Law, Localism & Governance
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Law
Abstract
'I have 3 very clear priorities: localism, and we'll weave that into everything we do from parks to finance to policy. My second priority is localism, and my third is ... localism' (Eric Pickles, Minister for Communities and Local Government, June 2010).
There can be can no doubt that the current Government aim to increase the ability of local communities to make decisions for themselves. The Localism Bill of 2010 currently making its way through Parliament promises to give communities 'a right to challenge' the ways in which public services are currently provided, a 'right to buy' community assets if they are threatened with closure and a 'right to build' if sufficient votes can be gathered in local referenda. There is no legal definition of 'the local' in the 2010 Bill, the concept is assumed to be widely understood. As it stands, community based localism appears primarily to be aimed at devolution to the grass roots, empowering local democracy, particularly in land use terms at the neighbourhood scale.
This research project will consider how law can define and promote 'the local' to supplement and at times challenge conventional understandings of local government. It has two key strands of investigation. The first is to ask whether localities can ever be sufficiently separate to justify wholly local-decision making. Legally, localities must still abide by national, EU and international law, protecting habitats or human rights, for example or engaging in transparent procurement practices or ensuring that highways run smoothly from one locality to the next. In the Ealing comedy, A Passport to Pimlico, it was evident that a locality could not secede for long. Places and people are closely connected. Yet localism invokes a boundary, both geographic and legal, distinguishing between an inside and an outside, with people either 'in' or 'out'. This is a familiar experience for many. School catchment areas, primary care trusts and local authorities can all offer very different services either side of this dividing line. We are familiar with 'post code lotteries' but rarely comfortable with the stark divisions they can produce. If localism now devolves still further to the 'micro-local' scale, distinguishing between neighbourhoods or parish councils, will this mean that those willing to sit in meetings at 7pm on a cold November night can make binding decisions affecting all residents? Or will localism exist in name only with local authorities or other regulators still required to resolve disputes both within and between localities?
The second strand of localism this research project will investigate is whether the machinery of localism (neighbourhood planning, local policing, GP commissioning or urban regeneration projects) that facilitate local democracy and autonomy, will in fact allow volunteers and a 'coalition of the willing' to decide what their locality should be like, both in terms of development (new houses or industrial opportunities) or behaviour (music deemed anti-social in a 'family neighbourhood' may not for example be inappropriate in a block of student flats). Since both poverty and wealth are closely correlated with place, will local-decision-making exclude the wrong type of resident, be they students, commuters or the poor?
This research fellowship aims to investigate both these sets of questions by asking whether legal understandings of the local are procedurally and substantively just. The research will be explicitly cross-disciplinary in law and geography and will work with residential communities to investigate how residents, neighbourhoods and local authorities use legal mechanisms to define and implement localism and the local on the ground. The project also aims to connect academia with practice, establishing a network and a blog to ensure that scholars, from all disciplines, are engaging with policy analysts, regulators, local authorities and service users on a regular and consistent basis.
There can be can no doubt that the current Government aim to increase the ability of local communities to make decisions for themselves. The Localism Bill of 2010 currently making its way through Parliament promises to give communities 'a right to challenge' the ways in which public services are currently provided, a 'right to buy' community assets if they are threatened with closure and a 'right to build' if sufficient votes can be gathered in local referenda. There is no legal definition of 'the local' in the 2010 Bill, the concept is assumed to be widely understood. As it stands, community based localism appears primarily to be aimed at devolution to the grass roots, empowering local democracy, particularly in land use terms at the neighbourhood scale.
