Locality have created a brilliant five step guide called How to Keep it Local.

The guide has been designed to help with the growing demand for authorities to provide good services with budgets that are getting smaller. To cope with this, some councils are tempted to outsource services to bigger providers but this means that local providers don’t get as much support.

This new five step guide encourages councils to use local services and find ways to make them work and reduce costs, help the local economy and build stronger communities.

The resource offers practical hints and tips, like how to promote good social values and how to involve local people in the process. It’s great to see more organisations using co-production in this way and asking local people what they need from businesses and services. We know from our projects like Rural Wisdom that this is very important, especially for making sure that often unheard groups, like older people, get what they need from local services.

We hope that many local authorities in Scotland make use of this new resource and ‘keep it local’!

You can read the guide here.