This is what Labour in local government should be doing

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend the first meeting of the Islington Fairness Commission. Designed to identify how the new Labour administration can tackle the problems caused by inequality in the borough (the 8th most deprived in the UK), it’s being chaired by Professor Richard Wilkinson (of “Spirit Level” fame) and includes members from all three major parties. It’s something that we have already taken notice of at LabourList – and it’s the kind of research and policy making that we as a party can still do whilst out of power in Westminster.

What surprised me most about the event was the turnout. Well over one hundred people gave up their monday night to hear about the issues surrounding inequality in the borough – and a good proportion of those who turned up showed a real willingness to get involved. With many local government consultations you can expect to be in a drafty church hall with fewer people in the audience than on the panel. This was nothing like that.

This isn’t the “Big Society” that dominated much of the Westminster dialogue yesterday – quite the opposite. This is about using the powers and leverage that local government has as a means of making people’s lives materially better. The commission isn’t ashamed to talk about the elephant in the room either – excessive wealth – with future discussions planned on equalising society from the top down, as well as from the bottom up.

Of course there were some sobering details. To list the litany of projects that the council currently undertakes (all of which are designed to attack poverty in some form) would have taken the whole evening – and yet poverty, in high levels, still remains. Add to these the initiatives launched by national government over the past thirteen years and you begin to see the scale of what the commission is up against.

Yet this reality – of overlapping, often muddled schemes dreamt up by different “service providers” is perhaps at the heart of the problem. What the commission would be smart to attempt is to create a unifying framework for tackling poverty and inequality (especially health) among the borough’s citizens, that encapsulates the best of the morass of current schemes. If they can do that, then they will have acheived something in policy terms, albeit at a local level, that would put much work produced by national governmant departments to shame.

This is exactly the kind of thing Labour in local government needs to be doing – innovative thinking that can allow us to build ourselves up from the ground level again. I will be watching the work of this group with real interest.