There is considerable interest from communities in accessing land and buildings in order to manage them for long-term community benefit. This interest ranges from preventing the loss, sale or development of existing public or community assets that are in public, private or charitable ownership, to securing long-term community ownership or management in order to deliver community-led regeneration. The types of assets range from community centres to shops, pubs, parks, woodlands and farmland.
However, in all cases anyone looking to save or secure land and buildings as community assets faces significant challenges in finding the data and information they need to be able to secure these assets. Data can be fragmented, opaque, out of date and hard to access.
To help with this, through this project, we undertook desk research on existing data sources, did interviews with key stakeholders, and ran workshops with community groups, to understand the data already out there and its characteristics, as well as what other information community groups need to succeed. Based on the feedback from these events, DCC developed and launched two new layers in its Land Explorer mapping platform - one showing local authority-owned land, and one showing Church of England-owned land. Work is ongoing for a layer to display unregistered land, which is due for release in spring 2025. Additionally, DCC invested in simplifying information access about a site and creating a dedicated section of their user guide to support people to more easily access and share information with other members of the group.
The rich conversations which took place during workshops were full of other suggestions - summarised here - some involving technology, others which reached far beyond it. The DCC and Shared Assets teams’ skills complemented each other and we are keen to work together again soon to take forward more of the ideas put forward by community groups. You can see some more reflections on our work together in this blog.
With the recent closing of the Community Ownership Fund, we want to ensure that community groups are well-prepared in the future to support them to take on assets locally. We will be developing funding proposals to continue the work initiated by this project in the months ahead.