Let?s go local

The MP for Leeds West has a vision: What if the urban villages of his constituency formed a neighbourhood economy? What if local needs could be met locally?

EVERY weekday lunchtime a police van parks outside a block of boarded-up shops. Hard brown steel plates mask what were the doors and windows. The faded graffiti are practically illegible but youngsters gather there every lunch break from the local school, worrying the local neighbours across the street. Above the shops are five flats ? spacious, with central heating, but also boarded.

Sometimes it is necessary to refocus. If you cannot sort out the global conflicts directly, I wonder, is there any chance we could simply get the shutters down off the boarded-up shops in our neighbourhood and the closed flats above them? And run them as a base for much-needed community economic development? For a healthy living food shop, say; a community laundrette; a caf?; a local clothing recycling shop; and as a base for local provision of social services ranging from childcare to care of the elderly? And have tenants over the shop, paid to manage the premises?

Is it too much to imagine that kind of urban renaissance in an inner-city neighbourhood from which an estimated ?4m. a year ?leaks? out in payments outside the community to bodies such as banks, credit and insurance companies ? not to mention buying in all the services and goods from elsewhere?

A new focus on localism ? in the context of globalisation ? could lead to a much more radical decentralisation. The efforts to move power and resources out from the centre in London ? the moves in the direction of regional government ? head in the right direction. But why not a much more detailed decentralisation of provision of public goods and services; why not ? to use a key term from Catholic social teaching ? a kind of ?subsidiarity?? Care for the elderly, childcare, meals on wheels, home visits and assistance to the sick ? why cannot these be provided by people living in the local neighbourhood? What about local recycling, energy efficiency and maintenance of the local environment and public spaces ? all organised and provided with a cluster of a few streets or small villages? Could we really arrange to ?go local? ? so that, for example, meals on wheels, instead of being provided by a local authority social services department, at present cooked and frozen seven miles away, delivered by van across the city, could be prepared, cooked and delivered by a neighbour a few doors away from where it is needed? Can we re-arrange the economics of local provision to employ and train local people to provide quality services in their own neighbourhood?

Nor should ?going local? only apply to public services. What about private goods, local business and service development? Can entrepreneurial sparks be re-ignited in local neighbourhoods to provide new local jobs? Of course, we cannot retreat to a world of ?growing our own? on small allotments. We cannot grow bananas in Leeds. But surely much more could be done to decentralise to get greater efficiency, and provide a fulfilling sense of local neighbourhood service? Local government could provide proper training, and pay people to do work in the neighbourhood they live in, thus radically decentralising statutory provision.

But how far could a drive for deep subsidiarity and local neighbourhood solidarity go? Is the local neighbourhood a convenient fiction that loosely ranges from 500,000 to a few families? What kind of size of neighbourhood do we have in mind?

The great environmentalist E.F. Schumacher advises us to ?think global and act local?. But in our twenty-first century world, post-1989 (when the Berlin Wall went down and the World Wide Web came up) and now post-11 September 2001, people are strongly aware that our world is more interdependent and more vulnerable. In a world of fast-increasing migration and mobility, politics will need to be more intensely local and more intensely global. To embrace complexity people need to ?think and act globally and locally simultaneously?. In reality, in urban neighbourhoods people of different nationalities, races, faults and cultures already jostle together: the global is already local and the local already global. As Fr Michael Barnes SJ puts it: ?The global only ever exists within the local?the tensions and rivalries of whole continents are forced to live cheek-by-jowl in single blocks.?

How local is a neighbourhood? My constituency of Leeds West ? one of eight in a city of 750,000 people ? is made up of a series of tightly knit ?urban villages?. Armley, Wortley, Bramley, Stanningley, Farnley, Burley and Kirkstall form a wedge, like a pizza slice, radiating out from the edge of the central business area towards Bradford in the southwest. Bordered by a motorway on one side and the River Aire, a canal, a railway on the other with only three crossing points, people living in that Leeds West wedge have always had problems getting into Leeds. Cut off from the city centre, people have always tended to stay local; though they are mainly in the inner city, these urban villages have their own identities, semi-autonomous places characterised by a multitude of small family businesses ? mostly fewer than 20 people engaged in engineering, printing, textiles and distribution. These firms were located on industrial sites with street fronts clustered around those traditional villages, so local people grew up and went to work in a family firm nearby.

Some of those traditional firms are still with us: Pennine Castings, for example, or ?Browns of Bramley? ? a fourth-generation suitmaking firm ? and FJ Rogers, which has made quality organ pipes since 1897. There are some new small businesses in the new technologies, such as Northern Instruments (which makes industrial thermometers) but in recent years there has been a contraction of small business and local unemployment has been rising. While the Leeds economy as a whole has been renewed and reinvigorated by new technology companies, and the finance and service sectors have come to replace larger traditional manufacturing firms, there has not been a great expansion in local family businesses in the Leeds West urban villages in the past 10 years. Family skills are being lost.

The challenge now is to revive that tradition. Rather than hope for salvation from one major investment in central Leeds, we need to re-ignite the entrepreneurial spark to rebuild our economy in the urban villages to serve local needs. Local communities need to introduce innovative local services investing the capital already within the community in transport, fair trade, childcare provision, leisure and community housing. They could make the delivery of local services more dynamic and focused on the needs of the local community; they could provide new opportunities for new forms of partnership ? both public and private. We need new social enterprises, and to develop local economic communities clustered around a few streets in those small urban villages.

The future of democratic policies will depend on the renewal of the processes of politics from the base upwards, at a local level in neighbourhoods, and participatory councils. For more than a century, politics in our society has been shaped by the idea that government can act as a society through professional working in ordered top-down bureaucracies.

In striving for a participative society in which decisions and responsibilities are devolved as far as practically possible to the local level, we need to rethink strategies for building basic communities in our society.

Writing in 1516, Thomas More in Utopia suggested that the optimum size of a neighbourhood community would be reached by combining 30 large households into manageable units of about 500 people. He wrote that ?30 households, 15 from each side, are assigned to each hall and take their meals there.? This seems to be a present vision of a few streets grouped together in modern urban society ? remarkably close to the cast of our street-based soap operas. But once we decide on a scale of a manageable size, the question remains: ?Are we responsible for working together with our immediate neighbours??

And can we imagine a confession which includes the words, ?It is nine weeks since I even made an effort to speak to my next-door neighbour??