Alf Young: Time to embrace a local approach

Creeping centralisation is not the answer for Scotland’s future – we need to tear up that script right now, writes Alf Young

Creeping centralisation is not the answer for Scotland’s future – we need to tear up that script right now, writes Alf Young

A whole chapter of Michael Heseltine’s report to the Westminster coalition government on how to pursue growth more effectively is devoted to the theme of localism. The man who gave England urban development corporations in the early 1980s and City Challenge partnerships in the 1990s believes the time is again right to trust local initiative to deliver what austerity-focused national treasuries and a broken banking system are singularly failing to unlock. New wellsprings of economic activity 
and growth.

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Earlier this week, I asked some senior Scottish bankers how long it would take to get the UK growth rate back to pre-crash levels. At least ten years was their consensus answer. Yesterday, the Financial Services Authority announced that, from 2014, the people advising you on investments, like a personal pension, will be told to reduce their central projection of what your money might earn, from 7 per cent per annum to 5 per cent. Clearly, even the FSA is questioning when, if ever, past rates of growth will return.

Unlike predictably staid Whitehall literature, the swashbuckling Heseltine’s report carries a caricature of the baron himself on its cover. He is lifting a great boulder and shining a torch into the void beneath, from whence several pairs of eyes peer anxiously back. Who could they be? The bureaucrats and their political masters who, for most of the 20th century, sucked power and decision-making away from localities towards the centre?

Certainly the colour portrait of Joseph Chamberlain that comes next in the report, complete with this acknowledgement from the man who swapped being mayor of one of England’s great industrial cities to become Gladstone’s president of the board of trade suggests as much.

“Unless I can secure for the nation results similar to those which have followed the adoption of my policy in Birmingham… it will have been a sorry exchange to give up the town council for the Cabinet.”

By this stage some of you will be wondering: “What’s any of this got to do with the state of Scotland?” Here we have grown so used to a political discourse which focuses, to the virtual exclusion of all else, on the nation state question, that the kind of localism debate Heseltine is trying to reignite south of the Border barely gets ventilated.

Since it first gained power at Holyrood in 2007, the SNP has, in many policy areas, been a resolutely centralising force. Months after it first came to office, the new minority government’s principal agencies for economic development, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, closed down their networks of 22 local enterprise companies.

The preceding Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition betrayed signs of the same tendency. When the cash-strapped NHS Argyll and Clyde got into trouble, it was broken up in 2006 and absorbed by NHS Highland and NHS Glasgow and Clyde. And now the majority SNP government is creating a unified Police Service of Scotland and a single Fire and Rescue Service, too. Colleges have been pushed into regional groupings. There has even been talk, but no action as yet, of a national education service at school level.

The downside consequences of the pursuit of scale are already there for all to see. Witness the successive messes bigger and bigger banks have plunged themselves, their customers and investors into. Or the eurozone’s ongoing struggle to reassert fiscal order across 17 disparate nation states with a shared currency. Or the current travails of another Scottish quango that presumes to stubborn the creative process in the arts from those whose very mission in life is to give that process its very lifeblood.

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Meanwhile, there is scant debate in Scotland about how the historic power of localist solutions to transform communities or even whole cities might be reactivated today. What Joe Chamberlain and his ilk did for Birmingham in the 19th century, others did for Glasgow, Dundee and other Scottish cities and towns, once defined by what they made, now struggling to prevent their commercial cores losing all sense of meaning and purpose.

Yes, I know, the current Scottish Government is legislating to curb rates relief on empty commercial property, to force more landlords to find tenants for all those empty shops and offices. And it has a cities strategy and a cities minister.

So did the first devolved Scottish Government. There are probably copies of the giant tomes of evidence it produced lurking somewhere in my loft. Plentiful talk, unmatched by any decisive action. There are equally warm words and a confusing array of small funding pots available to diverse community initiatives at a much more local level.

But for localist solutions to have a more profound regenerative impact on communities, large and small, the length and breadth of Scotland, much more radical prescriptions need to be explored. In England, Michael Heseltine is advocating taking up to £49 billion over four years from Whitehall budgets from skills and local infrastructure to housing and employment support and handing it over un-ring-fenced to local enterprise partnerships, bidding competitively for a share, free to spend it on the priorities they think best suit local priorities.

That approach will offend many in Scotland who insist every community must get its fair share of whatever resources are available. But deciding what is fair leaves the whip hand with those dispensing the largesse, civil servants and their political masters.

The modern-day Scottish equivalents of Joe Chamberlain’s council in Birmingham are, in many cases, far too big to be considered local in any meaningful sense of that word. And they are hog-tied by diminishing funding settlements from the centre in real terms and a council tax freeze that compromises their own accountability and now stretches all the way to 2015.

I have direct experience of localism in practice. I worked, for instance, in a freelance capacity for one of those Heseltine urban development corporations, in Tyne and Wear, in the early 1980s. And I now chair, in a pro-bono capacity, the board of Riverside Inverclyde, an urban regeneration company attempting to bring new life to the Clyde waterfront in the communities around my hometown of Greenock.

Nothing I have learned from these involvements persuades me that centralised government decision-making – no matter who’s in power – can match local initiative and enterprise in delivering real change on the ground. Creeping centralisation is not the answer. We need to tear up that script now, swallow some brave pills, and re-imagine what a vibrant localism in Scotland might actually look like.

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There’s is no need to slavishly copy the Heseltine blueprint. But he is surely right when he claims that “policies that are devised holistically and locally, and which are tailored to local circumstances, are much more likely to increase the economy’s capacity for growth”.

Having tasted more than a decade of devolution to Scotland we now need much more devolution of power within Scotland, whether we stay part of the United Kingdom or choose to embrace the power of an independent nation state.