The communities in which we all live and work are facing enormous social, economic and demographic changes. It’s going to be harder for councils to keep services going, let alone cope with rising demand for social care as the number of older people increases, because they are bearing the brunt of the coalition’s austerity. Councils are having their government funding nearly halved and the poorest areas have unfairly been hit the hardest.
What this means is that we have to change the way in which public money is spent on the things we all value and rely on. We need to get money out of Whitehall and down to communities where it can be used to best effect. And we need to devolve to councils and groups of councils (like the combined authorities and city regions) more powers over transport investment, planning, skills, and finding jobs for the long-term unemployed. This is one of the ways in which we can radically change the way in which England is run to make it a much less centralised country.
But perhaps most important of all, we need to do this to address the crisis of confidence, and alienation there is in our politics. The global economic crash came as a great shock, we have a cost of living crisis, and parents think about pensions, housing or the environment and wonder whether the future for their children will be better than the life they have enjoyed. Many people feel that too many decisions are taken too far away from them.
And that’s why the only way we are going to rebuild confidence in the power of people working together to create something better – the thing we call politics – is to give people the power to do precisely that for themselves.
For too long, we have fallen prey to consumerist politics – people demanding of government and then sitting back to wait for things to happen. The changes I want to see are based on the idea of contributory politics – it’s up to all of us to put something in because by taking responsibility we can take back power over our own lives.
And that’s what Labour’s One Nation idea is all about. Reform of the market to tackle the cost of living crisis and vested interests. Getting finance to encourage and support innovation and a longer term view. Pushing power down to communities so that people locally can build the homes they need, tackle the payday lenders, and generate renewable energy. England’s big cities are already leading the way on this and showing what can be done – a wonderful antidote to gloom and despair.
At the end of this month, Jon Cruddas and I are organising a Policy Review symposium that will bring together council leaders, MPs, members of the shadow cabinet, policy makers, academics, and those working in the third sector to discuss all this and more.
At a time when money is tight, how exactly are we going to change the relationship between central and local government, social institutions and the market? How do we reorganise our public services around people, households and places rather than administrative structures? And how do we tell the story of what this will make possible? These are the questions informing our policy making so that we can win the election in 2015 and provide the groundwork for a radical, reforming government.
Hilary Benn is shadow communities and local government secretary, and MP for Leeds Central
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