Is now the time to reconsider community wealth building?

This article originally appeared in the LGC.

As the first recess of this parliament draws near, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon for local government.

The new government seem bullish in their commitment to providing authorities with multi-year funding settlements and ending wasteful competitive bidding. Meanwhile a Bill proposed in last week’s Kings Speech will see more power devolved to the local level, albeit via combined authorities.

But it is also clear that there is much still to be resolved about the future role that this government sees for our councils. Funding commitments will take time to translate from Treasury wrangling into ink on the page and, with Kier Starmer appearing to channel Theresa May in the run up to the election – echoing her declaration that “there is no magic money tree” – few are expecting that local government finances will be restored to pre-austerity levels any time soon, if ever.

“read the smoke signals”

So, while we wait and attempt to read the smoke signals coming from Westminster, what can local leaders be doing to align themselves with the new government’s direction of travel? A clue can perhaps be found in the persistent rumours of an approach to “public sector reform” (a phrase guaranteed to make the blood run cold in most local government leaders) inspired by the last Labour government’s Total Place policy. Then-Shadow Local Government Minister, Jim McMahon, fuelled the flames in January this year – speaking at an event organised by the Institute for Government he said “There is something in looking at every pound you spend in an area and really requiring every part of government to marshal around a single plan for a place”.

This notion of looking at spend is nothing new for us at CLES. For decades we’ve worked with dozens of local authorities, the NHS, housing associations, educators and other “anchor institutions” in places across the UK and Ireland to help them understand how not just their spend but their other economic impacts can have a shaping effect on the communities they serve.

And the new government are clearly taking notice – in Wes Streeting’s remarks at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, just days after the election, he noted the vital role that health institutions play as local employers, arguing that they are “engines of economic growth, giving opportunities in training and work to local people, as well as providing public services”.

“using the resources they already have”

The time has come, then, for local authorities and their partners in place to consider how they can work together, using the resources they already have, to support better outcomes in their places. And the good news is that there is no need to wait around while the government get their house in order.

Anchor networks – groups of large, usually public sector, institutions that come together to work collectively for the benefit of a shared geography – have grown significantly in recent years and there are now dozens across the UK. All of them have formed and got to work on addressing the problems of their place without permission – not needing to wait for a change in the law or an act of parliament to get going.

And what work they’ve done.

We’ve witnessed anchor networks collaborating to develop better pathways into entry level NHS careers for people further from the job market, one network developing a creative proposal to build a solar farm on local authority land to provide green energy for a local hospital and another network sharing procurement data to increase spend through local food suppliers. And those are just in the West Midlands – if one region alone can harness the economic impact of the public pound to bring jobs to the people who need them most, bolster local business and support a just transition, imagine what the approach could do for the rest of the UK.

“a transformative effort”

Working as we have at CLES, at the forefront of community wealth building practice for over a decade, we have seen its evolution from a Corbyn-era marginal sport into something that feels deeply resonant to the political times in which we find ourselves now: a transformative effort that is about creating “broadly shared” growth and local economies where the wealth generated by communities doesn’t leak out into the hands of distant shareholders. Within this we can find echoes of 2009, when Total Place harnessed the imagination of the public sector. Community wealth building and anchor networks operationalise that same imaginative faculty, but it is also worth remembering what happened next.

The political shift in 2010 and the austerity project that followed have hollowed out the local public sector in ways that, in 2009, were almost unimaginable. No one reading this needs a run down of the numbers to quantify the scale of what has been lost in the last 14 years. Nor can lists of services, jobs and funding streams cut capture some of the more fundamental losses – hope, imagination, resilience – from many working in local government in the time since then. If Total Place-style approaches rely on those, then, can it work in 2024?

“passion is no substitute for resources”

Our experience with anchor networks says yes, that there are those who have managed to maintain the passion and energy for solving the problems of their place. But passion is no substitute for resources. We urge the government to move forward at pace with their plans for funding local government in a way that enables proper long-term planning but, more than that, to recognise that little can be done without proper investment too. To do so would be to recognise that local government is well overdue the funding it needs to move beyond survival and into a place of positive transformation.