On Tuesday Pickles me with Tory local government leaders to tell them that they wanted Tory councils to say ‘no’ to Labour’s national programmes where they thought these were running contrary to Tory philosophy. The Tories were championing local democracy and local decision making. Labour has lost its mandate locally and simply should not be able to railroad through unpopular programmes. This may be controversial maybe but you can see his point.

On Wednesday though the story had changed. Central office has decided to make local ‘bin collection’ a major campaigning issue. Rather inconveniently it appears that a number of Tory-run authorities are keen to partner central government in new programmes to deal with waste. The message from Pickles was simple. Co-operate with the government, against our wishes, and we will use the power of our front bench to name and shame Tory leaderships locally. It was not so much as a clunking fist banging the table, more of a sound of a great weight being dropped from up high.

In 24 hours Pickles had demonstrated the Tory’s real commitment to localism and to local government. The problems is, of course, the we are far too ambivalent here ourselves.

In 1997 the new government committed itself to signing up to the European Charter for local government which guaranteed the independence and status of local governance. We never did sign up to that charter.

One of the big challenges facing all political parties is how they - individually and collectively - meet the challenges of localism. Labour ought to renew it commitment to local government and local communities to sign that charter. Labour needs to show that it is the natural home of decentralisers. What Pickles has demonstrated - so effectively this week - is that the Party of the Poll Tax lives on. Yes Pickles want difference and diversity - so long as everyone agrees with him. Time for Labour to mount an attack.

In the event the people of Bury voted 2 to 1 against introducing a Mayoral system. The turnout for the ballot was just 18%.

This latest set back will be seen as a blow for Community’s and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears who seems keen to put a bit more energy behind Mayors and, of course, Bury is in Hazel’s political homeland of Greater Manchester.

If government really wants to introduce this system of government it needs to get on and do it and be clear that this is what it wants. Clearly local people are not really entertained by the idea.

Maybe it is time to simply forget about all this or go back to the drawing board. But I wonder when we will learn. Rumours abound that Ministers want to use a new White Paper to float the idea of directly-elected Police Chiefs. A couple of years ago the LGA found that this was the proposal that was least likely to engage the public and to get them to vote. Such a ballot might make the 18% in Bury look like a monster turnout.

Most of us have forgotten that we still have directly elected members of Health Trusts - goodness knows what turnout these folks are elected on.

To play the broken record people will only take things seriously if the bodies they are voting for are seen to have real powers and responsibilities. We do need a new settlement in terms of local governance, but it needs to be at a scale that makes real sense.

But it as the contribution of Sir Martn Sorrell that annoyed me. Sorrell, Chief Exec of the WPP group, attacked the government for its policies towards the city and business in general. His groups and others would consider leaving the UK for another base unless government changed its turn.

Our government has to hold its resolve in the face of these attacks. We already have one of the most open, least regulated, markets in the world. Times are tight for the government and they will have a difficult job in maintaining investment without penalising industry. This is a time in when everyone will face difficulties. I hope the government stands firm - I doubt any short term changes will make the UK less attractive than many competitors.

Standing firm in the face of global opposition is a real challenge to the Labour movement. So, it’s fascinating to see Unite merging with the USA Steelworkers. I can see why this kind of tie up is necessary and I reckon we’ll se more of this kind of thing. But how will this effect the UK and, especially, Labour’s relationship with the Labour movement?

Labour must decide. Sack or back him, deadline autumn: It can’t go on like this. The top people need to make up their minds on Brown by conference time or the party will be in ruins

Ashley correctly points out how mad it is for all of this speculation to carry on and on, after all, there may be the best part of two years to the next election.

But while I agree with the sentiments of the piece the problem is that politicians simply don’t work like that. They don’t just turn around and say, “OK - let’s back Gordon then” - everything will then be OK.

Let’s suppose for a minute that MPs go for the back me option. Are those anonymous Cabinet members - who keep giving quotes to the broadsheets - suddenly going to stop? Or those old experienced hands who are also anonymous. Or those in marginal seats? Or those young members who’ve never known opposition?