This research project will consider how law can define and promote 'the local' to supplement and at times challenge conventional understandings of local government. It has two key strands of investigation. The first is to ask whether localities can ever be sufficiently separate to justify wholly local-decision making. Legally, localities must still abide by national, EU and international law, protecting habitats or human rights, for example or engaging in transparent procurement practices or ensuring that highways run smoothly from one locality to the next. In the Ealing comedy, A Passport to Pimlico, it was evident that a locality could not secede for long. Places and people are closely connected. Yet localism invokes a boundary, both geographic and legal, distinguishing between an inside and an outside, with people either 'in' or 'out'. This is a familiar experience for many. School catchment areas, primary care trusts and local authorities can all offer very different services either side of this dividing line. We are familiar with 'post code lotteries' but rarely comfortable with the stark divisions they can produce. If localism now devolves still further to the 'micro-local' scale, distinguishing between neighbourhoods or parish councils, will this mean that those willing to sit in meetings at 7pm on a cold November night can make binding decisions affecting all residents? Or will localism exist in name only with local authorities or other regulators still required to resolve disputes both within and between localities?
The second strand of localism this research project will investigate is whether the machinery of localism (neighbourhood planning, local policing, GP commissioning or urban regeneration projects) that facilitate local democracy and autonomy, will in fact allow volunteers and a 'coalition of the willing' to decide what their locality should be like, both in terms of development (new houses or industrial opportunities) or behaviour (music deemed anti-social in a 'family neighbourhood' may not for example be inappropriate in a block of student flats). Since both poverty and wealth are closely correlated with place, will local-decision-making exclude the wrong type of resident, be they students, commuters or the poor?
This research fellowship aims to investigate both these sets of questions by asking whether legal understandings of the local are procedurally and substantively just. The research will be explicitly cross-disciplinary in law and geography and will work with residential communities to investigate how residents, neighbourhoods and local authorities use legal mechanisms to define and implement localism and the local on the ground. The project also aims to connect academia with practice, establishing a network and a blog to ensure that scholars, from all disciplines, are engaging with policy analysts, regulators, local authorities and service users on a regular and consistent basis.
Planned Impact
This research project will benefit all those interested in 'the local' and those tasked with or interested in the advancement of a localist agenda. It will provide public servants, policy analysts, community groups, campaigning organizations, lawyers practicing in the private sector and interested individuals with resources on localism, clarifying how the idea of the local differs from conventional understandings of local government. It will do this in three ways: through a blog, a network made up of academics and practitioners and by a strengthening of the capacity for socio-legal research, particularly by younger scholars, to inform, critique and guide policy making and practice.
With localism currently front-page news, this research fellowship aims to capitalize on this current level of interest by establishing a blog on Law, Localism & Governance. This will provide a one-stop shop on the legal and governance aspects of localism and will maintain a directory (with links to the relevant webpages) of individual local projects implementing principles of localism, echoing the compilation archived by CABE in its catalogue of 'sustainable places' as well as becoming a repository for academic research on localism. The blog will be a community site, drawing on the abilities and range of expertise offered by collaborative and guest editors to provid a meeting place for multi-disciplinary contributions and insights from practice. It will provide inspiration and critique, identifying common threads and investigating tensions.
One distinctive feature of the blog, though this will only be one aspect of the site, will be its reliable legal content. One of the aims will be to track the rolling legislative programme for localism in all policy fields including health, criminal law, environmental law, planning law and local government law. The extensive analysis of the Localism Bill 2010 in the specialist press, blogs and twitter illustrated that while public servants and policy analysts often have an excellent understanding of legal provisions they frequently seek confirmation of their analysis from qualified lawyers, particularly on the broader context of public law, the impact of human rights and the relevance of EU law. There appears to be space for a blog that contains reliable and up-to-date legal analyses of legislation, regulation, by-laws and caselaw produced with the usual caveats that provides an informed, analytical response to developments and pronouncements.
The research fellowship will also provide the resources to establish a network of practitioners and academics that will meet twice in Cardiff as well as engaging electronically on the blog. This network will enable the participants to make connections and to evaluate and engage robustly with concept of the local and localism within a collaborative environment. The network will co-produce the outline of the project report, with members submitting short pieces of analysis and comment. Being cross-disciplinary, it may well lead to future collaborative research. Certainly it will require academic researchers concerned with localism to test their findings amongst informed and experienced practitioners.
