When a campaign in Queen’s Park in Westminster led to the creation of London’s first parish council a decade ago, the expectation was that more new urban parishes would follow. Around half of people in Queen’s Park live in social housing; 45% of children are eligible for free school meals. But community development work was well established in the neighbourhood, and sufficiently valued that when government funding was cut, residents formed an action group.
Queen’s Park community council marked its 10th anniversary in May. But it remains the sole example of this form of community governance in the capital. While devolution deals have continued to be struck between central government and English regions, proposals to reinvigorate democracy at the ultra-local level have petered out. Neighbourhood plans, which were supposed to give communities more say over planning, proved to be highly labour intensive. The listing of community assets conferred limited entitlements, compared with those of landlords. Rhetoric around localism turned out to be a fig leaf for deep cuts to council budgets – just as the “big society” did.
Given this background, and the grave financial problems facing local authorities including Birmingham city council, it is unsurprising that hyperlocalism and community development barely featured in the general election. Important questions about the future of local democracy and services have been left by the wayside.
But with faith in politicians and institutions eroded, in part by cuts (for example, the chaos in courts), public engagement and social infrastructure at the local level will need to be addressed at some point. The recent riots make the promotion of cohesion and inclusion at neighbourhood level, particularly in poorer areas, all the more urgent.
A recent paper from the IPPR North thinktank focused on the possible extension of parish councils (also called town and community councils) to areas that don’t already have them, as one means of empowering communities to “take back control” – as Labour’s manifesto declared that it would without explaining how. The report’s authors recognised democracy as a key principle of community governance, but criticised “out-of-date practices and cultures”, and used the viral row at a Handforth parish council meeting in 2021 as an example. Another thinktank, Demos, has proposed an alternative model that it calls “foundational power”. This envisions a higher level of investment in local, community-led institutions funded by local taxes.
Given the extent to which council budgets are already stretched to meet existing statutory obligations such as social care, it is hard to see this working. But both proposals show that the idea of pushing more power down to communities has not been given up. Simon Parker, the author of Taking Power Back, describes the past three decades in England as “an experiment with extreme levels of centralisation” – which devolution deals have not reversed.
Hyperlocalism is not a panacea. Extra tiers of local government should not be imposed unless people want them. But progressives who oppose devolution on grounds that it increases inequality, and leads to “postcode lotteries”, are mistaken. Minimum national standards can be maintained alongside increased flexibility. Believers in democracy should take seriously the ambitions of those seeking to shift the levers of power over local services, closer to the communities that rely on them.
