Community development can be heard echoing through much government rhetoric on communities. New Labour came to power in 1997 with a commitment to building strong communities and their third term manifesto talked of putting power and resources in the hands of the ‘law-abiding majority’. There are more resources than ever for community-level activity and communities themselves are being positioned to have a central role in decision making within their neighbourhoods. David Miliband MP, for a short time the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, spoke of the double devolution of power from central government to local government, and from local government to citizens and communities in which he envisaged a vital role for small community groups (Miliband, 2006). The recent Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 makes engagement with citizens a statutory duty and emphasises the need to involve the ‘hard-to-reach’. I should be jumping for joy or clearing my desk, then, as surely our job is done. Communities should now be able to influence government policy and resourcing decisions directly, based on their own needs and experiences. Has it really ever been this good?

Relationships between community development workers and the state

The context for community development in the UK today is one in which communities are expected to participate within numerous ‘partnerships’ made up of statutory, voluntary and sometimes private sector ‘stakeholders’. The theory behind such partnerships is that through working together we can achieve more for those communities that experience social exclusion and deprivation. It is felt that the partnership approach symbolises a more mature era in working relationships across sectors and it has come to define almost every recent government programme from education and health through to neighbourhood renewal and housing.

Looking back about 25 years ago to the late 1970s, partnerships and even joint working were scarce. Practitioners kept largely to themselves and there was little evidence of practitioners working in any formal manner with statutory departments or the private sector. Confrontation and conflict seemed to prevail rather than a more cooperative approach to the work. Dave Vanderhoven, a community and youth worker in Newham during the late 1970s, recalls his working relationships: