Political Geography as Public Policy? ‘Place-shaping’ as a Mode of Local Government Reform

Abstract

The release of the Final Report of the Lyons Inquiry into Local Government in England, entitled Place-shaping: A shared ambition for the future of local government (Lyons Inquiry into Local Government) was a significant milestone in the debate on local government reform. Place-shaping is a sophisticated piece of rhetoric and policy making and can be seen to have relevance far beyond its own jurisdiction. This paper traces its theoretical antecedents alongside developments in the debate on local government in England. Despite its broad appeal, we argue that problems familiar to local government such as rent-seeking and cost shifting will be heightened rather than resolved with any take-up of the place-shaping agenda.

Notes

1. Prior to the 2010 General Election, Cameron (2009) spoke of the ‘redistribution of power’, and the ‘devolution of power’ with an explicit endorsement of the principle of subsidiarity (‘we should start by pushing political power down as far as possible, whenever possible’) and an increase in both individual power and local power. These policy prescriptions are now heavily reflected in the 2010 Coalition government's stance on local government, with the departmental website adopting a mantra-like approach to key elements of Lyons’ place-shaping agenda:

• “Localism, localism, localism” The Government is overseeing a fundamental shift of power away from Westminster to councils, communities and homes across the nation. A radical localist vision is turning Whitehall on its head by decentralizing central government and giving power to the people (Communities and Local Government, 2010b).

2. By the end of the third Report, Lyons stated: ‘Reform of the local government funding system should aim to do two things. Firstly, [it] should compliment my recommendations on the changes to the function and role of local government. Secondly, it should address those aspects of the current funding system which may act as a barrier to local choice and effective place-shaping (Lyons Inquiry into Local Government, 2007, p. 211).

3. These suggestions included that council rates ought not be subject to capping, that councils ought to allowed to charge for waste services, that a supplementary (local) business tax be allowed, that the plausibility of a tourist tax be investigated and that Local Income Tax (LIT) be considered in the ‘medium term’ (Lyons Inquiry into Local Government, 2007, pp. 260–272).

4. Perhaps more important is the fact that the theory was betrayed in implementation, as Stoker (2004, p. 39) pointed out: ‘Users were not the key choosers. Rather, externally imposed demands from central government via regulation, and the extensive internalization of mechanisms of the new managerialism among the officials running public services, appear to have driven the search for change’.

5. Harvey (2002, p. 457) makes this observation: ‘If, for example, urban entrepreneurialism (in the broadest sense) is imbedded in a framework of zero-sum inter-urban competition for resources, jobs, and capital, then even the most resolute and avant-garde municipal socialists will find themselves, in the end, playing the capitalist game and performing as agents of discipline for the very process they are trying to resist’.

6. The Pluralist's argument against absolute sovereignty is at once both an epistemological and a normative claim, that is, because individuals and groups have innate differences and can form civil associations that absolute sovereignty ought not to reside in one sovereign state. Wenman (2007, p. 804) made this clear: ‘According to Figgis, the Hobbesian theory of sovereignty—with its assumption of a mass of atomised individuals presided over by a central state authority—“is simply unable to account for the ‘whole complex structure of civil society”’.

7. Wenman (2007, p. 806) also noted the tendency of romanticizing medieval society and politics in the tradition of English pluralism writ large: ‘All three theorists were attracted to the “formalised differentiation” of medieval society’. Lyons, too, takes time to indulge in this (Lyons Inquiry into Local Government, 2007, pp. 45–46). It is precisely this idea ‘formalised differentiation’ that Ernest Gellner (1994, p. 9), in his last and most passionate book, objected to:

• The objection to the ancient city is not so much that it prefers positive liberty (fulfilment) to negative liberty (absence of external constraints), but that its crucial defects preclude the possibility of formulating the contrast. It thrusts onto the individual an ascribed identity, which then may or may not be fulfilled, whereas a modern conception of freedom includes the requirement that identities be chosen rather than ascribed.