Local Democracy Notepad

The concept of ‘local’ is pretty hot right now. There is the upcoming launch of Talk about Local, for example, which ‘intends to train thousands of people who don’t have a voice to find a powerful online expression for their neighbourhoods’.

Then there are the various events that are springing up, with localism their focus, such as the recent ‘Belocal’, as written up by Carl Haggerty.

On top of that, there’s money too, with the Department for Communities and Local Government keen to pump money into projects that help local government provide ‘timely information to citizens‘.

I’ll profess to having a real interest in locality based projects, and a little while ago wrote about how location can be the foundation of building new communities. I’ve since moved geographically since writing that, and thinking about how this stuff can be applied to where I’m based now seems to turn up more questions than answers.

One of the problems is one of definition: just what does ‘local’ mean – and if it turns out that its meaning is different to different people, does that matter?

I live in a house on a street, in a village, within a parish, that is in a district, a parliamentary constituency and a county too. I’m also close to a city which I visit, sometimes attend meetings but am not officially connected with in any way. I work on a regular basis in London, too.

All of these areas could legitimately be described as local – yet if I were to create project based on locality I would probably have to pick at most two or three of these to focus on. Would this still be legitimate though, and would it mean alienating people for whom local means something different?

To try and refine my thinking on this, I did the only thing a sane person could do in this situation: I asked Twitter.

The responses I received were predictably diverse: based on local transport, nearby streets and local town, enough people to fill a village spread over an unspecified area, walkability, region, county, it moves with you, village, an area of less than 10,000 people, something very personal.

The answer, then, to the question of what local is must be, disappointingly, ‘it depends’. Context, as always, is king. This makes planning local based projects difficult, but it also raises questions about how local democracy functions. How much should people’s feelings about what is local to them be funnelled through structures decided by other people?

This isn’t as much of a hypothetical issue as it may at first seem – for example, the proposals to intorduce unitary authorities to areas such as Shropshire provoked howls of protest from those who felt their local politicians were being made more remote. People’s view on what is local seems to matter to them – and when you break that it pisses them off.

Councillors could help, of course. One positive outcome of the lack of people willing to put themselves forward to be local elected representatives is that we have a number of politicians who are present on two or more of the tiers of local government and can therefore provide continuity and linkage where required.

As more money and energy is spent on creating projects to enhance a sense of community based on locality, it will be increasingly important to research how people’s notions of their own ‘local’ will determine levels of interest. Getting it wrong risks alienating the very people you might want to be engaging with.