Deborah Orr: Such a splendid idea, but such a tricky beast to unleash in practice

Is there anything more splendid than the idea of "community empowerment"? Is there anything more splendid than the reality of it, indeed, when it's there before you in all its modest pomp?

The young man who knocks on our door twice a year, replete with a plastic carrier and a battered list of supporters, to collect cash and cheques to keep a local football team in the league is a fine young man. The women who have strived to create a beautiful, tranquil pond in the middle of the troubled estate across the way, and who now put on community events in its lovely setting, are fine women. The people who pop up in the press, usually in the wake of churning tragedy, to be interviewed about their youth outreach projects, and the difference they are making, are fine people. They are the finest of all, because they do it for little other reason than that it needs doing and they are good at it.

Such people certainly inspire politicians, who surely recognise in community volunteers a desire to serve that they share, only not accompanied by the perfectly sensible, sometimes compromising and occasionally lucrative decision that they will make a career out of it.

David Cameron, when he first became leader of the Conservative Party, was full of enthusiastic talk about the grass-roots work he had seen around Britain, and how keen he was to unleash this incredible force for community renewal and civic pride. There have been fewer such declarations lately, maybe because he caught up with the fact that the Labour Government has been wild about community involvement all along, with the love affair only intensifying as the years have rolled by, or maybe just because he's had other things to be getting on with.

Suddenly, though, as Gordon Brown's bid for Prime Minister blossoms prettily, "community empowerment" appears to be part of the appealing reconstituted mix.

The publication yesterday of Making Assets Work, an independent report by Barry Quick, chief executive of London's Lewisham Council, was no doubt mere serendipity. Nevertheless, its contents, which wax lyrical about the possibilities inherent in releasing property - from "disused swimming pools, to pubs and community centres" or from "redundant police stations, old hospital sites, empty shopping parades and closed-down pubs on estates" - into local citizens' ownership, chime well with the sometimes hazy notions we have of what Brown stands for.

Actually, though, one of the central messages of the report is that there's nothing whatever to stop this from happening anyway. Legislation is already in place that allows groups, "underpinned by safeguards to ensure good management", to buy or lease assets for as little as than £1 where it is clear it is for the good of the community. The problem is that people don't know about how to do it, and that some local authorities are "less enthusiastic or concerned about the risks".

It's not really surprising that people don't know how to do it. Have a go at accessing the plethora of government information on how to go about empowering your community, and even if you're used to reading and disseminating policy, it's hard going. The suspicion is that "community empowerment" is another of those concepts that sounds simple, but is actually, paradoxically, so centrally bureaucratised and scarily gate-kept that you'd need a team of full-time advisers to have any hope of getting a grip on it.

Which is, oddly enough, exactly what a four-year study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded earlier this year. The report confirmed that empowering people through community support could make a real difference in closing the gap between the most disadvantaged communities and the rest of society, but that "some particularly disadvantaged or fragile communities need more intensive community development support to engage residents and bring about change".

It also found that "despite policy commitment to working with local groups, many community organisations felt marginalised in partnerships with power-holders, such as local authorities. When dealing with local councils, groups could face bureaucratic obstacles that prevented genuine community participation". The report also stressed that for community empowerment to work, "public sector culture needs to become more flexible".

In essence, the report suggested that the best way forward was to offer "light-touch" support, offering a good mentor or facilitator to help with advice, ideas and support, along with a small and flexible pot of money. Whether a mentor and a small and flexible pot of money are all that are needed to transform and run your disused hospital, purchased for a quid is a moot point.

I'm a bit worried about the disused hospital thing altogether. The constant factor in "community empowerment" is the housing issue. Even though there are two entirely different meanings here, housing is always central to the difficulties faced by a "blighted community".

In some parts of the country, the problem is scarcity of affordable social property, and huge pressure on the housing market. In others, communities live in housing that nobody else wants, and they are stuck there. In the former areas, a disused hospital sounds like just the place for community members actually to live, if only councils felt able to get on with the old-fashioned business of providing new stock. Presumably, the idea would be that the community in these cases would take the form of a housing association, a reflection of a long-standing distrust of the idea that councils make good landlords.

Again, though, this simply emphasises what a tricky beast community empowerment can be. Cases are legion in Britain of intractably empowered communities failing to vote their homes into the hands of housing associations and out of the hands of councils, in a pesky grass-roots refusal of top-down wisdom. Campaigners for council housing now refer to themselves as champions of the "fourth option", and they are reminders that you can't only empower communities when they want to do what you want them to anyway.

On this too, as part of Brown's cheery hello to the nation, there is some reason for optimism. His announcement of a rash of gleaming new eco-towns may have been dismissed by the opposition as old whines in new bottles. But Yvette Cooper, wife of Brown's long-standing ally Ed Balls, made a speech to the Fabian Society yesterday about the centrality of housing policy to the Government's child poverty agenda. So maybe a new willingness to empower the community by respecting their wishes may at least be hoped for.

As for the latter areas, the possibility of a disused hospital run by the community driving much in the way of economic revitalisation seems overly hopeful, except perhaps in the most arrestingly dynamic of cases. The harsh fact is that if a local community can get a project like that to work, then it's a community of people already empowered enough to run pretty much anything it likes.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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