals and about how we can make the best use of the Council’s assets in the future.

We want to know whether the proposed principles we have put forward for the governance of community assets take into account all the issues which affect VCS groups.

We want to know whether you think we have defined the community estate correctly, and whether we have identified all potential opportunities where assets could be used more effectively for community benefit. We have published a list of assets within the Council’s portfolio which are currently considered to be community assets and we welcome your feedback on whether there are any others which should be included in the scope of this Strategy.

(This definition does not refer to the statutory definition of an Asset of Community Value given under the Localism Act 2011. The proposals set out in this consultation are without prejudice to the Localism Act 2011 or the Asset of Community Value Regulations 2012, and the Council reserves its rights to determine what is an asset of community value having given due consideration to the aforementioned legislation or any amendment thereof.)

Your feedback will inform development of the full Strategy, which will be presented to the Assets, Regeneration and Growth Committee for consideration in the spring of 2015 and, if the Committee agrees, taken forward for full public consultation in the summer of 2015.