Compensating resident involvement: the ‘Just Rewards’ campaign in the UK

In the UK, as in many other advanced economies (e.g. Salamon et al., 1999), an ever more central role is being given to civil society in political discourse. At the local level, one way in which this is displayed is in the increasing involvement of residents in community regeneration initiatives. Thousands of ordinary people, especially in deprived neighbourhoods where community regeneration initiatives proliferate, are expending their energy and time acting as directors, board members and chairs of regeneration programmes. The starting point of this article is the recognition that unlike private consultants and others employed in the regeneration business, these residents receive little, if any, recompense for dedicating their time, skills and expertise to these programmes. Indeed, for those in receipt of state benefits, their community involvement can be at a personal cost beyond purely the time and energy that they expend contributing to their communities. In the UK, such residents often find themselves having their benefit payments reduced in line with what little recompense they receive (e.g., Macauley, 2003a; 2003b; Palmer, 2003). Those willing to dedicate themselves to the regeneration of their communities thus find themselves effectively punished rather than rewarded for their community involvement. The ‘Just Rewards’ campaign, initiated by a UK national regeneration weekly magazine entitled New Start, has recently sought to rectify this anomaly by proposing ways of remunerating community representatives on regeneration programmes in recognition of the time, skills and expertise that they bring to such projects. Until now, the principal proposal of this campaign has been that the ‘earnings disregard’ (which reduces benefits pound-for-pound for those earning over £5 per week) should be modified by introducing an annual £8,000 exemption for such community representatives, so as to allow them parity of treatment with other professionals who dedicate their time but are financially rewarded for their involvement. The response of the UK government’s Department of Work and Pensions, however, has been that providing such an exemption to the ‘earnings disregard’ for community representatives is unacceptable and this campaign at present appears to have reached an insurmountable impasse. In this article, in consequence, two alternative proposals for reimbursing resident involvement in community regeneration are put forward for debate and discussion that are more aligned with current government policy and provide a possible way forward. These are firstly, a proposal to ‘civil-ise’ New Deal so that benefit recipients can be reimbursed for their community involvement, and second, a proposal to expand the tax credit system by creating ‘active citizens tax credits’. First, therefore, this article will display the growing onus being put on community representatives as civil society is brought into the equation as an equal third player in the regeneration process alongside the public and private spheres. Second, and following this, the problems confronting those in receipt of benefits involved in community regeneration will be highlighted along with the solutions offered by the ‘Just Rewards’ campaign and the opposition Planning, Practice & Research, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 321–327, August 2004