I have gone all over the world to talk about the village that I live in within a city which has at its heart the world famous Penny Lane. It is the concept of a neighbourhood village that lies at the heart of the City Council’s new neighbourhood strategy.
On May 4th, this year I was elected as the councillor for Penny Lane. I am very, very proud to be able to say that. Being councillor for the most famous lane in the world has a certain cachet!
However, for the previous 19 years I was one of six councillors for Penny Lane, and I live within one hundred yards of this world-famous site. I used this fact many times when I was giving talks or speeches either about issues which relate to planning or urban development.
Many people think of a village as being a rural or suburban concept. They imagine a quant area with at its heart a cricket pitch, church, pub, post office and school. They imagine that this is an area that people live in down the generations and you can see their tombstones in the church. In other words, we assume that this physical form has created a community where people care about each other and shares the good times and the bad. Of course, we have all watched Midsummer Murders and Shetland and know that this is not quite correct!!
In my speeches I would point out that I too lived in a village not delineated by woods streams and fields but by the main London railway line, Rose Lane and Smithdown and Allerton Roads. Within that area we have everything we need to live in terms of facilities. Two great pubs, a junior school, open spaces, three churches and a mosque, a post office, shops, restaurants, and GP practices. These are facilities which we tend to share as we share facilities outside the area as well. Our high street I claimed at countless events was the famous Penny Lane
For example, because of history neither Erica nor I use the same doctor’s practice. In fact, we don’t use the same one anyway. The point about this is that no-one forces us to use the doctor in our ‘village’ and we choose not to. Sometimes when I get the 75 or 86 bus into town it is like doing a travelling advice centre. “Hello councillor I wonder if you just do this for me!,” is a common conversation. That too brings us closer together.
Our school is a council run school, so it is not religious. If parents choose to send their children to a catholic school it is outside the ‘village’ but is easily accessible by them. The boundaries which the public sector must create to run things and do things exist for our purposes only and are not enforced on anyone for anything except by providing electoral boundaries to ensure fair voting nor simple practical service delivery items.
The facilities that we have can be used by anyone. The Dovedale and the Rose of Mossley are widely used by people from across South Liverpool as are the restaurants and bars on Allerton Road. I usually use them because I like to walk to them so I can have a couple of drinks without worrying about the car and getting home. Sometimes, however, I go to Lark Lane or Woolton and I do not need a passport to enable me to do that.
But this my community in reasonably wealthy Liverpool 18. Just three miles away the villages in Liverpool 8 are not so lucky, in most of these areas there is a much-reduced range of facilities and people are forced out of their own community to get the services that they need. The wealthier the community the more facilities and the converse is also true.
As a liberal I believe that we should all have equal access to decent facilities which we can use if we choose to. You should be able to walk to the pub or the school of the mosque within easy reach providing roughly the same standards of service whether for need or pleasure. The whole point of neighbourhoods is about enabling and not enforcing.
I am now going to move into the field of politics which as Deputy Lord Mayor I should not really do although the absolute restriction to disengage in the political process will be strictly observed by me when I become Lord Mayor next year. I feel that I can safely do so in this case because in Liverpool the neighbourhood agenda is not one of party-political dispute. Last year I was involved in many discussions about neighbourhoods and how we can do two things inside those neighbourhoods and communities.
Get regular updates of the ways in which the public sector services get delivered and provide a localised input using local knowledge to improve those services.
Bring together those services and the communities they serve to enable efficient joint working of those services and the continued involvement of the residents of their area and those of us who have been honoured to be elected within that area in policies and programmes to deliver what is needed and not what someone in the Town Hall or Whitehall thinks should be delivered.
We also recognise that for some things the wards like Penny Lane are too small for effective planning. The Allerton Road/Smithdown Road district Centre is in three wards. To do things there needs joint decision making. It also services a wider area. I have no secondary school in my ward, but I do have nearby Calderstones Comprehensive where many students go. I want to be able to look at how they are doing every bit as much as I want to look at the outputs of Dovedale Primary School.
That is where the districts come in. The council has tried to bring together communities of mutual interest. Penny Lane will be part of a wider Liverpool 18 area which shares many characteristics, use of facilities and common interests. These communities have evolved over time. The council has not created them, they have created themselves. The council is just bringing them together to provide effective planning and delivery of services.
This movement by the Council on which all the Parties have worked and which all the Parties support is very practical and very enabling. However, some people have totally misinterpreted it as a way of controlling residents and not supporting the. They imagine some dystopian society in which people inside Penny Lane are forced to do things inside Penny Lane. A society in which all decisions are made from the top and brought down to people by way of dictat. A society in which there are, perhaps barriers to prevent the free movement of people around our city.
Where has this claptrap coming from? Well, as usual, the USA via Twitter and other social media. It is interesting that at least some of the people who protested outside the Town Hall earlier in the week are also known covid-deniers, they believe that Bill Gates inserted chips in to the vaccines and if it did exist it was made deliberately to subjugate people. They probably believe that the Earth is flat as well!
Creating strong communities in Liverpool, as elsewhere, is a way of breaking centralised power and not creating it. It is a way of putting back into the hands of residents to co-produce high quality services alongside their local elected councillors and service providers. It is absolutely the right thing to do.
I hope that all councillors will work together to stand against the drivel that is being spouted by those that oppose these very liberal and liberating actions. Power to the people can become a reality and not a slogan if we work together to fight this nonsense and create a new and empowering system.
But what does Richard Kemp think? 
‘ at its heart a cricket pitch, church, pub, post office and school’
Sadly, many rural villages no longer have these. Where my daughter used to live in Cambridgeshire there was no school, no shop and no post office (a dwelling house had the name ‘the Old Post Office’). A nearby village had lost its church, and, of course, many rural churches will be sharing a minister with up to six others,