No, of course not. This is Just going to carry on and on. And ordinary members, well we just feel rather powerless. The future of our leadership is again resting on a small bunch of people in Westminster who haven’t exactly got a good track record in making these kind of decisions recently.

Yesterday I was out with members of my ward. We now have three Respect councillors. There’s no easy way back in a place where Iraq and Afghanistan loom large. But we’ll now be out regularly doing street surveys, talking to residents about the areas, collecting problems and looking to take them up, whether they be individual problems or neighbourhood complaints.

We had a very good reaction yesterday. People were pleased to see us. They laughed when we made jokes about starting again from rock bottom. They encouraged us though. It was a good morning.

The only problems we had were when anyone got onto national politic, and it was clear that most residents didn’t want to talk about it either. But when they did they were clear. They simply thought Brown out of his depth. They saw no way back. And, to fair, neither did most of the Party members I was with.

So, where to from here? It seems to me ordinary members are left waiting for the Parliamentarians to do something decisively. But they probably won’t. And we’ll loose a General Election and then look to select another leader who’ll try and forget their role in this current, terrible time.

There will be all kinds of ways forward for us as a Party and as the fulcrum of a progressive political consensus. BUt Westminster will not provide the solution. Increasingly I fear Westminster will be a major part of the problem.

So, Ashley may be right. BUt maybe it’s simply the case that once the skids are well and truly underneath you, well there’s nothing much that can be done. I just wonder about one reshuffle. Normally you wouldn’t want to swell the ranks of your enemies on the backbenchers, but can it really get worse than this?

Maybe, despite my unwillingness to get into this leadership lark, maybe, it is time to start thinking about future options seriously

I’m cautious about many of the changes that are being proposed in the Department of Work and Pensions, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t like all of them. But if things are to change we do need Ministers who are prepared to take on the Civil Service and ditch some of their long held obsessions. Changing systems, building in flexibility, makes sense but few Ministers seem to be able to stand back and review things dispassionately and then insist on change.

While not being a Purnell fan I’m getting more interested in him to the extent that I’m keen to follow how he develops his philosophy. I guess it is now time to begin to consider - if just a little - like after Gordon.

Giles will no doubt rant on again. But if you think the Tories will be fairer, dream on!

Now Purnell is the Work and Pensions Secretary and he may just have done it again. Purnell is developing a ‘choice’ agenda for claimants, but this may not be quite as dreadful as the term implies.

Purnell is arguing that claimants - while being encouraged to explore world - should have access to a greater range of options and should be allowed to choose which they follow, rather than be bulldozed into a choice by the Job Centre or whoever. There’s certainly something in this. Claimants are more likely to respond to something positively if they feel they have genuine choices, in other words, if they have some semblance of being in charge of their own destiny (if only slightly).

But he goes further. Job Centres should be allowed the flexibility to develop programmes to meet local conditions. They should be encouraged to innovate and to create real flexibility in the service the offer to claimants. Maybe, he argues, Job Centres in cities and regions should be able to pool budgets in order to develop bespoke services.

Now I don’t want to get into a technical argument about the benefit system and the welfare state. But to see a Minister arguing for more creativity in the system is good. And arguing that staff on the ground should be able to think imaginatively is, well, very different indeed.

I’ve met and worked with quite a lot of Job Centre Plus staff over the last few years. Many of them are truly committed to supporting people in moving forward and equally frustrated with the rigidity of the system that they are enforced to use. Should they - and others - be given this freedom I can imagine some interesting things coming out of it.

On a deeper level this represents a profound challenge to UK political culture, one which insists on uniformity everywhere. MPs hate difference. If an MP in the North east realises that a health trust in the South West is doing things differently the first thing they do is berate government to ensure that the system is universal.

It seems to me right and proper that services might differ where circumstances differ. It will be interesting to see where this goes - probably not that far. But, again, Purnell seems to be presenting himself as someone is is quite prepared to review recent history and to change course when appropriate. This has to be seen in direct contrast to the centralised, in-flexible, nature of leadership that we’re seeing from No. 10.

