ABSTRACT
This book has presented an in-depth analysis of the ways in which localities function internally and how they articulate to the wider national and international processes of change in the political economy. It has sought to illustrate the argument that the relationship between the different scales is not simply a one-way street with localities the mere recipients of fortune or fate from above. Rather, localities are actively involved in their own transformation, though not necessarily as masters of their own destiny. Localities are not simply places or even communities: they are the sum of social energy and agency resulting from the clustering of diverse individuals, groups and social interests in space. They are not passive or residual but, in varying ways and degrees, centres of collective consciousness. They are bases for intervention in the internal workings of not only individual and collective daily lives but also events on a broader canvas affecting local interests.Such propositions are an important outcome of the research reported here. None of us thought in this way about localities at the outset; indeed, much initial effort was devoted to establishing whether or not the notion had any conceptual status at all. Nor were the localities studied selected with the idea of examining just how pro-active particular parts of the urban and regional system had been or were being. The opposite would be closer to the truth: the seven localities were selected to a considerable extent for their variety. But this variety was determined much more by their experiences in the wave of economic restructuring that affected UK cities and regions in the 1970s and 1980s, their diverse labour market and social structural trajectories, than by their local policy performances. This is not to say that the last dimension was considered unimportant, rather that it was not a determining factor in the choice of localities to be studied.Accordingly, the discoveries regarding policy development, policy initiatives and policy failure that have been described can be taken as
Table 9.1 Classification of policy pro-activity in the seven study localities
± = Pro-activity trend not untypical of the range of policy postures being adopted by UK localities having middle of the road political cultures. As such, they are interesting for the light they shed on the different emphases and social origins of the policies being pursued currently and in the relatively recent past. This changing diversity is schematized in Table 9.1 which contrasts traditional with contemporary policy dispositions and sources of initiative in the seven study localities. Three general deductions can thus be made on the basis of the evidence drawn from the seven localities.The first is that there is a clear division between localities having a history of active, local policy intervention and those lacking such a history. It is extremely important to recognize that such intervention is not confined to economic development issues; local policy effectiveness is often focused upon social care. Moreover, local initiative frequently occurs outside the formal sphere of local government. For the present, unfortunately, employment creation has the higher local profile, a characteristic which has, perforce, to be reflected here. Even now, however, diverse emphases influenced by local traditions continue to condition local priorities. The relevant chapters in the book explain these distinctive policy histories. In very simplified terms the difference can be boiled down to paternalism and the struggle to escape it. Paternalism is too complex a concept to explore in detail here: it can be active and stifling of popular initiative as it was at the Lancaster factories or at Cadbury’s in Birmingham, or passive and enervating as in Cheltenham and Thanet where it had its basis as much in local politics as in the workplace. By contrast, those localities with a history of intervention had, to some extent, sloughed off paternalistic tradition, and not necessarily solely by means of local effort. For example, both Middlesbrough and Swindon were classic company towns with all that is implied by that label for control of local social and political life. But the long-term decline in power of local industrialists and, more importantly perhaps, nationalization by the central state of key industries led to the resulting vacuum being occupied by the local labour movement. Accordingly, more inno-
LOCALITIES vative kinds of local interest representation, particularly towards the central state, became feasible.The second general feature of the local policy process is that its vitality waxes and wanes over time and space. Thus the urban-industrial localities - the modern formation of which was closely tied to the Fordist era with its emphasis on mass production, mass housing, welfare provision and, to varying degrees, state regulation of the development process - are now less obviously interacting in their own restructuring processes than they were. The outer suburbs of Liverpool centred upon Kirkby, Halewood and Speke were largely formed by the interaction of central state regional policy redirecting the location of, especially, motor vehicle production and local state housing policy as part of a wider restructuring plan for the Greater Liverpool area. Birmingham’s motor industry expansion was less dependent upon central state policy of the kind responsible for Liverpool’s transformation, but the provision of mass housing close to the booming peripheral industrial areas was a central feature of the city’s urban redevelopment in the postwar years. And Middlesbrough, confronted with industrial decline in long-established industry, mobilized its local coalition successfully to press government and large-scale industry for new infrastructural and industrial investment. But in the context of a shift in the mode of developmental organization in which large-scale industry, the mass provision of public sector housing and state regulation of development are no longer dominant motifs, that kind of local initiative and effectiveness has become redundant.That is, of course, not to say that local pro-activity is no longer relevant as a general rule. Despite the undoubted increase in discretionary control of local affairs by the central state in the 