What is Community Involvement?

Herefordshire Council has a strong tradition of engaging and consulting with local people and recognises and acknowledges the benefits that good quality community involvement offers to local communities, communities of interest and to Herefordshire Council and our partners.

The Council has, through its commitment to delivering quality services and supporting the delivery of the Herefordshire Plan, been involved in a variety of good practice initiatives over recent years intended to drive up the levels and quality of community involvement in decision-making, both within the Council and externally.

These include development of Herefordshire Voice, a Citizens Panel of a representative sample of 1000 Herefordshire Residents and the successful 100% postal ballot for the 2003 local elections, resulting in high voter turnout.

The Council wishes to extend consultation beyond statutory requirements and needs to build on our progress to date to find new and innovative ways of engaging local people and actively involving them in planning and decision making.

The definition of community involvement as used in the Herefordshire Plan is:

“Community Involvement describes the full range of research, consultation and participation of communities and individuals in the decision making process.
This might include:
Communities of interest (e.g. young people, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, farmers, carers and service users)
Communities of place or “Geographical communities” (e.g. towns, parishes, wards and estates)”

Ultimately this should enable the Council, with its partners, to make better decisions and provide better services; an active, involved community is itself one of the things we should be aiming to achieve - an essential element of social inclusion.