CLES at 40: rewiring the future of local economies

In the kitchen of the CLES offices in Manchester sits a framed black-and-white photo of the first meeting of CLES, held in Norwich on 1 February 1986. It reminds us of where our story began. We were born out of difficult times, when a group of good women and men decided to rise to the challenges facing our local economies, and take collective action. We’ll never forget our origins or our purpose.

So it was with some trepidation (and a little excitement) that we embarked on a CLES rebrand, our first for almost two decades. The task was to take some time to carefully reflect on our history, our relationships and our work, and to consider how to reflect our identity in the way we present ourselves today and in the future.

Today, we unveil our new look and name which renews our commitment to local economies as we continue to follow in the footsteps of our predecessors.

CLES was created as a radical alternative to the market-led ideology served up by Thatcherism, which systemically undermined local economies across the UK and eroded local government and public services.

Amid major economic and social change in the UK, the establishment of CLES aimed to sustain innovation in economic development, champion the role of publicly owned and democratically operated services in underpinning strong economies and emphasise that higher productivity depends on healthy people and strong communities. It also sought to affirm local government’s central role in creating the conditions for economic progress in the places we call home.

Since that time, CLES has worked in places across the UK and internationally to provide in-depth analysis, insights and practical support to strengthen local economies and advocate for improvements in policy and delivery at both local and national levels.

Our early work at CLES in the late 1980s and 1990s reflected the wider political and economic challenges of the times, with hard-hitting analysis on topics such as the important role of local authorities in job creation and ownership, as well as the emerging debate on the introduction of the community/poll tax. CLES also made the case for regional development agencies, which were eventually established in 11 regions of England in 1999.

In the 2000s, CLES’s work on local economies expanded into new areas including health, wellbeing and neighbourhood regeneration with a strong focus on addressing long-term unemployment. This is the time when I first joined CLES from local government. My early months were spent evaluating European funding programmes, employment initiatives and neighbourhood regeneration programmes.

I was still there for the financial crash of 2007/08, when our work shifted to thinking about place resilience or ‘boing’ economics, as it became affectionately known, referring to the idea that place resilience is about understanding the ability of a place to spring or ‘boing’ back from adversity. The chief executive at the time, Neil McInroy and I worked on a series of publications which challenged the orthodoxy of growth-led local economics arguing instead for a focus on the development of place resilience. The financial crisis revealed just how much local economic development leaders were being pitted against the vagaries of global capital. This was an early forerunner to what would become CLES’ work on community wealth building in the UK.

This, and the years that followed, were difficult times, particularly for local government. But many, like CLES member councils Preston, Belfast and Manchester, wanted to understand how they could make better use of their existing resources to support their most disadvantaged communities. This led to the development of CLES’s in-house spend analysis tool on public spend and procurement. It also highlighted the crucial role of the public sector in underpinning and shaping private sector innovation and growth.

CLES’s work at this time led directly to the development of the five principles model of community wealth building as a key strategic approach to local economic development. Community wealth building was and still is – about increasing the flow, circulation and ownership of wealth, recognising that growth first economics does not trickle down. This remains a central theme and inspiration for our work today.

It was a great privilege to rejoin CLES as its chief executive in 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, it is clear that community wealth building is fast becoming mainstreamed in local authorities across the UK. We’ve also seen it enshrined in legislation with the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act which received Royal Assent on 25 March this year.

As CLES steps into its next decade, the need for creativity when it comes to our economic challenges has become increasingly urgent. The UK’s local economies are characterised by growing inequality, child poverty and homelessness. In contrast, there is less money to imagine a different future – the legacy of more than 12 years of local government austerity.

CLES’s future focus will be to continue to grow our work on community wealth building – including by examining how the hollowing out of public services and the reliance upon private capital is enabling the extraction of wealth from our local economies, particularly for services such as care, energy and housing.

CLES’s work is built on the relationships and trust that we have built with organisations and places across the UK and beyond. A key focus for our future work will be about continuing to provide opportunities for people to come together to take ownership of our local economies. There are many changes happening at a place-based level in the UK from devolution, local government reorganisation, and programmes for regeneration such as Pride in Place. It is vital that these resources are used effectively to maximise the local economic impact for local economies and deliver real change.

Yet regardless of your place or local economy, the centrality of the environmental crisis will define the future for all of us and our children. CLES has been writing about the green local economy since the 1990s and its importance in our work will only grow in the coming years. For us, this is about reestablishing the central importance of local and regional solutions to the crisis, which will move at a faster rate than would ever be possible within a government department at Whitehall.

The launch of our new look and name alongside CLES’s 40th birthday is a great opportunity for us to gather people together once again as we did in 1986: to make sense of difficult times, build alternatives and remind ourselves that together we can not only imagine, but realise a better future for our local economies so that they produce good lives for everyone.

Sarah Longlands is the chief executive of CLES