Participation Requests
Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act was enacted in July 2015. Part 3 of the Act, ‘Participation Requests’ and its Regulations came into force on 1 April 2017. This section of the Act provides a way for community bodies to put forward their ideas as to how services could be changed to improve outcomes for their community via a participation request.
What is a Participation Request?
The most common definitions describe participation as ‘the action of taking part in, or sharing in something’’. The purpose of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act is to enable the active participation of communities in addressing the issues and opportunities that are of greatest importance to them and to provide more influence over the services and decisions that affect their lives. A community group can use the Act to discuss with service providers how they could better meet the needs of users around a particular issue or topic that the community group feel would result in an improvement to the service. Participation requests are not designed to:
- Replace good quality existing community engagement or participation processes
- Be used as an extension to a complaints procedure
If you would like to know more about who can make a Participation Request and how to go about it click on 'Guidance on submitting a Participation Request' in the Documents section on this page.