Lastly, the emphasis on strengthening and extending skills in empirical research methods within the academic community, particularly through a conference stream at the Socio-Legal Studies Association conference, will support a younger generation of empirical legal scholars to develop theoretically informed empirical legal research. Empirical legal research provides valuable insignts into legal practices and procedures explaining how legal 'knowledge work' impacts on social institutions, business and citizens. By contributing, from the bottom up, to support and networking for younger scholars interested in empirical legal research, this project has the capacity to act as a catalyst to deepen understanding and inform policy-making in a wide range of policy fields.
With localism currently front-page news, this research fellowship aims to capitalize on this current level of interest by establishing a blog on Law, Localism & Governance. This will provide a one-stop shop on the legal and governance aspects of localism and will maintain a directory (with links to the relevant webpages) of individual local projects implementing principles of localism, echoing the compilation archived by CABE in its catalogue of 'sustainable places' as well as becoming a repository for academic research on localism. The blog will be a community site, drawing on the abilities and range of expertise offered by collaborative and guest editors to provid a meeting place for multi-disciplinary contributions and insights from practice. It will provide inspiration and critique, identifying common threads and investigating tensions.
One distinctive feature of the blog, though this will only be one aspect of the site, will be its reliable legal content. One of the aims will be to track the rolling legislative programme for localism in all policy fields including health, criminal law, environmental law, planning law and local government law. The extensive analysis of the Localism Bill 2010 in the specialist press, blogs and twitter illustrated that while public servants and policy analysts often have an excellent understanding of legal provisions they frequently seek confirmation of their analysis from qualified lawyers, particularly on the broader context of public law, the impact of human rights and the relevance of EU law. There appears to be space for a blog that contains reliable and up-to-date legal analyses of legislation, regulation, by-laws and caselaw produced with the usual caveats that provides an informed, analytical response to developments and pronouncements.
The research fellowship will also provide the resources to establish a network of practitioners and academics that will meet twice in Cardiff as well as engaging electronically on the blog. This network will enable the participants to make connections and to evaluate and engage robustly with concept of the local and localism within a collaborative environment. The network will co-produce the outline of the project report, with members submitting short pieces of analysis and comment. Being cross-disciplinary, it may well lead to future collaborative research. Certainly it will require academic researchers concerned with localism to test their findings amongst informed and experienced practitioners.
Lastly, the emphasis on strengthening and extending skills in empirical research methods within the academic community, particularly through a conference stream at the Socio-Legal Studies Association conference, will support a younger generation of empirical legal scholars to develop theoretically informed empirical legal research. Empirical legal research provides valuable insignts into legal practices and procedures explaining how legal 'knowledge work' impacts on social institutions, business and citizens. By contributing, from the bottom up, to support and networking for younger scholars interested in empirical legal research, this project has the capacity to act as a catalyst to deepen understanding and inform policy-making in a wide range of policy fields.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Antonia Layard (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Bennett L
(2015)
There are eight million stories in The Naked City
in International Journal of Law in the Built Environment
Bennett L
(2015)
Legal Geography: Becoming Spatial Detectives
in Geography Compass
Jones P
(2015)
MapLocal: Use of Smartphones for Crowdsourced Planning
in Planning Practice & Research
Layard A
(2014)
Localism, Narrative and Myth
Layard A
(2018)
Law and localism: the case of multiple occupancy housing
in Legal Studies
| Description | This Fellowship sought to investigate how law can successfully contribute to defining and promoting 'the local', exploring the many ways in which 'local laws' can be produced, and how these ffer from local government legislation. While it has engaged significantly with the current localist agenda, particularly with neighbourhood planning and the use of community rights, the central findings are (1) the need for a clearer articulation of "the public" in these debates and (2) an appreciation of how we can spatialise understandings of this "public". These finding were exemplified one Sunday afternoon at an Elders' Tea Party in Patchway, a relatively deprived part of Bristol. During an arts-based research initiative, where a local storyteller told stories drawing on his creative understandings of "the local", participants were asked for their impressions. Two ladies explained very simply, but emphatically, that "there is no local here". They described the lack of local shops (there is one large Tescos), no local cafes or pubs, a community centre that needs to charge for its activities ("it costs money to be local") and a park that was too windswept to be welcoming. This articulation of what it meant to be local resonated against a background of literature, further empirical work and theoretical approaches. It seemed to confirm the emerging thesis: that the idea of a local, imagined or real, is predicated on being in public and on having somewhere to be in public. 