The call for greater regional devolution is sensible – but why not go further?

In response to The Fabian Society’s latest report, A Good Life In All Regions, Local Trust’s policy officer Steven Barclay makes the case for devolving power to the local level to tackle UK inequality.

The Fabian Society’s Commission on Poverty and Regional Inequality has published its final report A Good Life In All Regions: Uniting Our Country To End Poverty.

This well researched and well thought out report is to be welcomed, along with its sensible and pertinent recommendations for addressing the UK’s pernicious regional economic inequalities and the shame of widespread and unnecessary poverty.

The report highlights facts about regional inequality which should be cause for real concern for central government, including that the UK is “the most regionally unequal developed country”.

The UK is more regionally unequal than Germany, despite the fact that Germany has absorbed the whole of former communist East Germany over the past 30 years, a process the German government made a priority in a way that the UK could for its unequal regions, if it chose to.

There is also pause for thought in the concentration of economic prosperity in London and the Southeast, a fact which must also be immediately caveated with the observation that despite this, London is also the third most deprived region – in part, as the report makes clear, due to its high housing costs relative to incomes.

A call for greater devolution

The report’s analysis of what has gone wrong is that this is the result of centralisation, poor industrial and regional strategies, and low and ineffective investment.

As for what to do about it, the report is particularly keen on devolution of powers to mayors and councils as a priority. Rolled into this, it also recommends improved public transport, (particularly buses), more affordable housing and childcare, and long term national and regional industrial strategies.

The call for greater devolution is a sensible one, as the UK has great disparities of political power to accompany its regional economic disparities. However, the UK’s spatial disparities are not only between regions, but within regions. Every region contains a mixture of prosperous and less prosperous districts and neighbourhoods.

The UK’s problem is both a regional one – where all the headline policies for devolution are focused at the moment – but also local, where there remains much too little in the way of ideas.

The report partially recognises this situation: “our regional inequality translates into concentrations of high poverty in all regions – even those which are most productive and have the highest incomes.”

Therefore, the UK’s problem is both a regional one – where all the headline policies for devolution are focused at the moment – but also local, where there remains much too little in the way of ideas.

A hyper-local approach for deprived areas

Devolution to mayors and councils is likely a condition without which regional rebalancing cannot take place. The report is strong on recommendations that would strengthen the regional governance fabric.

What is missing is an equally detailed and prominent, specifically hyper-local strategy, targeted at the most deprived areas, to run alongside this regional rebalancing.

Interestingly, the analysis contained in the report arguably supports this assessment.

Places which “have been overlooked and badly served for decades, trapped in a vicious cycle of low public and private investment” include coastal communities (whose potential for growth was recently given a highly positive assessment by the Centre for Economics and Business Research), poor and disconnected countryside, towns and the peripheries of cities. As the report notes: “where there is currently poverty, there is also great potential.”

Local Trust’s own research on ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods shows that the most disadvantaged communities share these profiles. Analysis shows particular problems in the absence of connectivity (rightly recommended for investment by the report), but also civic assets and an active and engaged community.

The report also misses a key fact about these ‘left behind’ places. It recommends investment, but views this in the traditional vein of meaning transport infrastructure and skills, neglecting the importance of social infrastructure despite its particular importance in the most deprived areas and its highly place-based effects.

The importance of this ‘social infrastructure’ has now become established. We know its importance for social outcomes and the economic returns which follow.

Rebuilding the most deprived communities will mean building the strength, cohesion and cooperation within those communities that comes from places to meet and opportunities to foster a sense of pride and belonging.

Devolution to the local level

Perhaps, as the report implies, hyper-local regeneration would follow automatically with devolution, and the report has ideas of what beefed-up mayoralties and councils might do.

It recommends inclusive economic strategies with poverty reduction targets and a 30-year investment fund allocated to places based on population level and poverty rate. Local Trust’s own learning from supporting the Big Local programme and the work of the Community Wealth Fund campaign suggests a promising way forward for a sustainable and community-led form of regeneration.

Experience has shown that community buy-in to regeneration is greater when community control is greater, and that partnerships with greater community control lead to better outcomes.

Innovative suggestions in the report, like “local social partnerships” with “representatives of trade unions, people with lived experience of low income and those who work with people living in poverty, and businesses on their boards”, which feed into the mayoral and council controlled local economic strategies, are to be welcomed.

Experience has shown that community buy-in to regeneration is greater when community control is greater, and that partnerships with greater community control lead to better outcomes. However, as far as the report is concerned, devolution stops at mayoral or local authority level.

Regeneration is sorely needed in our most deprived communities, and previous attempts show that the answer is not top-down control and imposed, technocratic solutions. If devolution is the answer, why not go further and devolve powers right down to the local level?

A Good Life In All Regions goes a long way to a spatial economic strategy and fills in the regional picture admirably – what is left to fill are the details of the local picture.