Driving through and between places always raises more questions than answers in my mind. What makes this place unique? What makes it great for people to live in? Is it thriving? How do people make a living? What groups meet here? Where do people travel to on a Monday morning? What events of the past are invisible today yet fundamental to the community? And before I know it I’m out of the village; farmland, industrial estates, maybe a railway crossing, a bridge over a busier road and now I’m parking in a market square.
Travel – even by car – offers a way to engage with the patchwork quilt of communities, frozen in time and space as I pass through. Especially once you get off the fast track and slow down a little on our winding country roads. Little wonder, perhaps, that I’ve been trying to figure out why the concept of place is once more being talked about with enthusiasm in public policy circles. It begs questions, because the outcomes of so many policy choices emerge in places. Wasn’t place important before? If not, what principles did policy-makers draw on instead? How can you even design policy without thinking about these questions, and what does that say about how policy-makers really see the world?
For some of us it will feel strange to realise there enter a version of reality where place doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is a world of uniformity. Where no postcode lottery of provision exits under the dogma that if a policy is right it’s right everywhere. What works for one Jobcentre Plus, will work for all. Whether you walk into a Jobcentre Plus in Hunstanton or Huddersfield, the service and the outcome will be the same. Policy levers, pulled in this way, give maximum impact as they reach across the whole country, even as they may be missing the local nuance required to actually work in practice. A planning policy restricting the parking spaces available to new homes might work in a city but not in a rural community without viable alternatives to car travel.
A worldview built on universalism probably doesn’t have room to accommodate place. I was once at a session with civil servants where the dismissal of the need for local control and variation in response to context was brutal. The mindset in the room seemed to be that standardisation equals fairness, and that anything else risks the policy-makers kryptonite – the dreaded postcode lottery.
Perhaps it’s a manifestation of the over-centralisation of government in the UK combined with the predominance of economically-driven thinking. Yet the fear of a postcode lottery is in many respects irrational because it’s not an anomaly that must be avoided. It’s an inevitability given that every place is different, born of historical legacies and the unfolding cultural, social and economic fabric that makes everywhere so wonderfully unique.
The renewed focus on “place-based” approaches suggests a tacit admission: a blanket approach to policy doesn’t always have the impact we hope for. It acknowledges that what works in one context may not work in another because the local realities are fundamentally different. When you devolve business rates as a primary funding mechanism, you aren’t creating equality; you’re reinforcing a “rich get richer” paradigm. Affluent areas with growth attract more revenue, while deprived, isolated areas – those that need support the most – struggle to stimulate local economic activity. This creates a vicious cycle. Low educational attainment can fail to develop the workforce needed by business, which means businesses may not relocate or start up there, which doesn’t attract a higher salaried workforce, which doesn’t sustain local services and retail, which further depresses the local economy. Meanwhile, the national redistributive mechanisms that once helped balance these disparities have been eroded. We are left with power imbalances hidden under the guise of avoiding them. This is but one example.
The evidence suggests there has always been a disconnect between policymakers in Whitehall and the people their policies are intended to help. Perhaps their lived experience doesn’t offer insights into the problems they are trying to address. Perhaps some have forgotten (or decided to ignore) the reality of growing up in places outside London. Perhaps they are not incentivised to think differently within the Whitehall machinery of government.
True place-based working requires a cultural shift. It demands that we move away from the capitalist obsession with economies of scale and instead put power in the hands of communities. It means trusting local professionals—youth workers, teachers, social care providers—to tailor support to the specific circumstances of the person in front of them. Indeed, one of the intangible values of local public services is that so many within the workforce are dedicated to serving their communities. Some might say they have skin in the game1.
Place-based policy is not just about geography or community, it’s about recognising that for many their life chances are determined by the ecosystem they inhabit. A standardised, “lift-and-shift” policy model ignores this. Instead it imposes out-of-the-box solutions that rarely fit the nuanced needs of individuals and communities on the ground.
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