The ten top definitions of New Localism

Town & Country Planning, February 2005

You can hardly turn on the television these days without confronting yet another countdown programme – the 100 best films or the top 50 comedies, for example. Or now, since material has got a little scarce, the 10 best erotic moments in movie history.

There is something enjoyably adolescent about them – you can say much the same for most of current TV output – and it doesn’t take long to get stuck into that kind of thinking: the 50 favourite garden cities, or worst tower blocks, for example.

So I am tempted to emulate the form now that I come to try and define what has become known as the ‘New Localism’, which is after all the raison d’etre for this column. What is it about the new localism, for example, that makes it different from the old stuff?

It isn’t enough really to pin down where the phrase originated. In fact, it seems to date in the first instance back to a pamphlet in 2000 called Towards a New Localism published by IPPR and the New Local Government Network, but even this borrowed a phrase that had been quite common in urban studies departments in the USA throughout the 1990s – not to mention an idea that had been nurtured by a range of think-tanks, notably my own.

In any case, now the phrase has become knitted into the speeches of ministers, and the visionary pronouncements of futurists, it has taken on a meaning of its own. But what?

Like the TV programmes, I have based my ten top definitions on a not very extensive poll of friends and acquaintances, most of whom seemed to be under the impression that their own organisation – think tank, city or university department – had invented the idea themselves.

I can’t say I even interviewed ten people – most people I asked came up with a range of contradictory answers – but here are the results: the top ten definitions of what makes new localism different:

It’s the economy, stupid: the old localism was just about decentralising power, the new localism understands that the local economy is important too.
It’s all about health: the whole idea emerged from the local food movement, farmers markets and so on.
It’s a New Labour trick: to cover up the development of new quasi-democratic neighbourhood or community structures designed, accidentally or on purpose, to undermine local government.
It’s Liberal Democrat: it’s about the emergence of strong new leaders in local government like Mike Storey in Liverpool, Peter Arnold in Newcastle and Steve Hitchins in Islington.
It’s about money flows: it means the emergence of a new emphasis in local regeneration departments on keeping money flowing locally, rather than begging Whitehall for hand-outs.
It’s the inevitable result of devolution: once you have devolved powers to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, you automatically have a new localism.
It’s the influence of the EU’s regionalism: either an enlightened grafting of European culture onto our sclerotic UK centralised government, or a malign foreign influence, depending on taste.
It’s what happens when you try joined-up government: once Whitehall was urged, albeit briefly, to join up their programmes so that they contradict – yet this is actually impossible except at a local level.
It’s a con: just the deliberate impression, put about by Whitehall, that power is being devolved.
It’s a rediscovery of efficiency: only at local level can multiple objectives – the inevitable side-effect of any public service that is worth doing – be knitted together into a system that actually works.

Of all these I fear number 9, and hope it is maybe number 10, but there is undoubtedly some truth in all of them – and a whole range of other reasons that never made the list at all. The hope is that the counter-productive idea – which is the defining flaw in most of the empires in history – that events are more efficient if they are controlled from the centre, is finally being laid to rest.

You have to ask, after all: efficient for what? Centralised efficiency can only be about single measures, measures that can be summed up in a number, usually money.

But any journey by train in the UK these days – putting yourself in the hands of organisations that believe the most efficient service they could provide is none at all – should convince you of the limitations of this as a working hypothesis.

There is no doubt that ‘new localism’ is describing something. It is a powerful enough buzzword, even if the phenomenon behind it is hard to pin down, to inspire the launch of a leftist think-tank dedicated to its demise.

But perhaps the last word should go to those who actually know: ministers of the crown. “like many new phrases,” said Nick Raynsford in July last year. “it will I suspect be open to a range of different interpretations.”