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Local government at the heart of a just transition

As the energy price cap rises today, CLES Senior Researcher, Ellie Radcliffe, reflects on her recent visit to the Apse Big Energy Summit and considers the role of local authorities in balancing climate and economic justice.

Nearly three years since three hundred local authorities began to declare climate emergencies, the removal of the energy price cap today arrives as the Big Six energy companies have recorded over a billion pounds of profits. This is just part of the picture, with oil and gas giants BP and Shell spending over £147 billion in stock buybacks and shareholder dividends since 2010 – seven times more than what would be needed to keep households’ energy bills at a manageable level.
“we need an approach to decarbonisation which changes the fundamental building blocks of economies”
Such profiteering hits to the heart of why we need an approach to decarbonisation which changes the fundamental building blocks of economies, making them work for ordinary people and our places, as well as the planet. At CLES, we advocate for community wealth building as a pathway towards this just transition, with local government at its heart.

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Post-pandemic social value in Manchester

”They return the love around here, don’t they?” – Guy Garvey
In its recently published Levelling Up White Paper, the government argued that the power of public procurement should be used to deliver support to communities and pledged to put social value at the heart of government spending. The forthcoming Procurement Bill will, the government argue, provide the means to realise this ambition. In this, there is much that can be learned from the work of Manchester City Council.

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Making financial power work for local places

This article originally appeared in Responsible Finance. 

Recent years have seen a growing number of local councils across the UK, including Birmingham, Sandwell and Wigan, as well as the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales adopting community wealth building to develop collaborative solutions to local social and economic problems. In contrast to the UK Government’s much-touted levelling up agenda, community wealth building is a tested method for people-centred local economic development that brings real change to local places.

Community wealth building is about a more progressive form of local economics. It helps to increase the flow of wealth back into local communities enabling people to start businesses, develop skills and access jobs. One of the ways in which it does this is by harnessing the economic power of “anchor institutions”, such as local authorities, NHS trusts, colleges and housing associations, to strengthen the economic resilience, social cohesion and environmental health of local places. Through the strategic use of their spending, hiring and asset use anchor institutions can deploy their economic power to support the development and growth of local businesses. Ensuring that all businesses and social enterprises have access to fair and ethical finance is a key component of community wealth building.

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The brave

Four lessons from Scotland in delivering community wealth

At the close of the 2021 Community Wealth Building Summit, we reflect on remarks by our opening keynote speaker Tom Arthur MSP and the work that CLES has undertaken with the Scottish government over the last 12 months. The lessons learned should resonate with governments of all scales in Scotland and the wider community wealth building movement.

In his opening remarks to this week’s Community Wealth Building Summit, Tom Arthur MSP argued that community wealth building provided an “opportunity to approach economic development in a new way” in order to help create “common prosperity”. As the Scottish Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth, Mr Arthur has put community wealth building at the forefront of his agenda arguing that it needs to sit across government, providing a “whole system approach” to an inclusive economy. He also confirmed the Scottish government’s intention to introduce a Community Wealth Building Bill during this parliament, to consolidate changes in practice and enable local anchor organisations to use their economic leverage to deliver more for local people and communities.

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Raising Council Tax won’t fix local government

This article originally appeared in Tribune.

A decade of austerity has decimated local authority funding and left many councils in crisis – but hiking regressive Council Tax isn’t a real solution. Ahead of the today’s budget statement, CLES’s Rachel Bentley and Victoria Bettany have written for Tribune explaining why.

This week’s Budget will be make or break for councils across the UK. It’s set to be a true test of whether the government really cares about the poorest in our society, or whether it’s content to continue passing off responsibility entirely to local authorities, whose capacity to help has been diminished by a decade of austerity.

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Welsh Government

(2019 – ongoing)

CLES has been appointed as community wealth building partner to the Welsh government. Our role is to support anchor institutions in selected Public Services Board (PSB) areas across Wales to explore community wealth building approaches, with a focus on progressive procurement. This project is being delivered by CLES and the Wales Co-operative Centre.

Context

  • The progressive national policy context in Wales provides a supportive framing for community wealth building approaches.
  • The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act means there is a specific legislative focus on improving the economic, social, environmental, and cultural well-being of people and communities in Wales.
  • The Welsh Government also prioritise strengthening the foundational economy – those sectors which deliver the everyday goods and services that people across Wales depend on.
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Hywel Dda University Health Board

(2020 – ongoing)

Health spending has the potential to be a core economic driver in local economies, helping to mould the local economic architecture of places to address the social determinants of health and tackle some of the core drivers of avoidable demand into the health system. CLES, with Hywel Dda University Health Board (HDUHB), are exploring how a progressive health board can maximise the impact of its spending power for wellbeing in Wales.

