Making the missions happen

This article originally appeared in the Municipal Journal.

Done properly, community wealth-building can provide the Government with a means to deliver their election pledge of change and to maximise the impact of that change on people and places. That was the clear message from the first of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies’ (CLES) Community Wealth Building Conversation events earlier in the month.

Labour needs living standards to improve and, in last month’s Budget, chancellor Rachel Reeves again made the case for economic growth, wealth creation and opportunity for all, arguing that these were the only way to deliver that goal.

But, if Labour is to win a second term, the economic step-change she is hoping for needs to be felt in communities across the country. Despite the welcome news from the Budget that the Government is increasing levels of investment in public services, local authorities continue to have to make very difficult funding decisions which are having a disproportionate effect on the most vulnerable in their areas.

“community wealth building can provide a framework”

To address this will take more than simply a drive for growth. If the focus is simply on growth in the hope it will trickle down, then the Government will simply reinforce the inequalities that already define the UK. That is where community wealth building can provide a framework to ensure public and private investment works hard to deliver for communities that have not only been left behind, but kept behind.

Community wealth building is about bringing wealth back home to our places so it can be put to good use to create generative local economies which offer decent jobs, opportunities for progression and pathways to community and business entrepreneurship. It is about ensuring new public and private investment leaves nothing to chance and instead works hard to deliver change through procurement, employment, finance, land and assets and ownership.

“embrace the economic power of public sector institutions”

With this lens, community wealth building can also guide national decision-makers in ensuring their plans for growth are developed and delivered with a clear sense of how they will enable change at the local level. We need a national procurement policy that aligns with the objectives of the industrial strategy and growth plans which embrace the economic power of public sector institutions and provide opportunities for social enterprises and SMEs.

Community wealth building has, at its heart, a commitment to public value. This is about a commitment to the common good, democracy and ensuring decisions made by the state are working in the public interest.

“imagine the transformative power”

And community wealth building could also be the bedrock of the English Devolution Bill. To date, elected mayors have been required to stick closely to the Treasury’s economic playbook on regional prosperity. But imagine the transformative power of a devolution settlement which went beyond the narrow confines of economic growth as its only indicator of success. Freeing up places to look more broadly at all five of the Government’s missions would enable an approach to devolution which prioritised the growth of wellbeing and good lives.

Community wealth-building provides the means to ask questions about how economies are delivering for people and place. It asks questions about who benefits from growth, private investment that the Government wishes to crowd in and ultimately, who owns the wealth alongside the means of wealth creation.

If we remain agnostic about how wealth circulates (or not) and who benefits, then it is likely few will feel the change the Government has set out to deliver.