Here’s what’s on the agenda for Centre For Thriving Places…
September always feels more like a new year than the 1st January ever does. Those formative years of conditioning leave a deep footprint in our minds and bodies.
Here at Centre for Thriving Places, as we start this new ‘term’, we see challenges and opportunities in every direction.
The challenges are clear. Climate change is no longer a possible future threat, but a daily local and global reality. We all see the rise of the far right, fuelled by eye-watering rises in inequality and imbalance of power and wealth at every level. Wars and our extractive economic model, leading to widespread financial and social poverty and even to warnings this week that we have a 1 in 4 chance of ‘catastrophic’ water supply failure for 1m Britons.
The list is long and depressingly familiar. It feels hard to have spent one’s entire career warning about and fighting against these same challenges and still witness them grow progressively worse.
Yet the opportunities too, seem to be multiplying. Hope is emerging in expected and surprising spaces. More people are starting to speak the language we have been shouting from the rooftops for decades. The language of ‘good growth’, not just any growth. Of ‘building pride in local places’ and focusing on the things ‘that enable people to live thriving lives’. Talk of power and wealth ‘needing to flow through and back to local communities’.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham, in his first address to the Commons in his new job, set forth a vision of a radical decentralisation of power and decision making, and a concerted push back on the steady destruction of our most vital services by extractive profiteering private equity firms and their bands of corporate lawyers.
So far just words, but they are much needed and long overdue and the local and regional opportunities to reverse this race to the bottom lies at the heart of our ongoing work on ‘Reclaiming our Regional Economies’ alongside the New Economics Foundation, CLES and Co-operatives UK.
Burnham aims to deliver ‘good growth in every postcode’ – which would be a decent description of support services we at Centre For Thriving Places have been providing around the country for 16 years. Our Thriving Places Index, which is due for its next data release this Autumn, is the best roadmap for what ‘good in every postcode’ actually looks like – and where it is at, right now.
PwC say that people living in 12.5 million households – accounting for 46% of the UK – live in parts of the country where economic growth is not leading to better living standards. Our Thriving Places Index helps local and regional leaders unpick exactly what is meant by ‘quality of life’ and see which aspects of the local conditions they can improve to ensure they are delivering it.
The next data release of our Thriving Places Index, coming soon, will help you to see which conditions need to be in place and ‘grown’ for people to live thriving lives. Which of our towns, cities and regions are successfully growing public safety, or access to clean, green space, or levels of public health…all this and more. Perhaps those in power will take note and use it to shape the soundbite of ‘good growth in all postcodes’ into really practical and workable policies on the ground – work we help places deliver on, on a daily basis.
Many in the media, (beyond those bought out by global businesses), recognise that the existing economic model is not delivering the growth and prosperity promised. Just in the past month, we have seen big questions asked about data centres and their impact on places, the behaviour of our water companies, the quality and availability of social housing and more.
At the same time, we are starting to see amazing stories of hope emerge too, that suggests people are taking matters into their own hands by re-wiring power at a local level. Listen to this brilliant example from the SCREW THIS LET’S TRY SOMETHING ELSE podcast, detailing how the residents of Lawrence Weston in Bristol got together to empower their local area, including by building a community wind turbine, that brings them all an income.
We will feed this growing appetite for stories of change with our Thrive 35 campaign to be launched next month, which will champion such stories. Local examples of everyday changemakers, from social entrepreneurs coming up with new ways to do things better, to local councillors who fight for change, to examples of innovation that bowl us all over with their ingenuity and brilliance. All enabling more people and places to thrive.
Indeed, Centre For Thriving Places has a busy Autumn ahead. We continue to provide practical support, policy advice, data and up-to-the-minute local analysis, to leaders of places from Wales to the West Midlands, from London to Newcastle, from Somerset to Sheffield.
As part of RORE (Reclaiming Our Regional Economies) we are building an emergent network to push back against extraction from our public services. And alongside the Local Health Global Profit Consortium, we are delivering applied research to help reclaim public health and high streets from corporate greed.
There is a wave of change coming and Centre for Thriving Places is ready for it – are you?
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