Context

  • Health spending has the potential to be a core economic driver in local economies. However, this has yet to be realised at scale by health institutions in the UK.
  • In England, many health institutions are keen to explore their role as local economic agents, but this can be hampered by a muddled national policy context and a tendency towards centralised systems.
  • In Wales, the national commitment to a wellbeing economy and the prioritisation of the everyday, foundational economy, provides a progressive policy frame within which the scope for health spending as a core economic driver can be fully explored.
  • CLES is supporting HDUHB, which provides healthcare services to a population of around 384,000 throughout Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, to pioneer this approach.
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Local elections 2021: Ideas for new administrations

This article originally appeared in The MJ.

Economic recovery from COVID-19 will be a long and painful process. When the pandemic struck, we at CLES argued for a new common-sense approach to economic development based on the principles of community wealth building.

From this emerged our plea for local government to muscle-up and embrace a series of key interventions to lead the charge to build back better. In our Own the future publication, we fleshed out a number of practical actions, which taken together, constitute an achievable vision for a just recovery and the social, democratic and economic reform of localities, led by local authorities.

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A budget for recovery…but recovery for whom?

Years of successive budgets have been high on rhetoric and low on the content required to fundamentally change our economy. This budget is no different. The budget has continued to shore up spend, but not for local economies, local public services or the climate. In previous times, increased state spending would have benefited public sector workers and enhanced the social protection floor to insure us against poverty and destitution. Not this time.

Within the continued pledge to do “whatever it takes” there are plenty of warm words, bolstered by policies that show concern, but the cold harshness of a fossil fuelled economy of growth, financialisation and wealth extraction remains.

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Summit 2020: Procurement for economic reform

Ding dong, 2020 is nearly over and we here at CLES are thinking about hope in the darkness and the prospect of local economic reform as we commence the long journey to Covid-19 recovery. In this spirit we’re sharing write ups of our policy breakout sessions from November’s Community Wealth Building Summit. Today Amanda Stevens looks at the role of progressive procurement in supporting local employment and recirculating wealth and surplus locally.

In this interesting session there was broad agreement by the panel and delegates that a change in perceptions about procurement is needed: procurement professionals should be encouraged to think beyond bureaucratic and technical considerations and to consider procurement as a lever to address economic, social and environmental challenges.

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The Commons

By applying a community wealth building approach, local land and property assets can be owned and managed in ways which ensure that they generate wealth for local citizens, as opposed to being enclosed by private interests.

The goal here is not simply for a local authority or anchor institution to ‘own more land’, but instead to ensure that the land they do own is run by and for the people. This can be understood through the concept of ‘the commons’- the idea that the land held by public institutions is owned by all of us, together. To achieve this, public landowners should develop governance and management structures where communities can take direct control of common assets. By advancing a ‘commons’ approach to public land and assets, anchors can ensure that our shared buildings, parks, and other land holdings help to create good local economies, ensure sensible environmental stewardship, and advance social justice.

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Community Land Trusts

Urban Community Land Trusts

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are democratically run organisations set up to develop and manage land and assets in the interests of their members. They tend to be set up to solve a local problem, such as unaffordable housing, or derelict and unproductive land. CLTs are driven by concerned members of communities who wish to take economic development into their own hands. Whilst they tend to be vehicles for the long-term stewarding of affordable housing, they can also develop other assets important to the community, such as community-run pubs, food growing or workspaces.

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Lewes district – mobilising council assets, decarbonising supply chains

Breakout session: 3.15pm

Behind the plaudits for the “Preston model” lies a fundamental truth about community wealth building: there is no one way to do it. The power of the approach lies in its flexibility to local context and conditions. In these breakout sessions we will delve into the experience of places – who are at different stages in their community wealth building “journey”, in rural and urban contexts, with different challenges and enablers – to draw out the lessons that can be applied to your place.

Lewes is the county town of East Sussex in south east England. While the town and rural hinterlands to its north are relatively affluent, the outlying areas of the district and those areas adjoining the south coast experience high levels of deprivation.

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A green recovery for local economies

Covid-19 and the climate emergency both expose in different ways the fundamental lack of resilience in how we develop local economies in the UK. There has been a lot of talk about how we must “build back better”, but if we want a green recovery worthy of the name, it will mean confronting these underlying issues once and for all.

Local economies are, right now, between a rock and a hard place: the rock – an unprecedented economic collapse, with mass unemployment, business failure, and social destitution for many; the hard place – the looming threat of climate emergency, with every new hot day a reminder that the clock is ticking towards ecological collapse.

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