Earlier this year, Sheffield City Council voted to get Community Right to Buy ready, supporting the Co-operative Party’s campaign to protect invaluable local spaces.

Whether it is a pub, a music venue, a leisure centre or cinema, everywhere has something that makes it truly special. Those important community assets need protecting.

Ahead of the government strengthening Community Right to Buy powers – giving communities first refusal on Assets of Community Value (ACVs), and more time to raise funds to buy them – Sheffield City Council is now reviewing how we support ACV applications, to make the process more accessible and easier to find for community organisations.

We’re also investigating the new High Street Rental Auction powers the government has cascaded down to local authorities. This will help us tackle persistently empty shopfronts on local high streets, giving communities and businesses the right to rent a long-term empty property.

These new powers offer a genuine shift of power, agency and control to local people over the places in which they live.

We’re so excited about them in Sheffield, because they align with a key value of ours: to devolve power downwards.

In recent years, we have invested in the community-led regeneration of our local high streets. Our Economic Recovery Fund put funds in local people’s hands, letting them lead the revival of our high streets and district centres. Over the course of two years, £4m was distributed in grants to: refit shop fronts; organise street markets, community fayres and events; installing parklets, plant a fruit tree orchard; and so much more.

Independent analysis of the projects showed a large increase in footfall to local district centres, and an economic return to local high streets that was double the original investment. But the real significance of the fund was that it put our communities in charge of our economic renewal – and that trust placed in communities was greatly rewarded by the fantastic projects they created.

Community Right to Buy, High Street Rental Auctions, and the wider reforms offered by the Devolution White Paper, will allow councils like ours to build on this thread further, by giving communities control over their surroundings.

In my ward in recent years, we have seen community assets like the Plough Inn – where the rules of football are thought to have first been written down – or the Cobden View community garden, sold off to developers. Our communities organised to oppose this, seeking ACV status, but in the end were forced to sit by and watch. Previously, ACV status only enabled a right to bid, providing no guarantee that an important place would remain open and accessible to people. The Community Right to Buy is that guarantee – it stops community hubs being privatised or enclosed – and provides a means to for the people who need and rely on them to run them directly.

As we continue on our journey to greater devolution, there are further avenues the government could explore. As important as extending the Community Right to Buy to buildings will prove, I hope we will also look to a Community Right to Buy for mismanaged land.

Every October, without fail, Sheffield’s air becomes thick with smoke from burning on the peatlands that surround the city. Despite a ban on council-owned peatlands, our communities are still subjected to an annual smog. The Duke of Rutland owns the Moscar shooting estate, and burns the heather to facilitate bloodsports on his land.

This week I attended a public meeting exploring a community land trust to take ownership of Sheffield grouse moors. As abhorrent as grouse shooting is, the need to stop peatland burning goes far beyond this.

Peatlands have a unique ability to sequester and store carbon dioxide on a huge scale. At the same time that the government is looking to carbon capture and storage, nature-based solutions like peatland restoration are readily available. Healthy peatlands can also reduce flooding, by slowing the flow of water. Communities in the Calder Valley have campaigned for years to stop moorland burning near them, to limit the flooding they have faced.

If Community Right to Buy were extended to mismanaged lands, it would tip the balance of power away from aristocrats and large landowners – helping local communities to buy land upstream and restore the peatbogs, slowing water flows and prevent floods.

This is particularly important for Sheffield. 12% of our city area is covered by heathland, with an additional 12% of blanket bog. Our city and surrounding landscapes could be transformed to play a key role in climate mitigation, with little legislative nudge.

We are committed to putting our communities in charge of our city’s future. Community Right to Buy, and all moves to support community ownership of our local economy, are essential to making that ambition a reality.

This is why I and Sheffield’s other Labour and Co-operative councillors are working to embed community ownership at a local level: to create a future with people, not for them.