Liberal Democrats have every reason to be excited about the Sustainable Communities Act, which kicks in this year. Co-sponsored by our very own Julia Goldsworthy, and passed with cross-party support, it offers a unique opportunity which Lib Dems would ignore at their peril.

Quite simply, it’s a piece of devolved, ‘opt-in’ legislation. Participation isn’t compulsory, but councils can choose to get involved – and on their terms. The Act enables local councils to submit proposals to the government on how they can promote ‘local sustainability’. This is extremely loosely defined. It’s anything which will contribute to ‘the improvement of the economic, social or environmental well-being of the authority’s area whereby “social well-being” includes participation in civic and local activity.’ By such a vague definition, almost anything which a council does, and does well, could count, so it really is a great chance to flag up distinctly liberal issues and instilling free choice, social justice, devolution of power, and encouraging diversity in our communities.

All councils’ ideas will then be collated and prioritised by the Local Government Association. As the LGA stage will very much be an all-party affair, it’s vitally important that we fight our corner, and that from the very outset we present and argue for a series of distinctively liberal solutions for stronger, more empowered communities.

It’s also worth flagging up that in taking these options through the LGA, we will be avoiding the Whitehall policy ‘threshing machine’, and will instead be going through councillors’ own representative body, adding more legitimacy to the final solutions.

The Act puts a duty on the government and its quangos to ‘reach agreement’ with the LGA on implementing the solutions, so everything hangs on using our strong local government base to overwhelmingly argue our case in the LGA.

Furthermore, because the Act includes a requirement for the government and quangos to publicly publish a local breakdown of all related local spending, councils will then be empowered to claw back locally-spent money which they think they could more effectively spend themselves. This could be a passport to localism, Lib Dem-style, not Labour or Conservative – if we grasp the nettle of opportunity here and now.

If I sound overly excited about all this, it’s because I am. Nobody is saying that the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 was a Lib Dem measure. It was a cross-party compromise, and one that leaves the field open for more cross-party compromises. But it has the scope to be a liberal measure, and to empower more liberal communities. At the moment, its final effects are a blank canvas. It is what we make of it. And it will only be a liberal measure if we get to work on it, before the other parties do!

Seth Thévoz is the project co-ordinator for The Local Parliament, a joint project between the LGA Liberal Democrats, and the Leadership Centre for Local Government.