1980s, there is substantial evidence that localities continue to mobilize in a diversity of ways to cope with change. In particular, local policy is now more alert to the manner in which local effectiveness depends on the extent to which footholds can be formed to link the local to the global. At one extreme can be found the phenomenon of ‘place marketing’ whereby whatever is idiosyncratic or unique about a particular locality is packaged and sold to the outside world as a commodity without which, whether as tourists or international investors, they will be unnecessarily depriving themselves (for critiques, see Wright, 1985; Horne, 1986; Hewison, 1987). At another extreme could be found, until the 1986 abolition of metropolitan counties, the example of the Greater London Council, developing for the first time a fully researched industrial strategy for coping with the massive job loss occasioned by economic restructuring (Greater London Council, 1985). In this, links were formed, through the
REVIVAL OR SURVIVAL? adoption of a municipal trade policy, with developing countries such as Nicaragua and Vietnam, and through international labour organizations, with trade unions in multinational companies'having a base in the London economy as well as those of cities in other countries.Initiatives such as these can require a prominent, not to say leading, involvement by officers, especially where political leadership may be so ambitious as to have outreached the inherited norms of policy practice or, conversely, where a local political regime has yet to adjust fully to a rapidly changing policy environment. Our research has shown, thirdly, that where political vision is lacking, clear-sighted managerial initiative both inside and, sometimes, outside the local policy arena can be crucial. In Lancaster, for example, neat footwork by the town clerk’s department ensured that land shortage would not be an obstacle to the possible location of the university in what at the time was a declining local industrial economy. Accordingly, when the university arrived, it brought in new personnel and new ideas that, in the persons of a modernizing intelligentsia, helped further strengthen local initiative, especially in the conversion of old buildings for new industry and the general beautification of the built environment. The urban managerial influence upon Swindon in the past has been written about elsewhere (Harloe, 1975) and it is a tradition that continues in one of the country’s most assiduous exercises in the place marketing of a high technology milieu. But in other localities the initiative has come from within the political system, notably in Thanet, where stagnation and the decline of tourism have resulted in local interests pressuring the council into sometimes reckless policy formulation.However, though there is plenty of evidence of the emergence of local pro-activity, ranging from local boosterism to local chauvinism, it is also clear that the pay-off in terms of the ultimate criterion by which such activity demands to be measured - job creation - is rather small (Benington, 1986). Estimates, subject to much debate as to reliability, suggest that even some of the largest UK metropolitan Enterprise Boards could claim only relatively modest job creation totals by comparison with, for example, the Scottish and Welsh Development Agencies funded by the central state. It is difficult to get an accurate assessment of the numbers of jobs created by either Enterprise Boards or Development Agencies. The latter usually report on ‘job opportunities’ created or ‘jobs forecast’ and a strong case can be made for dividing such estimates in half, at least, to arrive at a more credible estimate (Cooke, 1987). However, even if that division is performed it seems likely that the Scottish and Welsh Development Agencies have been generating between 2000
LOCALITIES and 3000 jobs each per year since 1976 (Moore and Booth, 1986a; Welsh Development Agency, 1981, 1986).A key factor, though not the only important one, in explaining the difference in performance is the massive contrast in the levels of expenditure available to the Enterprise Boards by comparison with the Development Agencies. The Welsh Development Agency began with a budget of £20 million per year in 1976 and was, ten years later, spending £60 million annually on its various activities. The Scottish Development Agency started with £60 million per year and was averaging over £100 million expenditure per year by the mid-1980s (Moore and Booth, 1986b). To this essential factor can be added the organizational capability that these agencies have developed over a decade, so that they are now able to target investment increasingly towards what are perceived as growth sectors, rather as Japan’s Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) has successfully done on a much vaster scale. Moreover, they are able to represent their countries’ interests overseas, thereby attracting inward investment. By contrast, Enterprise Boards tend to have been tied to investing in troubled companies and pursuing socially useful and desirable goals - something which has not featured prominently in development agency strategies in recent years.There is a case for building upon the strong signs of local pro-activity revealed, even for quite small localities, in the research reported here. There is also evidence that if adequate investment capital is available, as it is for the Scottish and Welsh Development Agencies, then not insignificant contributions can be made to the job-generation process. The 50,000 new jobs ascribable conservatively to agency activity since 1976 cannot be dismissed as a drop in the ocean. The question that has to be addressed is how best might local initiative be harnessed to an organizational structure capable of focusing clearly on a precise target, such as the achievement of a set job increment, within given cost constraints and without neglecting local democratic rights and sensibilities? Despite appearances this is not necessarily the scenario for an episode of Mission Impossible.There are four possible models of policy delivery of this kind that are worth considering. They are respectively: 1 municipal enterprise;2 public development corporations;3 regional-local partnerships;4 autonomous development authorities.
