119 LSPs in NRF areas are required to engage the public through a community empowerment network. Research suggests that other partnerships, including other LSPs, are not as concerned about making their proceedings publicly available as individual organisations.
'Conformance to criteria of public access is an ad-hoc phenomenon, and little attention is paid to developing mechanisms that provide such access. Only half of partnership board members (56 per cent) thought "there was considerable public involvement in the work of the partnership board".' (Ref. 17)
120 Public bodies use the term partnership to portray multiple forms of collaboration, including procurement contracts and voluntary collaboration. As a result of this the public may not know what partnership means. However, the public use of the word partnership probably has made people aware that public, private and voluntary organisations now collaborate more than they did in the past.
121 Some partnerships use a variety of community channels to raise public awareness. Many authorities have worked together, pooling budgets and resources to communicate with a wider public than it would have been possible to reach if they had continued to work in isolation.
'We participated in the City Show last month. People from across the partnership, including the community voluntary sector, had a presence. The public had an opportunity to talk to different agencies situated next to each other. In this way, and through some of the other coordinated involvement working, we've sought not to revisit the same community with a whole series of different activities.'
Metropolitan borough council chief executive
We found a division of opinion between those who believe that the public do not care about, or need to know about partnerships, and those who think that they do.I Local authorities, which represent their communities, are just as prone to this division (Figure 11).
___________________________________________________________________________
I Source: primary research for governance of partnerships study.