The five kinds of localism

Town & Country Planning, September 2007

I stayed firmly at home this August bank holiday, venturing out in a rare moment of sunshine for a brief foray on the Pilgrim’s Way – past some fearsome Keep Out signs to keep ordinary ramblers out of the vicinity of the Foreign Secretary’s pile at Chevening House.

On the way home, we stopped for lunch in a pub and found ourselves in the midst of a fund-raiser for Muscular Dystrophy, complete with an octogenarian jazz quartet (very good), trying to fund a sponsored walk across the Sahara.

In the afternoon, we dropped in to a produce sale back home at the local allotment, presided over by a robust lady from Malta, together with her mother, who boasted she had given birth to 22 children.

It struck me afterwards that both these were local activity, and in a sense both were social capital-building localism. But not simply so. One involved jetting some of the locals off to the middle of a desert in north Africa. The other was organised by a family who were certainly not local, at least in origin.

And it made me think how complicated localism was. The idea that this is something about sturdy English yeomen taking control of their lives, rather as G. K. Chesterton urged them to do, is really unrecognisable now.

Maybe this is why the localism debate – if it can be dignified as a debate – is so contradictory, and why it seems impossible for those of us interested in the phenomenon to take part.

There is a Labour localism debate (something to do with ‘double devolution’ to local quangos). There is a Liberal Democrat localism debate (something about devolving more powers to local authorities). And there is a Conservative localism debate, set out in regular columns over recent months in the Daily Telegraph, which seems to be mainly about the extension of choice.

These are internal discussions. They do not really engage with each other. They certainly don’t encourage outsiders, though – as an outsider (to some of them) – the flaws in each approach are horribly apparent.

New Labour localism struggles with central authority – is it real power or just the trappings of localism? You wonder whether Lib Dem localism has yet tiptoed beyond the apotheosis of local councillors.

As for Tory localism, which seems to involve the enthusiastic printing of vouchers, you wonder whether – by destroying local institutions – it will catapult us poor punters into a lonely, atomised world where we can enjoy infinite choice all by ourselves.

That is such a fascinating phenomenon – the point where over-emphasis on choice leads to the corrosion of localism – that I’m going to come back to it in a later column.

Some of these seem to be real aspects of localism; some of them are just mutton dressed as localism. The real challenge for the policy-makers is somehow to embrace the whole gamut.

With that in mind, here is the David Boyle Patent Guide to Localism for Policy-Makers. I’m not sure it’s perfect yet, but it’s a start. I’ve called it ‘the five kinds of localism’:

Decentralising to locally elected bodies: to local authorities but also to parishes and other local mutuals which can run public services, whether they are about health or parks.

Decentralising to frontline staff: we have constrained them with inflexible targets for too long, and we need to be able to set them free to build relationships with people and take what action they need to make things happen.

Decentralising to public service clients (the so-called co-production agenda): public services prefer us to be passive and grateful, but that is wasting the very real skills, time and ability to care that people have to offer. We need to make public service institutions – schools or surgeries – into engines of local renewal.

Tackling giantism: giant factory schools and hospitals mean more mistakes, more alienation, less flexibility and less opportunity for change. Why should people have to travel 50 miles to the nearest hospital or courts?

Tackling monopoly: centralised corporate power is as insidious and alienating as centralised government power, and far more impoverishing. We need effective competition policies that can unleash the innovative power of small business.

There it is – an identification parade of localism suspects. But which is the real one?

The answer is that, for any genuine policy of localism worthy of the name, all five need to be addressed. Re-inventing our institutions, and making them more local – but forgetting any one of these five – is liable to render the other four meaningless.

David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Authenticity. www.david-boyle.co.uk