The Labour government is putting considerable faith in policies targeted at mobilising community initiative, aimed at resolving twin problems of spatial inequality and disillusionment with mainstream politics. This is not the first time that a British government has embraced such thinking in response to a vicious cocktail of economic constraints, state dysfunction, geographic inequality, and acute awareness of political disengagement and a rising radical right. Since the 1960s, similar initiatives have been launched with great ideological fanfare: that they might reverse local decline, strengthen community spirit and working-class self-reliance, and deepen democracy. Their record in meeting those lofty expectations has been mixed.
The history of post-war place-based policymaking can offer lessons for the government’s current approach. In particular, the government should learn from the past the importance of durable design, clarity of objectives, and the relationship between community policy and economic strategy.
Putting community policy in historical perspective
In recent months, the English Devolution Bill has been rebranded as the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, foregrounding a Community Right to Buy, accompanied by a new ‘Pride in Place’ fund, providing deprived communities with the resources to improve their local area. These measures, alongside Labour’s much-heralded capital investments in regional industry and transport, are the government’s response to what the responsible Secretary of State, Steve Reed, diagnoses as a crisis of social cohesion and political trust stemming from ‘austerity, deindustrialisation, an uncritical embrace of globalisation… [and] a style of government which deprived people of control’.
Whereas today the Labour government is concerned with social infrastructure and community cohesion outside England’s major cities – in the ex-industrial places which, in MHCLG officials’ terms, ‘fell through the cracks of previous regeneration schemes’ –it was previously an ‘inner cities crisis’ which motivated British governments’ original embrace of the ‘area-based initiative’.
By the late sixties, Britain’s inner cities had become synonymous with an apparent ‘crisis’ of community, marked by the persistence of deep-seated, geographically-concentrated deprivation, urban deindustrialisation, the fractious politics of race, and the apparent decline of historic, working-class kinship networks. Aware of the political threat of Powellism and the National Front, politicians scrambled for solutions. Interest in hyper-local, devolved and participatory approaches to policymaking was fuelled by other factors: particularly the desire to offload responsibilities from an ‘overloaded’ state in the context of low growth, high inflation, and dysfunctional industrial relations, and politicians’ perceived need to cater to less deferential citizens, frustrated with the remoteness and restrictiveness of the bureaucratic, post-war welfare state. With electoral participation declining and the party system fragmenting, parties were embracing the language and methods of community politics at a time when they appeared increasingly detached from real communities.
In this context, poverty was conceptualised as something to be addressed not only through standardised services or financial transfers, but by tackling interlocking, spatially-concentrated problems of ‘multiple deprivation’, spanning housing, education, welfare, and apparent cultural deficits of agency and aspiration. Such thinking would shape centre-left approaches to welfare and poverty into the next century.
From community development to property-led regeneration
In 1968, Harold Wilson’s drifting Labour government – alarmed at working-class support for Enoch Powell, directionless after the abandonment of the central pillar of its economic policy, the National Plan, and shedding votes to Conservatives, Liberals, and Scottish and Welsh Nationalists – launched twelve Community Development Projects to conduct ‘action-research’ in deprived urban areas. The idea was at once for community workers to build local capacity, and to deepen the government’s understanding of the complex factors underlying ‘multiple deprivation’. The projects, it was hoped, might revive decaying traditions of working-class self-help and illuminate methods of tackling deprivation untouched by the Beveridgean welfare state.
The programme swiftly became a debacle. Spearheaded by radical community workers closely entwined with the far left, the CDP became synonymous, locally, with bitter clashes with Labour-led councils and, nationally, with a radical critique of the principles underlying the programme. CDP researchers argued that the forces restructuring inner city communities lay well outside them, in the decisions of multinational companies. Policies designed to effect hyper-local change amounted to little more than – in the evocative title of one CDP pamphlet – ‘gilding the ghetto’, substituting a focus on working-class residents’ moral failings in lieu of a thorough political-economic understanding of urban change. This analysis was not baseless but, as the historian Peter Shapely notes, the attempt to bend the original CDP vision to more radical ends ‘achieved nothing of value for the urban poor’, beyond embarrassing government and ensuring future initiatives would be more tightly managed.
From the late 1970s, urban policy took a turn towards private sector, property-led regeneration. The most determined opposition to Thatcherite regeneration initiatives came from municipal government, where the Labour left had gained a sizeable foothold. Despite the political controversy they generated, left-led councils proved crucial laboratories for more participatory and decentralised forms of service provision. The Greater London Council (GLC) lavished public funds on a sprawl of community groups, childcare providers and co-operatives, while Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council would decentralise its housing service into a network of neighbourhood offices. These were flawed experiments, but, by the 1990s, decentralist approaches had entered the mainstream of local government practice. However, one consequence of the ideological heat around local government was a progressive dismantling of its powers – as the Thatcher governments restricted councils’ financial autonomy, imposed compulsory competitive tendering, and abolished the metropolitan county councils including the GLC – from which it has never truly recovered.
Into the 1990s: community in the ascendant
Come the 1990s – shaped by a common sense that Thatcherite individualism had extended too far – politicians across the spectrum sought to compete on the terrain of community and citizenship. John Major’s premiership yielded a new, more conciliatory Conservative localism, albeit within a competitive framework. However, the principal beneficiaries would be New Labour.
In the nineties, much was made of Blair’s ‘communitarian’ political philosophy, though this was in some senses rather superficial, especially given New Labour’s ambivalence towards local authorities. Nevertheless, those governments marked the apotheosis of changes hinted at since the sixties. From state multiculturalism to the government’s enthusiasm for partnership with community businesses and social enterprises, community was increasingly treated not just as an ideal to be pursued, but as something represented by organisations, committees and leaders – stakeholders to be managed and incorporated within a framework of governance. Albeit, in all these cases, there was ambiguity over how representative these mechanisms for community voice were.