'The local', however defined, cannot take place solely behind closed doors in private spaces. This calls for a dynamic, tripartite understanding of what we mean by public - that is, conceptually, legally, and spatially. A community group, for example, may collectively own or rent its premises yet not admit all who wish to enter. Conversely, the local pub may be privately owned but facilitate coming together in public, for collective as well as individual interactions. These assumptions raise questions at the heart of this Fellowship about "whose public?", and which codes of conduct and legal provisions govern "local" places. The finding that understandings of the local are themselves predicated on some understanding of "the public" can be applied to many other spheres including the ability to protest in public; exercise rights of freedom of expression; or the ability to access local authority-held information on viability assessments, regeneration agreements or the detail of s106 agreements in housing developments or regeneration projects (conventionally classed as too "commercially confidential" to make public). It also includes the purchase and management of community property or holdings through community land trusts, facilitated through the current localism framework but available only to those who have the (financial, professional or social) resources (with assets being de-listed on appeal if communities are judged not to have these resources). These research questions, which are occupying the final months of the Fellowship, also engage with the question of whether the idea of local autonomy is predicated on an understanding of local identity. What happens if law enables communities to realise their vision on the ground, excluding some types of residents or behaviour that do not confirm to this vision? Can these forms of localism, when implemented through maps introduce exclusionary effects or can community property provide a public space that is open to all? And are there any ways in which, nationally, the geographies of these local, public spaces can be introduced, rather than only in the already more privileged communities. One of the objectives of this Fellowship has been to adopt an explicitly cross-disciplinary approach to understanding "the local", filling a research gap connecting literatures in law and geography on locality and place. It has also established a network to connect academia with practice, which the seminar series application aims to build on and develop further. |
| Exploitation Route | This was a mid-career fellowship with aimed both to undertake work on localism and to facilitate the acquisition of mid-career skills, in this case in legal geography. One key output was a paper written as a result of instigating a stream on Law & Geography at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) conference in 2013 and 2014 with Luke Bennett. These streams prompted a request by Geography Compass for a review piece on legal geography, which we wrote to give a more UK (and less North American) perspective on the cross-discipline. This is included in publications. I still regularly work in legal geography and interdisciplinary programmes. I instigated a research methods stream at the Socio-legal Studies Association conferences (in 2013; 2014 and 2015). |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Description | The most promising route for impact from the Localism, Law and Governance fellowship has been through connections with DCLG on neighbourhood planning, setting up a network of academics and practitioners. This has crystallised into a seminar series, Neighbourhood Ways of Knowing and Working, details of which are available here: https://neighbourhoodworking.wordpress.com/ This seminar series is definitely a collaborative project (though I am the principal investigator). It is funded by the ESRC, working with academics from Oxford Brookes, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle as well as the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). The seminars combine academic analyses in economics, law, geography, planning, sociology, cultural studies, arts and humanities with questions about co-production in local communities. They are a collaborative project between academics, community organisers and policy-makers. As the only lawyer on the project, my role is to explain the legal framework and the interactions between the legislation - which sets up a framework for neighbourhood planning and localism more generally - with individual decisions and disputes, decided by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, a planning inspector or in court. There is contact with DCLG on these points and potential to develop further research, particularly on housebuilding, viability and affordable housing, which are my areas of academic interest that have evolved from the Localism Fellowship. The main challenges to working on impact are the pace of change in the legal framework and the sheer number of legal cases and planning decisions. It is also difficult to gain access to some planning materials, including decisions of planning inspectors, as many of these sources are behind paywalls. In policy terms, there is also sometimes a mismatch between the aspirations of local people and the detail in the planning framework. This is particularly the case when communities would like to promote affordable housing, while developers are concerned with making projects financially attractive. The nub of these debates revolves around 'viability' and yet these viability assessments are not always freely publicly available. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Impact Types | Economic |