The smoke and mirrors of laissez-faire localism

Imagine a health service where nobody bothered to share learning nationally or internationally about which treatments worked and why. Imagine a health service where it was considered entirely unnecessary to explore the causes of sickness, as long as local GPs and hospitals were given free rein to treat the effects.

Imagine a health service where there were no agreed standards of practice, no national resourcing and no way of knowing whether care in a hospital in Blackburn was any better or worse than in a similar institution in Brighton.

If that’s inconceivable, just take a hop along the road in Westminster from the Department of Health to the Department of Communities and Local Government, where this new approach is all the rage. Let’s call it laissez-faire localism.

Last November a parliamentary select committee produced a withering critique of the government’s paper, Regeneration to enable growth (see previous blogs here and here, and my evidence to the select committee here). The government has just published its response to the committee, which is to reassert the virtues of laissez-faire localism.

Faced with the criticism that the government’s approach was incoherent and failed to define either the nature of the problem, its causes or how any remedy was expected to work, ministers came up with the following statement:

‘At its core, regeneration is about concerted action to address the challenges and problems faced by the community of a particular place. It’s about widening opportunities, growing the local economy, and improving people’s lives. But beyond that high-level definition, it is not for Government to define what regeneration is, what it should look like, or what measures should be used to drive it. That will depend on the place – the local characteristics, challenges and opportunities.’

To stick with the health service simile, this is like saying health is about feeling well. But beyond that high-level definition, it’s all down to the patient and their local doctor. Illness is just something that randomly happens and how you deal with it depends entirely on your local circumstances.

When it comes to dealing with deprivation and disadvantage, Grant Shapps, the minister responsible (if that’s still a meaningful concept) asserts that local communities are ‘in the driving seat’ and catalogues the powers that have been devolved from Whitehall.

Devolving power is helpful, as are some of the new rights and initiatives listed in the latest iteration of the regeneration toolkit. I’ve argued for many years that governments need to trust local people to develop their solutions and give them greater powers to implement them. Real localism is about giving people the ability and resources to take action at local level.

But Mr Shapps is doing something else here, though the way it’s being presented is highly disingenuous. There’s a huge difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating it.

Laissez-faire localism doesn’t put communities in the driving seat. It leaves them to clear up the mess after others have driven over them. National and international market failures and the shortcomings of public policy are simply imagined away. Laissez-faire localism pretends localities are not interconnected, and it presents the results of national economic and social policy as purely local issues.

On the intellectual gossamer of laissez-faire localism are strung the hopes and aspirations of our most hard-pressed communities – communities that have borne the brunt of decades of economic change, frequently aided and abetted by central government.

Market failure and public policy failure are inconvenient truths, and the temptation to wish them out of existence must be irresistible. So Mr Shapps blithely passes the buck, even while market failure is happening on a gargantuan scale across the eurozone. It will lead to precisely the blight and deprivation that only a few years back would have had ministers running to announce regeneration strategies.

Mr Shapps would, and does, argue that the government is doing its bit. The regeneration toolkit lists all the scattergun initiatives sprayed out by central government over the last year and a half.

However there is no analysis of whether or how they will work together, how they are expected to achieve their objectives and how their success or failure will be assessed. Neither is there any serious acknowledgement of the context, which is a radical reduction of support to those areas most in need of regeneration.

In his defence Mr Shapps rewrites history, arguing: ‘We can’t go back to the top-down, centralised system of the past which attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to regeneration with little regard for the needs, circumstances and wishes of local people.’

There was plenty wrong with the regeneration initiatives of the past, but to say they were one-size-fits-all is at best a highly selective reading of the literature – if indeed the literature has been read at all.

In a global economy, it’s not only intelligent but essential for national governments to take an overview of the factors that lead to blight and deprivation, identify causes and consequences, and apply additional support where it is most needed – while at the same time promoting, working with, and responding to the local initiative and energy and knowledge of cities and citizens.

There is, thankfully, a foolproof and largely risk-free way for Mr Shapps to test the validity of his own thesis. If he seriously believes the government has no role in regeneration he should resign as a minister. By his own reasoning his job is redundant, and the salary could be more usefully spent on any number of local projects.