For the second time in a year. Good stuff Purnell. More please.

I’ve already mentioned (in my report on the Compass conference) the comments from Ruth Lister that the government was now paying the costs for ignoring poverty amongst families and amongst childless adults.

A few days I had lunch with an old colleague of mine who prepares the annual poverty indicator for the Rowntrees Trust. He felt that the new increase meant that the game was up on Child Poverty. With the economy in the state that it is in it is unlikely that we won’t see another rise next year. When so many people are suffering as they are surely Child Poverty ceases to be a ‘niche’ that makes a great deal of sense.

Our message on poverty - and policies - need to be sharper. It may be the case that the Tories have not pledged to end Child Poverty but this is an increasingly meaningless charge.

The notion of Child Poverty - as it has been expressed politically over the last few years - assumes that we are dealing with a small group - a group that needs real attention - but a small group nonetheless. It is time to talk to - and of - a bigger audience.

PFI is such an important component to our plans for infrastructure development that this may mean real problems for future plans to invest in health, education and so on.

Maybe this is another example of how the government is going to have to re-think much of its policy for delivering public sector investment. If the methods of the last decade or so are failing are we imaginative and bold enough to change tack?

So, I’ll start with some thoughts following the Renasi lecture last week; this was given, jointly, by Ted Cantle and Bob Kerslake. Both were senior figures in local government, Ted as Chief Executive of Nottingham and Bob as Chief Executive of Sheffield. Ted now heads up the Institute of Community Cohesion (IcoCo) and Bob is the Chief Executive of the new Homes and Communities Agency. Both men are committed to the regeneration and development of our urban areas of poverty. So, here are some interesting things that got my thought processes working and that should be of interest to all politicos.

Holistic Regeneration - Taking a Broad Approach

Bob Kerslake reflected on ten years - and more - of special regeneration initiatives, starting with Hesletine’s City Challenges and then running into Single Regeneration Budgets, New Deals for the Community and so on. Some cynics would suggest that there is precious little to show for these area based initiatives but Bob disagrees; we certainly got better at these as time went on. Bob reckoned you could see lasting change and lasting improvements in some of our poorest communities. Some of the changes were about physical, infrastructure development, others were around social investment and some were about key agencies (in both the statutory and voluntary sector) working together, more creatively, in programmes that were designed to support each other.

But these programmes have now gone. Replacing them are the government’s renewed thrust on employment and training. This approach is worrying because it is limited and addresses (in quite an academic way) simply employment, supply-side issues. This approach is simply too narrow for addressing the wider needs of our poorest communities. There are quite a lot of things that worked well that may not be fundable in the future.

For me this is another example of how Brown’s focus on employment and skills is simply too narrow. For example, this will also not deal with the many of the key issues of poverty either.

The New Housing and Communities Agency will be trying to get away from simplistic programmes and will be looking to tailor responses to the identified needs of communities and neighbourhoods (although there are two years of pre-agreed programmes to deal with first). I’ve heard thins kind of thing said before but anyone who knows Bob can testify to his ability to really focus on key issues over the long term. This new agency will be interesting to watch and if anyone can engineer a breakthrough here I guess it will be Bob.

Localised Issues of Identity

Ted Cantle has been working with community cohesion for a while now and although not everyone warms to his themes I’ve no doubt that he is now someone to listen to with care; Ted really has built up a great deal of knowledge and understanding of community cohesion and the issues around it.

There’s a lot of stuff on the Institute’s website to look at and Ted has written a book on the subject, so I’m not going into this here. But he had some fascinating stuff to say about identity.

Identity and belonging is something that exercises many people not least when they come to wonder about an ‘English’ identity or a ‘British’ identity, this last one famously being a concern of Gordon Brown’s.

