On a visit to Highley in Shropshire, scorched under the oppressive heat, the parish clerk’s passion for the village shone through. Not only does she know all those that serve the community – from the local police team to the volunteer lifeguard at the lido and the community health visitors – she still knows the dozens of people she went to school with who still live in the area. As I chatted to those in the community centre the sense of community felt like a real thing, the intangible somehow made tangible. It took me back to a remote community in La Libertad in northern Guatemala where the they come together to resolve and address their challenges. That same sense of people grounded in, deeply knowledgeable about, and proud of the place they call home.
Those rooted in their communities, born and raised in the same locality, are often the most passionate advocates for their hometown. Their aspirations are inextricably tied to the place they grew up, a desire to live a good and fulfilling life in the community in which they were raised, in an environment that is familiar. Not everyone wants to move to find this.
In Highley, I saw the best of community spirit and the worst of government retreat. The town has a deep mining legacy, and the loss of that industry reverberates through the generations. Yet, the community’s resilience is evident. Decades ago, the miners welfare fund invested in swimming baths1 to prevent young people getting into trouble swimming in the River Severn. That facility is still used today and when I was there, during the August heatwave, it was buzzing. But the new sports hall built on the site of old facilities torn down in the name of progress? Twenty percent of the community refuses to use it, a silent protest against a top-down imposition that ignored local history and sentiment. The abolition of Bridgnorth District Council2 in 2009 also removed the tier of local government closest to the community (Parish council aside) and critical services and decision-making was withdrawn to Shrewsbury, thirty miles away. Even in a county context, local knowledge can be lost across such distances.
The sense of isolation in Highley was as real as I felt in the community in La Libertad, even if culturally more familiar to me. Transport links are convoluted; a bus ride to the nearest town might be the only option on a Saturday, with no return trip for an evening out. A road closure – perhaps a tree comes down – can mean a child misses an exam because even if there was alternative transport, the diversionary route is three times as long. The cost of living in an isolated rural area is often higher than in a city, yet the opportunities are fewer.
We hear again of place-based policy, currently expressed through the Government’s ambition of collective actions that drive ‘growth in every postcode3’, always a shorthand for the need to tailor policy responses to their local context. Yet the nuance here is that such tailoring can’t be truly effective without actually being in, the very places and communities that the policies need to fit. That is work that requires understanding of what is and not assumptions about what might be.
I think that we need a new dialogue about what it takes to enable each community to thrive and grow as it sees fit. My quality of life framework offers a way of making sense of this. It comprises four core elements under each of four pillars: individual, community, governance, and ecosystem. Each element has a positive foundation and a shadow side. For example, employment is an element of individual stability, but unemployment carries a heavy shadow that can ripple through a person’s life chances.
Policy fails when we ignore the interplay between these elements and the specific context of a place. We treat ecosystems as mere resources to be exploited, ignoring the indigenous practices and philosophies that sustain them. We treat communities as markets to be served rather than organisms to be nurtured.
What does this look like in practice? It looks like the system we’re developing in Shropshire to support young people : a core minimum standard of support, wrapped in contextually appropriate, locally empowered delivery. It looks like trusting people to know what they need. In a Universal Basic Income experiment in Fife, participants showed incredible creativity in how they would use funds to fix their roofs or support their families, to reduce the burden of worry or uncertainty. No one knows your life better than you do.
But to enable this, we must stop stripping away local knowledge. The reorganisation of two-tier local government – already done in Shropshire and currently being rolled out across much of the remaining two-tier areas – is removing the tier closest to the community. District councils held the institutional memory and the passion for the development of local places and the needs of their populations. We are replacing passionate locals with remote bureaucracies in county towns or in Whitehall.
The result? A loss of professional and local knowledge. A standardisation that makes things worse. Who knows what good youth work looks like if there are no youth workers in the community? Who understands the challenges of refuse collection in a specific community if the council is based fifty miles away? Who understands how the issues we see today emerge from the challenges we’ve faced in the past?
I genuinely believe we need a version of the two-tier system that works, or one that retains democratic accountability that is both accessible and effective in every postcode. Feeling more remote from those who are making decisions that affect us is not a passive state when things happen that we feel powerless over.
What works in Leicester and its county won’t necessarily work for Clacton and Essex. We need strategic authorities handling cross-county issues like social care and highways, and local authorities managing the granular details of parking, traffic, and community engagement. We can have a system in the UK that achieves these aims of locally-appropriate solutions within national standards. I’ll come back to this in more detail in future blogs.
We also need to get money and power down to the community level, not only public investment but private too. We need to stop the “failure demand”—the costly cycle of fixing problems that arise because people fall through the cracks of a fragmented system. We need to invest in prevention, not just reaction, as I have argued before .
Home from Highley, and watching the partial eclipse darken the sky – a celestial event not seen since 1999 and not to be repeated until 2090 – I am reminded of the scale of time and space. Places are where the policy rubber hits the road. They are where we live, work, raise families, and care for our elderly. They are the contexts in which our lives unfold.
If we are truly committed to place-based policy, let’s not just use it as a slogan. Let’s commit to the hard work of decentralisation, redistribution, and trust. Let’s empower the people who know their communities best to do what’s best for their communities. It’s the same challenge I worked for in the humanitarian world – undoing decades, if not centuries, of paternalistic, top-down, Government knows best thinking and planning.
Because in the end, it’s not about efficiency, it’s about dignity. It’s about ensuring that every individual, regardless of their postcode, has the support they need to thrive.
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