1# Localism: we need to broaden the debate. David Boyle, new economics foundation

Localism is flavour of the year, but there is something wrong.  The minister responsible, Eric Pickles at the Department for Communities, keeps telling local councils what to do – right down to de-cluttering their high streets.

Worse, the debate about localism – if it is a debate – seems to be entirely about local government finance (never a crowd-stormer even on its best days) and about local decision-making.

Of course decision-making is important, but politicians fetishise the business of decisions and committees – it is their ideal, after all – and forget about those other aspects of localism that go together to create local life.

The real problem is that politicians of all parties are very confused about localism.  They gargle with the ideas, but believe it is something about giving people a little bit more, having fewer targets, and setting up local committees.

They get marooned in the narrow question of where each function of government should take place – a kind of parlour game for politicians before they lose the will to live.  They miss the point.

They have narrowed the localism debate because they only have the language of centralisation with which to discuss it.  What will Whitehall do?  Who has the power?  Who defers to who?

There are four other critical aspects of localism which need to be given their due:

How to give power and initiative back to front line public service staff.
It isn’t localism if frontline service staff still have to distort their jobs to meet centrally imposed targets, whether their are from distant managers or from Whitehall.  The cult of bogus efficiency, of shared back offices and call centre factories, does not create local life any more than it creates imaginative local institutions.

How to hand more responsibility to service users for delivering broader services, to make real change possible.
As long as local services ignore the vast resource that their users represent, and their families and their neighbours, the more they will foster dependence and a hopeless battle to tackle symptoms rather than to prevent causes.

How to make public services more human scale.
Local life will suffocate if all our institutions are giants.  Factory hospitals and schools, where nobody can build relationships with professionals, are corrosive of localism.

How to localise economic power as well as political power.
You can decentralise local decision-making as much as you like, but it will make no difference if communities remain supplicants to Tesco or Barclays.

Localism is about how to make things work, how to escape from the sclerotic centralisation that is making Britain seize up.  We need a debate which is less about committee meetings and more about life.

David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and the author of a range of books, including Eminent Corporations.

Join David Boyle and our expert panel at our seminar Localism: what is the future for Local Authorities? in London on 15th March 2011. Further details and bookings here.