I’ve always had problems with this, it is if we are trying to re-define a set of ideas based on some principles that are now way out of date. For me growing up - and living - in a city like Birmingham has meant that I’ve never had to worry too much about being English or indeed British. Over the years I’ve been involved in a number of initiatives and events that have tried to define new notions of both identities and I’ve found all of them unsettling and not the least relevant to what I see around me. I’m not talking about formal nationality of citizenship here, that is something else.

Cantle and his colleagues have been looking into these issues of identity and belonging with young people and their results seem to be fascinating. Young people seek to draw their identity more and more from their immediate locality. They don’t identity with country, county or even sub region. Further, many of them don’t even identify with a city or a town. In London, Ted was arguing, young people will identify with a post code or neighbourhood. That is certainly true in the inner cities of Birmingham.

The first time I really came across this phenomenon was eight or nine years ago at a briefing organised by the Independent Television Commission (ITC) which has now been round up into the new watchdog. The briefing was about regional television but it was when we got to talking about future trends that things got really interesting. The media experts at the seminar thought it likely that there would be no notion of regional television left within a decade or so. For example, research showed that young people in Birmingham were simply not interested in what was going on in Wolverhampton (just a few miles to the north) and visa.versa. A couple of years ago I interviewed the Managing Director of the Bradford Argus for some work I was doing. He told me about some private research, conducted by regional newspapers, that showed that the better quality internet link people had the more likely they were to use the net to find more localised news, information and to network with those in close proximity to them.

If these trends are true - and there seems to be evidence from a number of differing sources and perspectives - what does this mean for politicians both local and national? How must we organise our governance structures to take account of this? How will this effect communication and consultation strategies? How does it effect campaigning? These are things that politicians should be considering now.

Community Churn

Cantle (I think it was Ted) also raised the issue of ‘churn’ in our poorer communities. We’ve known about this for a long time in schools. In the poorest parts of the country churn in schools (particularly primary) is now about 50%. In other words only 50% of children who started in a class in September are actually still there in the next July. But in some places - and I know this is true for some Birmingham Schools - the figure can be as high as 90%.

Now we can agonise about this and try and find ways to stop people moving about (and this is a fascinating subject in itself). But we also have to deal with the reality of it. If this is happening in schools, argues Cantle, then it must be happening in the wider community surrounding it. This must be a problem of households and of families.

So, imagine designing a community consultation process over, say, a major regeneration development. We can do some up front consultation but it is likely that the sample group may well have completely changed in eighteen months.

Not only is this a challenge for service professionals but it must be a challenge for politicians. Our political machines concentrate on voters and on those who do vote. Increasingly this group will become older and less representative of the community as a whole. What do we do? Ignore then because they don’t vote? Will we naturally see a greater disconnection between people and politicians? Something to think about.

Community Infrastructure and not just Housing

Finally, I raised the issue of community infrastructure in new developments. I was thinking particularly about the Thames gateway north of the river, which is rapidly becoming the social housing capital of London. Here a city the size of Leeds is being built but the important infrastructure such as libraries, youth centres and GP surgeries is planned second hand. I began to wonder whether I’d misunderstood this until last year when a Select Committee made a great deal of the same issue. I fear we’ve not learnt from the New Towns of the 60s and 70s and that these places will develop without the necessary resources and infrastructure to develop civil society.

I raised this in questions with both Cantle and Kerslake. Ann Power’s (LSE) recent work shows how important families are to poor neighbourhoods and in a series of fascinating, long term, case studies, she looks at what parents see as important in an area.

Cantle was blunt. Far too many local agencies - Councils, development agencies and so on - rely on Section 106 development contributions to put in this infrastructure. But this is never going to be adequate.

This is one area where local politicians can make a real difference. Through both general leadership and planning they can constantly focus on this kind of infrastructure, demand that it is present, constantly point out when finance cuts these critical interventions out of plans. In short, local politicians need to se themselves as custodians of the wider development needs of communities.

There was a lot to think about here and I’m sure I’ve not done Bob and Ted justice,. But I’ll be following through some of these themes and no doubt I’ll be here to inflict my thoughts and observations on you.

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