Comment: 12.07.2010

Julian Dobson

Perhaps we need a new name for this type of localism. Directed localism, maybe, or enforced localism. Or letting a thousand flowers wither.

We are starting to see a very centralised kind of localism. While we await white papers and a localism bill to spell out the detail of the coalition’s thinking, observing its behaviour can tell us a thing or two.

Eric Pickles and his team talk a lot about handing back power to the people. The language is remarkably loaded: in his announcement scrapping regional strategies, he called them ‘the previous government’s Soviet tractor style top-down planning targets’ and promised councils would be ‘free to protect green belt surrounding 30 towns’.

It’s clear what outcome Mr Pickles wants, or wants people to think he wants. He isn’t saying councils would also be free to allow building on the green belt.

But there’s much more. Policy on business support and innovation, for example, is being centralised. The Commission for Rural Communities, independent advocate for some of the most isolated and far-flung parts of England, is being axed on the grounds that policy should be ‘driven from the centre’.

A short walk from Mr Pickles’ office takes you to Tothill Street, where Iain Duncan Smith presides over the Department for Work and Pensions. His vision is of housing benefit restrictions that will push benefit claimants out of more expensive areas into cheaper ones; and of using the social housing system to switch tenants from areas that lack jobs into ones where jobs are growing.

Both ideas are anything but localist: the vision is of a great clearing house that moves people where employers feel they are needed, while shifting those out of work into marginal areas. Think what that will do for local economies. It’s a reversal of Tony Blair’s vision that nobody should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live.

And for a real sense of what the coalition’s approach to localism might involve, look at the deficit reduction strategy. Apart from the emergency budget, we’ve had announcements out of the blue on in-year spending, capital programmes and Building Schools for the Future.

A localist approach, you’d imagine, would be for cuts to be decided locally – that assuming their scale is a given, local people should consider how and where they should be made. You might envisage a deliberative process, or a transition period to offer local partners a chance to put alternative services in place. Instead cuts are announced centrally with no engagement with those affected, though great play is made of the fact that localities can pick up some of the pieces.

Perhaps we need a new name for this of localism. Directed localism, maybe, or enforced localism. Or letting a thousand flowers wither.