Local wealth building
Beyond industrial strategy
As the government moves towards publishing the Industrial Strategy white paper (due by the end of November) they have the findings of the Industrial Strategy Commission to digest, but will its key messages get lost?
Beyond Industrial Strategy
The final report of the Industrial Strategy Commission recognises that the challenges facing the UK economy go far beyond the need for an industrial strategy, even if it is the first for a generation. The independent commission provides a subtle, yet damning indictment of the UK’s approach to stewarding the economy, and makes a number of broad positive suggestions for a way forward. However, given the fundamental nature and the current frame around industrial strategy, the points are likely to be lost. We need to move the messages of the commission beyond industrial strategy if we are to create a more socially just, locally led approach to the economy.
Improving the social efficiencies of local markets is not protectionism
Over the course of the last ten years, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) has undertaken work around, what we call, ‘Local Wealth Building’. This work has sought to challenge the orthodoxy of the UK’s approach to economic development. In recent weeks, this work has been portrayed by national media as a core cog in reinvigorating our local economies and places. It has come with some critique, the more pertinent of which this piece seeks to address.
What is Local Wealth Building?
Local Wealth Building is a growing movement in Europe and the USA, and the ideas and practice of local wealth building are coming to the fore as a reaction against a liberal economic approach to ideas, and the extractive nature of return on local inward investment. The orthodox assumption that economic benefits will ‘trickle-down’ to the local economy and will benefit communities is being challenged, like never before.
Preston, Jeremy Corbyn’s model town
How one city became an unlikely laboratory for Corbynomics
Corbyn shines spotlight on CLES’ work with Preston
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn singles out work of CLES and Preston Council for praise in a major speech on public ownership and the economy.
Wealth for all: an activist local government
Re-municipalisation? Not the catchiest term, but across Europe and the UK, local government is on the rise. Instead of succumbing to the inevitability of decline and being the last line in mopping up social pain, more people within local government are stepping in – making the economy work better for all.
For many years, economic growth hitched to public sector reform has been the mantra. For some areas it is working, but growth is often meagre or fails to trickle down, and reform is often eroded by demand. The promise of a ‘devolution revolution’ turned into an evolution and is now largely stalled. Inclusive growth has opened doors to a questioning look at economic growth policy but it’s more geared toward national policy. Indeed, warm words around ‘unlocking the potential of growth’ offers nothing particularly new to what many local authorities have been doing for years in terms of adopting living wage policies, working with local business and local labour markets. However, alone this is no enough.
