Labour and a sense of place, redux

I have form for suggesting that Labour has a problem with place. Not place as a word, but place as a concept, as in place management, as in understanding the geography, economy and culture of our communities. I wrote a whole blog about it, and about why Blyth doesn’t have a Labour MP any more which I think are much more than a coincidence.

When I saw it trailed on the news that Keir Starmer had promised additional funding for towns and high streets my ears pricked up. This, after all, is something I’m learning a lot about, both in my day job and my studies. So what did Sir Keir have to say? This is it. “A High Streets Fightback Fund to protect our local shops and retail, because Britain can’t re-open if our towns and our high streets are closed.”

That’s it. The sentence before was about low carbon jobs, the sentence after about the self employed. Even by the modern standards of political speechmaking, it’s poor. As someone who’s seen these ‘speeches as press releases’ all too many times, I sometimes think that the greatest objection a modern speech writer would have to Nye Bevan’s notorious ‘lower than vermin’ speech is that it contained paragraphs, a narrative arc and a consistent thread, rather than its language.

Now, an astute government press officer will point, with considerable justification, to the work this government is doing via a whole raft of initiatives, and might even, with some further justification, accuse Sir Keir of jumping on a bandwagon while denying its existence. That’s the stuff of politics, and especially of resisting triangulation. While the press officers do the rough stuff you can imagine an emollient senior politician on the government side welcoming Sir Keir’s conversion to the cause, perhaps even summoning up the Biblical cliche about there being more joy over one sinner who repenteth.

So what? Did I set out to write a slightly snide blog about Sir Keir’s speech writers? No. I wanted to talk about how, if Labour wants to start to talk about place, it needs to do better than to try and triangulate existing government policies.

That’s not a huge challenge by the way. Place management is at the beginning of its curve in terms of spreading the ideas more widely, and changing not just the major cities or destinations, but almost everywhere. It’s a work in progress, but my view is that place management is both scaleable and essential for all our places.

Keir Starmer can’t afford to overlook that message, or the insights it brings with it. The throwaway line in his speech this week suggests he, or his advisers, know that too.

There are huge amounts of data about the decline and fall of town centre retail, and large chunks of theory about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to understanding place. The Centre for Towns has done some significant work, as have the Institute for Place Management and their offshoots. So why hasn’t Labour, as yet, evolved its own distinctive critique of government policy?

I have a local interest in this of course. I live in a town where the High Streets Fund is being used to plan and deliver a comprehensive programme of town centre re-development. I’ve been privately critical of aspects of the scheme, not least because a significant part of it is just a re-tread of existing schemes or concepts that have been around for 15 years or more.

I’m a student of the topic too. I work in a town where the balancing of the economy, the needs of the place and the town’s role as a significant tourism destination within the wider regional economy has beena persistent, and sometimes overwhelming challenge for civic society and its governance structures. I arrived as an interim at the tailend of a governance crisis that coincided with the Portas project to revive the high street, and I’ve been helping the council I work with to learn those lessons ever since. In turn they’re helping me to study and learn about what lies behind the practice of government’s interventions in places, like the Portas programme to regenerate the high street.

A critique of the current implementation of place management could well be that it’s just another badge for the age old practice of centralized (and centralizing) governments of funding from the centre schemes it approves of. Before anyone forgets it, the much criticized renovation of our local marketplace in Blyth in 2008 was undertaken in exactly the same way, and included, within its funding stream, provision for a cultural space and public realm improvements. Typically of such schemes, once the grant from the centre had been spent, the enthusiasm for using scarce revenue funding to maintain the improvements waned; the water feature was turned off to save the annual maintenance costs, and the administration at County Hall resorted to criticizing the quality of the public space changes in order to avoid drawing attention to their refusal to pay the revenue costs.

When I’ve discussed these issues with other professionals they’ve been clear in their view; the future for many places rests in using BIDs, or BID like structures, to bridge the gap in terms of revenue funding for place management, or in quasi privatization of public space through town centre management arrangements with dominant landlords / developers. If a Labour party keen to establish a distinctive niche in the debate about town centres can’t find a way to adopt the work of people like Anna Minto into a critique of the existing practices of place management, it needs to find a new policy department.

Arguably there’s a school of critical place management already. In fact, there are schools of critical place management. The starting point for much of the most interesting work that I’ve read has been marginalized and minority communities opposing gentrification or the commodification of their communities. This article may have escaped Sir Keir’s gaze, but it’s hardly an outlier in our cities. Neither is research into the way in which places like the gay village in Manchester have been and are being commodified — this article by Jon Binnie and Beverley Skeggs has been available for a decade and a half. Find a place which is characterized by being a place where marginalized people gather and form communities, and you’ll find the threat of gentrification lurking round the corner.

Place management itself though is entirely rooted in human geography, and arguably arose from a critical approach to the reduction of city and town centres to being monocultural retail environments. The tools and techniques of place management can serve many different objectives, but, oddly, Sir Keir and his team don’t seem to have got beyond the idea of high streets as being retail environments.

I suspect I’m not the only person wondering if and when Labour will start to produce some insights into its policies or an understanding of a rapidly changing society that has more depth than Sir Keir managed in his speech disguised as a bucket list of good intentions.

Here’s the odd thing. I’ve been around the Labour Party for a decade or three (or four). I wouldn’t know where to start in terms of influencing Labour policy or practice on issues of place. I wouldn’t even know where I might read it.

Labour could do worse than paraphrase Jane Jacobs; “Places have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” As a way of testing and scrutinizing government policy, it might be a start too.