Today (Wednesday, June 16), the Local Government Information Unit
(LGIU) published their latest report, A New
Settlement for Place, revealing that the Government’s aims
for ‘levelling up’ and ‘building back better’ can only be
achieved through the implementation of a new constitutional,
political and social settlement, centred around the needs of
local places.
Following the Government’s announcement that the Devolution White
Paper will be replaced by levelling up proposals, this report
calls for a new settlement for place that reconnects the
Government’s levelling up ambitions with the decentralisation of
power in England. In recent years, the momentum on English
devolution has been lost but the pandemic has underlined the
fundamental importance of shifting power to places and people.
Though the debate has moved away from devolution, LGIU still
believes that it is the best way to empower communities and
places. The key recommendations include giving local leaders the
necessary tools to pursue levelling up, introducing a sustainable
funding model for local government and ensuring a commitment to
further decentralisation across all Whitehall departments to give
local government a stronger voice in national policy decisions.
The report concludes that place-shaping has to be driven
primarily by communities and citizens to ensure effective
political devolution.
A New Settlement for Place was undertaken by Andrew Walker, Head
of Research at LGIU, with Farah Hussein and Dr Patrick Diamond of
the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary,
University of London, and funded by Research England. Through a
series of interviews, briefings and seminars with LGIU member
councils, a set of ideas and case studies were developed around
the role of place in post-pandemic recovery. An embargoed copy of
the report is available upon request.
LGIU’s new Local Democracy
Research Centre (LDRC), which formally launches alongside A
New Settlement for Place, will help champion these issues across
the globe by unlocking the latest research and bringing together
experts from local government and academia to do practical
research on some of the key challenges for local democracy around
the world.
A virtual discussion will be hosted by LGIU and chaired by Andrew
Walker on Wednesday 16 June (10am-11:30am) to launch A New
Settlement and formally open the door to the LDRC. Speakers will
include Patrick Diamond (Queen Mary, University of London), Dr
Arianna Giovannini (De Montfort University), Professor James
Mitchell (The University of Edinburgh), Dr Mark Callanan (the
Institute of Public Administration), and Professor Juliette
Kayyem (the Harvard Kennedy School). The launch is open to press
so if you would like to attend, please RSVP here.
Andrew Walker, Head of Research, LGIU said: “Everyone is buying
into the idea that levelling up has replaced devolution but we
know that you can’t have one without the other.
Place is demonstrably crucial for post-pandemic recovery.
‘Place-blind’ policies often fail to achieve their outcomes.
Successive governments have sought to integrate place into their
policy approaches, but there is a growing belief that progress is
stalling.
The current government has an understanding of place exclusively
focused on ‘levelling-up’. It sees ‘place’ as a more electorally
salient approach to redistributing resources that is concerned
with capital spending on physical infrastructure.
However, effective place-shaping has to be driven primarily by
communities and citizens. Place-shaping without effective
political devolution is a contradiction. To make further
progress, future governments will need to commit to a sustained
programme of English devolution which includes a viable funding
model for local government.”
