Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy says the way her local council in Wigan transformed its public services can inspire Labour's plans to “reimagine the state and smash up a century of centralisation”.
The Labour frontbencher told the Locality Convention in Sheffield that the 'Wigan Deal', introduced to reshape council services as austerity cuts kicked in from 2010, was "what we need at national level as well".
And setting out Labour's vision if it gets into government, she compared Britain to “a football team trying to score a goal but with only a couple of players allowed to touch the ball”, with the contribution of most people and most places "written off" because of regional inequalities. The Wigan MP, elected in 2010, said a partnership between the state and local communities was needed if the changes needed to transform left-behind areas were to become reality.
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She said the so-called Wigan Deal, a major transformation of the council as budgets were cut by 40%, was initially a "disaster" because Wigan council dictated terms to local residents rather than listening.
She told a Q&A session: "When austerity hit, we knew that we had to make big changes because we knew that whatever political party was in power, there would be funding cuts and we didn't want to just salami-slice services.
"We wanted to think through how we would reshape services in order to protect the most vulnerable and stop people tipping from just about coping to not coping.
"And so we went out to the people of Wigan and said, 'You're going to have to help us' and the council said 'we'll call it the Wigan Deal, we'll do our bit if you do yours'.
"Great idea, great concept. It was a press release that told the people what their part of the deal was and told them in return what the council would do for them. It was a disaster.
"The people rightly said 'that's your deal, I'm not interested, thanks'. So our inspirational chief executive Donna Hall went round to community groups in every part of the constituency and borough, she went to rugby league, she went to wrestling, she went to carers' groups, she went to pubs and between us, we worked out the priorities of the council and set them to go with the people's priorities."
Ms Nandy told the audience in Sheffield the concept meant that libraries were kept open rather than being shut down and staffed with volunteers, meaning they're now busier than ever before.
The Wigan Deal has been cited by experts as an example to other local authorities of how to provide vital services while under extreme financial pressure.
A 2019 report by the King's Fund think-tank heaped praise on Wigan town hall for transforming services and delivering improvements in the wake of £140m budget cuts.
Its assessment said that ‘by some measures…a minor miracle has been achieved’ with key health benchmarks, such as life-expectancy and quality of social care, improved across the borough since 2012.
Ms Nandy said yesterday: "We kept our community going, we kept the things that matter most to people and through it there's a completely different culture in the council because certainly council is not this monolithic structure that does things to people, people are in the driver's seat.
"They're there to serve the community, they have the skills, the expertise and the resources to be able to make it a reality. Why am I talking about that because actually, I think that's what we need at national level as well.
"The reason the national state is so distrusted is because it's trying to micro-manage millions of decisions that don't belong to it.
"We should be getting investment into every part of the country so that every part of the country can build and create, not dictating what that vision should look like, what those assets are, where that potential is. It's a partnership.
"We haven't always done things like this in this country, at least during my lifetime, but we are going to have to get used to doing differently if we're going to work our way out of the crisis that we're in."
The MP, who this week compared the constantly-changing roster of government Ministers to pop group Sugababes, used her speech to describe plans to give communities new powers to take ownership of assets such as high street shops, pubs and football clubs.
She said that when these local assets come up for sale, communities will have first refusal – a ‘right to buy’ – so that they can take them over, run them for the common good, and generate revenue that is kept in the local community.
Labour will build on the Community Ownership Fund and extend the time period local groups are given to raise funds, to allow communities to make the most of this power and establish financial autonomy.
Ms Nandy also signals that Labour will go further than the current government are planning in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill in reforming compulsory purchase powers, so that where appropriate, local authorities and development corporations can purchase land at existing use value.
She says that under our current model, “the contribution of most people and most places has been written off. For too long, this has been seen as a regional problem. But it’s not – it’s a national problem".
And she adds: "More than that – it’s at the heart of the crisis our whole country finds itself in. We are trying to power a modern economy using just a handful of people, in a handful of sectors, in one small corner of the country.”
Identifying that “growth is our only way out of this malaise”, she says that “the only route to growth is to back all people and all places and to get Britain firing on all cylinders. And we have a very clear vision for how we do that: by giving every community in this country the power, the resources and the backing to make the contribution they know they can make.”
At the same conference Zoe Billingham of the IPPR North think-tank told the audience how community organisations are constantly made to feel like they should plug the gaps left by the state, rather than being able to go above and beyond for their local areas.
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