No prepared community pathway for service continuity when councils withdraw

When councils under section 114 stress cut libraries, youth services, public toilets and parks maintenance to legal minimums, the vacuum fills ad hoc through opaque outsourcing, volunteer burnout, or nothing at all. No prepared, legally templated, financially transparent pathway exists for a community to assume a withdrawn service, covering asset transfer, insurance, TUPE employment obligations and auditable community finances. Dozens of councils are in distress, and the Community Right to Buy now in force covers assets rather than services. Locality and Plunkett support asset transfers, and nobody has productised service continuity.

The fiscal arithmetic guarantees more withdrawal. An unprepared handover fails publicly, which discredits community capacity, or succeeds invisibly, which teaches nobody. A prepared pathway applies the logic of parallel institutions to the most immediate UK case there is.

A service-continuity playbook and support unit: legal templates per service type, a transparent-treasury standard for community operators, TUPE and insurance guidance, and a rapid-response advice service for communities facing withdrawal. The community-power foundations could fund it, and a Locality or Plunkett-class body could deliver it.

// Build now: First artefact: open service-continuity playbook (legal templates, TUPE, insurance) published by a Locality/Plunkett-class body.

More councils will strip services this year, and no productised pathway lets communities assume them, so each live handover either fails or goes unrecorded.