Participation and disillusionment
New Labour went further than any previous government in its pursuit of area-based initiatives to increase political participation and tackle spatial inequalities. The headline initiative here was the New Deal for Communities (NDC), designed as a ten-year programme to tackle ‘multiple disadvantage’ in deprived, largely inner-city areas, involving residents and a range of public bodies and other local organisations in regeneration initiatives, driven by neighbourhood boards elected by residents. 39 communities of no more than 4,000 households were selected, with a total of £2 billion funding allocated over the decade.
Given its lofty ambitions for community involvement, the NDC was judged a disappointment, with ambiguity around what participation should entail, rising tensions between residents, councillors and consultants, and the programme became yet another flashpoint in frustration with Treasury ‘control freakery’. The project’s national evaluation found that just 17 percent of residents in the NDC areas had attended or taken part in NDC activities, and just 14 percent of those had voted in board elections.
This was unsurprising: by design the programme was targeted at areas often characterised by high rates of residential turnover, poor relations with the local authority, a lack of pre-existing community organisations, high rates of unemployment, and significant numbers of young people and single parent families. This exposed the great difficulty of ‘develop[ing] cohesive communities in areas that in many cases could not properly be described as communities at all.’
When it came to outcomes more broadly, the picture was more positive: by 2008, NDC partnerships had spent £1.71 billion on 6,900 projects or interventions. New neighbourhood centres were opened; homes, parks and play areas were built; innovative projects provided expanded early years provision, leisure activities, and employment support. These yielded statistically significant improvements across a striking range of indicators, including mental and physical health, participation in education and training, and residents’ satisfaction with their area. Placed alongside other initiatives in urban social policy, most obviously Sure Start, we can see New Labour’s efforts at strengthening social bonds, facilitating new social infrastructure and combatting ‘multiple disadvantage’ in a more positive light.
Frustration with the NDC derived in large part from the scale of declared ambition: the inevitable disappointment stemming from the hope that programmes commanding only a small portion of social spending in a locality could somehow reverse decline rooted in deindustrialisation and the decline of social housing. Likewise, the promise that communities would have control over how money was spent – providing they met demanding Treasury criteria – exposed the tension between target-laden programmes designed to improve material outcomes, and the aspiration to active citizenship.
After New Labour
The Conservative-led coalition government marked, as political scientist Stuart Wilks-Heeg notes, a striking departure in urban policy: for the first time since the CDP, government abandoned area-based initiatives aimed at the most deprived places altogether. Instead, the 2011 Localism Act, shaped heavily by the Liberal Democrats’ enthusiasm for ‘community politics’, equipped local government with new ‘rights’ – but at the same time, increasingly cash-starved local authorities bore the greatest brunt of austerity, cutting a swathe through Sure Start centres, libraries, youth hubs and women’s refuges.
Brexit marked a striking change of its own, drawing political attention from the inner city towards ex-industrial towns, the ‘red wall’ electoral battlegrounds, to be provided with ‘levelling up’ funding through competitive pots of funding. In this geographical focus, if not in the specifics of place-based policymaking, there is clear continuity between the Johnson and Starmer governments. The political geography might have shifted, but the problems with which Labour is concerned – spatial inequality and the decline of local spaces stoking political disengagement, distrust, and a backlash against immigration and social liberalism – are strikingly reminiscent of those which animated the CDP’s founding almost six decades ago.
Learning the right lessons
As the Starmer government pursues its own Pride in Place agenda, it is worth dwelling on three lessons.
The first is around sustainability. As Power to Change’s Jess Craig has noted, plaques on walls are frequently ‘the last visible remnants of regeneration initiatives’ like the NDC. Where the cycle of community feast and famine, in step with government funding, has been broken, it has often been where commercially viable community businesses have been established, able to rely on income from properties bought through regeneration funding. The challenge of sustainability also suggests the importance of confronting the precarious financial position of local authorities, which – when not stretched to breaking point by pressure on statutory services – are best placed both to provide democratically legitimate local voice and to support community initiatives.
Second, clarity of objectives is critical. Area-based initiatives have often fallen victim to ambiguity about their fundamental purpose; a jumbling-together of aspirations aimed at poverty reduction, local economic renewal, strengthened ‘social capital’, a more decentralised and participatory democracy, or just a sense of ownership over small, but worthwhile, local infrastructure. They have been more successful in some respects than others. The most participatory-democratic process may not always align with the best, measurable outcomes. Either way, imprecision or overclaiming about objectives inevitably breeds disillusionment.
The third lesson is perhaps the most fundamental: that policies directed at reversing place-based decline cannot succeed in isolation, separate from an overarching view of political economy, nor from a strategic view on how the great share of social spending attached to other programmes and services (whether on education, health and social care, or early years provision) is deployed. The CDP radicals understood correctly that communities are inevitably subject to forces larger and more remote than those that can be tackled in their immediate area.
This government appears to have learned at least some of these lessons, pairing an emphasis on community ownership with an economic strategy focused explicitly on the geographic distribution of good work and opportunity. Success in cultivating stronger communities will depend upon its depth of commitment, its focus on equipping community initiatives and local government with the capacity to outlast a change in central government policy, and a holistic view of the forces shaping communities’ power and autonomy.
Nick Garland is a historian of contemporary Britain and an Associate Fellow at IPPR.
