‘Labour can empower working-class communities without breaking the bank- here’s how’

Seven Labour council leaders reveal their proposals for how a Starmer government should radically devolve power to councils and communities, to build stronger public services and better places to live. This is an edited extract from A Labour Vision for Community Power.

The Labour movement’s founding purpose was to organise and empower working class communities. This was not just to secure better pay and welfare. It was also to pursue the dignity of a powerful collective voice, through which those communities could better shape their places and futures.  

This mission to secure agency and grassroots influence through community power runs deep in the Party’s history: in the diversity of local union and party branches; the tradition of municipal socialism which predated Labour securing national power; and in the century-long association with the Co-operative Party and movement which champions mutualism and shared ownership.

Radical action to strengthen communities is at the heart of Labour’s mission

The Labour Party constitution commits the Party not solely to winning elections and enacting policy but also to “making communities stronger through collective action”. 

This radical spirit of grassroots pluralism and energy may have faded in the post-war era as many of Labour’s defining achievements in office, including the establishment of the welfare state, became more associated with large scale state power. But it urgently needs to be renewed to confront the challenges of our current era.  

Our communities are now on the frontline coping with the fallout of big national challenges and global trends. Yet they have little power to respond. Our system of government is the most centralised of large wealthy peer countries.

Policy makers are often under-informed of the on-the-ground realities

Policies decided in SW1 have massive consequences locally. The gradual erosion of our social safety net as a result of austerity policy is the obvious example, hitting already deprived areas harder, and fragmenting public services everywhere.

But across a range of policy areas, from the ill-conceived Universal Credit rollout to the failed contracting models for long term unemployment support, local partners have had to pick up the pieces when choices made in the abstract at Westminster hit hard against reality. Communities are all too often on the receiving end of decisions made by people with no direct experience of what is happening in their area.  

As a result, mutual mistrust runs deep within our system. The Westminster Bubble tends to infantilise communities as parochial. A Treasury-dominated system of financial prioritisation can’t always recognise the ‘business case’ for investing in what people living in neighbourhoods value.

The Whitehall model of governance doesn’t credit local areas much ability to make decisions for themselves, preferring micromanagement and only a very tightly managed form of devolution.  

In turn, communities increasingly mistrust ‘out of touch’ Westminster decisionmakers who they hold responsible for a system that they feel isn’t working for them.

Politics has been oblivious to a growing, systemic cynicism

For the most part, the business of policymaking carries on oblivious to the consequences of this systemic cynicism, with glimpses of the discontent that simmers emerging rarely, such as when the “take back control” mantra of the Brexit campaign resonated strongly. Nonetheless, communities continue to be buffeted by forces beyond their control.  

This precarious status quo matters deeply for Labour as a party which seeks power because it is ambitious to ensure everyone is able to get on in life, particularly those facing the biggest hurdles.

Labour can only fulfil its mission to restore security and prosperity in our country by actively rebuilding people’s trust in the system and ensuring it works for them. The big challenges our country faces – growing poverty, deep inequality, exhausted public finances and a climate emergency – cannot be overcome without the consent and active participation of people themselves.

Keir Starmer has outlined the scale of these challenges: “Our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm… in 1964 it was to modernise an economy overly dependent on the kindness of strangers, in 1945 to build a new Britain, in a volatile world, out of the trauma of collective sacrifice – in 2024, it will have to be all three”. 

Labour in 2024 will need to forge a new statecraft

A future Labour government will not be able to rely on the levels of growth enabled investment available to Blair’s government, the deference to hierarchy of Wilson’s era or the public appetite for large scale technocratic solutions which Attlee channelled during his landmark administration. Labour in 2024 will need to forge a new statecraft, capable of addressing the complex, interwoven challenges of today. 

This would need to mark a clear break from previous waves of renewal, which were calibrated to the demands of different eras. For example, the Third Way analysis influenced the approach taken by New Labour in the late 1990s regarding the role of the national state and the reality of economic globalisation and individualism.

This sought an accommodation with between the state and market which emphasised partnerships, between public and private sectors and with civil society organisations. Viewed from the perspective of the mid 2020s, the role of people and communities themselves is largely absent this analysis – the third way accommodation is largely a bilateral endeavour between state and market power. 

So, a renewed statecraft fit for today’s challenges would need to be based on an understanding of the limitations of traditional approaches to governance and public services from the perspective of communities themselves. 

Conventional models of delivering services are having diminishing returns

The role of the state is essential but conventional models have diminishing returns. Big, top-down, one size fits all responses are proving too rigid in response to complex, inter-connected challenges that manifest differently in different places.

The limits of market-inspired efficiency initiatives and large scale private sector outsourcing focus on driving economies of scale removed from localised needs, encouraging only a transactional relationship with communities and diverting investment away from building more resilient local capacity.

There is increasing awareness that more effective, sustainable and legitimate solutions are devised with and by people, rather than simply done to them. 

The Labour Party has already made some moves in this direction. Keir Starmer has been clear about the need to restore agency and purpose from the ground up. His proposed Take Back Control Act that would give legislative force to these ambitions, recognising the failure of attempts to give people meaningful influence since 2016.

Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future, which has been welcomed by the Labour Party, focused on economic renewal and contained a radical set of proposals for devolving power to local government.

Labour’s approach to mission-driven government retains clarity of ultimate vision while enabling flexibility and innovation on the means of delivery.

Labour’s platform for government proposes biggest redistribution of power in generations

Taken together, Labour’s platform for the next Parliament proposes the biggest redistribution of power we will have seen for generations. It offers clarity of ultimate vision while enabling flexibility and innovation on the means of delivery.

Labour now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew how it fulfils its enduring purpose: improving the lives of working people. In the context of the 2020s, this means an approach to government and public services that actively focuses on closing inequality gaps and securing better outcomes from public spending, while working within the context of our hyper-connected, networked age. 

But how can they do it? A Labour Vision for Community Power sets out a detailed roadmap for Labour’s route to devolving power. It is written by Labour council leaders who have not only been at the frontline of austerity measures, but at the frontline of innovation.

These leaders have sought to work differently to improve places and services, hand-in-hand with communities, despite gruelling financial and political constraints. 

Labour has always had fire in its belly for deep social, political and economic change. The next government will have an opportunity to take the best of what is happening at local level and make it national policy. They will have the opportunity to really allow people to take back control of their places, their services and their futures. 

Working in this way will undoubtedly require a shift in mindset on behalf of a Labour government to win power just to give it away. But the prize will be worth it: a country where all communities are able to realise their potential, supported by effective public services and with trust in governing institutions restored.

This is an edited extract from: A Labour vision for community power: Participation, prevention and devolution. The full paper can be found here. It was written by the seven Labour council leaders named in the byline and supported by New Local, Power to Change, Local Trust and the Co-operative Party. 

Co-authored with: Cllr Kaya Comer-Schwartz, Cllr Bev Craig, Cllr Tracey Dixon, Cllr Georgia Gould, Cllr Denise Jeffrey, Cllr Peter Mason and Cllr Kieron Williams.