The government has launched its Pride in Place strategy, which sees significant investment in disadvantaged communities across the country. It is also, says the newly minted housing, communities and local government secretary, Steve Reed, “putting working families in control of their lives and their neighbourhood”. This follows the English Devolution and Community Empowerment bill, which ploughs a similar furrow, legislating for, among other things, communities’ right to buy and ensuring sports venues are automatically listed as assets of community value.
The strategy is being broadly understood as Labour’s answer to Boris Johnson’s much-touted “levelling up”. The investment, Keir Starmer has said, will “get rid of the boarded-up shops, shuttered youth clubs and crumbling parks that have become symbols of a system that stopped listening”. Neighbourhoods and high streets are the place where the “change” promised by Labour’s winning manifesto must first manifest. It’s not all about the fastest-growing GDP in the G7: the strategy starts by asserting that the government’s “measures of success cannot just be shifts in national statistics but must include change that people see and feel in their local community”.
Labour MPs are praising the direct investment the fund will bring to their communities. The funding allocations have been decided by, among other things, the index of multiple deprivation and the lesser-known community needs index, which measures quality of available services. When communicating the policy to their constituents and local media, they are generally leading with the cash amount being funnelled into their areas, as well they should. Money is what makes things real: policies about duties and responsibilities that cost nothing are cheap in all senses of the word.
People working in what might be understood as the “progressive communitarian” space (including organisations such as Power to Change, the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, Locality and the Co-operative party) want to critique that narrative, however. They argue that Labour’s plans are different from the levelling-up funds because of the structures by which the money will be spent. It provides money and power.
“Nothing destroys political trust like money that comes and goes,” says Caitlin Prowle, head of politics at the Co-operative party, drawing a direct contrast with Johnson’s plan: “This isn’t just about investment in communities, it’s about a genuine shift in power and ownership. This money comes with new powers to shape and own community assets, so that even when funding fades, the community owns those places and can determine their future.”
As with the provisions of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment bill (but more so), it is being framed by Labour as a response to decreasing trust in politics – and, of course, to Reform UK. Farage’s party placed second to Labour in a great many of the areas that will now receive funding. “This is our alternative to the forces trying to pull us apart,” says Reed in his introduction to the strategy. There are no prizes for guessing who he means.
The theory of change here is based on ideas about political trust, understanding Reform as a manifestation of anti-politics. First, it argues that people want to see real delivery in their local areas – and that at this level it is possible to give it and make people believe politics is responsive to their lives. Second, it seeks to build up trust and positive feeling, from where it is strong at a local level, so that its benefits might apply to national politics.
Steve Reed is a Labour and Co-operative MP, and before entering parliament was leader of Lambeth council, in which time he set up the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network. In 2011, in his contribution to the Purple Book (an attempt at intellectually revitalising the Labour right after the 2010 defeat, featuring contributions from no fewer than five current cabinet ministers), he wrote about “handing more power to communities and the people who use public services”, something which requires turning the “traditional model upside down”.
Reed is a long-term believer in the politics he is now attempting to put into practice; this background probably goes some of the way to explaining why this programme is the most fleshed-out iteration of Labour’s localism-against-Reform playbook thus far. Whether it is successful, however, depends on how well Labour can communicate the agenda and authentically own the changes that will be brought about by this shift of money and power. Reform is, many people acknowledge, significantly ahead of Labour when it comes to community organising (something no doubt due in part to the difficult legacy of the Corbyn-era Labour community organising unit, shuttered early in the Starmer years, which became for many on the then ascendent right of the party a byword for a kind of lefty excess that was both out of touch and insufficiently electorally minded). But the potential rewards are huge: a rebuke to the argument that politicians are removed from people’s real lives, and an injection of cash and autonomy to places that sorely need both.
