Where do you find deprivation in England today? The North? Coastal towns? Inner cities? The depressing answer found in today’s newly published Index of Multiple Deprivation is clear: everywhere.
Back in the office at the start of a new week, the CLES team is fired with an enthusiasm that only comes with successfully bringing 200 dedicated activists and changemakers together. As we push on to drive further actions and outcomes, the team has taken some time to offer three quick-fire reflections of our own from the day about what #cwbis to us…
Decades of agglomeration has led to the incubation of ‘superstar cities’ such as Manchester, leaving places like Blackpool and Rhyl deprived and depleted. As CLES reported on in 2017, the last vestiges of their seaside heritage are now enveloped by a coil of ever-tightening social and economic decline.
Vital to this is the extent to which community businesses are woven into the supply chains of anchor institutions. Work by CLES in three locations has found that community businesses are building local wealth and it is now time to celebrate, secure and amplify their full potential within the supply chain of anchor institutions.
The idea that when local authorities buy goods and services they should ensure that the money given to suppliers produces good social, economic, and environmental outcomes might now seem like common sense, but ten years ago there was no Social Value Policy Act and very little activity around of this nature.
Cities across the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Rome , London to Lagos, are facing housing crises which are set to render as many as 1.6billion people around the world without access to affordable, adequate and secure housing by 2025 . A fundamental problem is that the prevailing economic model views housing as an asset, rather than a right – an issue which Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham, has recently made calls to address.
We must accept that the UK political economy, with its market liberal economic growth model, is intrinsically incapable of ensuring that wealth is fairly distributed. We are the fifth largest economy in world, but fifty-two percent of our wealth is held by the top ten percent, and 20% by the top 1 per cent.
Last week, Amazon finally announced that they would be building their $5bn new national headquarters in Long Island, New York, as well as a new national ‘Centre of Excellence’ in Virginia. The reveal of the location for ‘HQ2’ has been the culmination of a thirteen-month process in which Amazon received bids from over 238 cities to host the new sites, which will bring in an estimated 50,000 jobs.
The government’s attempt to get businesses to consider their social impact can be understood as an acknowledgement that something has gone awry in the state of commissioning public services. The dramatic collapse of outsourcing giant Carillion in January 2018 has prompted a new wave of governmental thinking about how goods and services are purchased. With public opinion increasingly moving against poor provision of public services (most noticeably the much criticised railway system), this extension of the Social Value Act represents the government’s response.
However, just because the number of work-related accidents has fallen over the decades doesn’t mean that modern work is harm-free. There is mounting evidence of the dangerous effects on health of modern work practices. This is most severely demonstrated within the ‘gig economy’, in sectors where workers gain flexibility at the cost of employment benefits (sick pay, parental leave and the like) and work that is, more often than not, offering unstable hours and low-paid.
While not playing an exclusive role, Preston’s adoption of a local wealth building approach to its economy has been a factor in the city’s success. In particular, by exploring the supply chains of some of the city’s largest employers and purchasers of goods and service, there has been a reconnection not with only the local economy but also with the local people at the heart of it.
The huge appetite for new ideas was palpable across the three days in Liverpool. On Wednesday morning, there was standing room only as CLES welcomed Shadow Chancellor, Rt Hon John McDonnell MP, Lisa Nandy MP, Jim McMahon MP, Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz OBE, and writer and broadcaster, Paul Mason to discuss how we must restore ‘public value’ to public services if we want to transform British society.
It is no surprise that local wealth building has begun to gain traction in the last decade. Across the world, communities are beginning to fight back against a political and economic system in which wealth is hoarded by a narrow few, public services are cut to the bone, and the many are consigned to lives of economic precarity and political disenchantment.
Wonga did not collapse because of a lack of demand for fast credit. Instead, new regulations – such as limits on the daily interest rate and the total amount that borrowers could pay in interest and fees – created problems for its business model. Indeed, the macroeconomic factors that created the boom of payday lenders persists and there are worrying signs that, despite Wonga’s collapse, financial distress has risen – the number of people contacting the debt advice charity StepChange for assistance is at record levels, and the rate of personal insolvencies has also increased.
Commentators have variously blamed the shortcomings of G4S, a failing policy of privatisation, a decade of unrelenting austerity (with cuts of over 40% to prison budgets) leading to systemic failures in the criminal justice system which is now on its knees. Underlying all of these is something more insidious and deeply pernicious: an abject absence of the values which should imbue public services, including human dignity, equality and allocation of resources to ensure that everyone is able to access public goods (such as security, housing, healthcare) regardless of their own, private means.
