Law, Localism & Governance

'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.

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.