People, Places and Policy

Knowing contemporary Wales through new localities

Martin Jones, Scott Orford, Victoria Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317407560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.

Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into 'place-making' and 'locality-making' in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political geography of Wales.

This book looks at the economic, social and political geographies of Wales, which in the context of devolution and public service governance are hotly debated. It offers a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework for capturing the dynamics of locality-making, to go beyond the obsession with boundaries and coterminous geographies expressed by policy-makers and politicians. Three localities – Heads of the Valleys (north of Cardiff), central and west coast regions (Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and the former district of Montgomeryshire in Powys) and the A55 corridor (from Wrexham to Holyhead) – are discussed in detail to illustrate this and also reveal the geographical tensions of devolution in contemporary Wales.

This book is an original statement on the making of contemporary Wales from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) researchers. It deploys a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework and innovative mapping techniques to represent spatial patterns in data. This allows the timely uncovering of both unbounded and fuzzy relational policy geographies, and the more bounded administrative concerns, which come together to produce and reproduce over time Wales' regional geography.

1
Introducing WISERD localities

Martin Jones, Victoria Macfarlane and Scott Orford

Introduction

The governance of Wales has received more attention in the last twenty years than in the preceding centuries since the Acts of Union.

(Williams, Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery, Welsh Government, 2014: 114)

This book is situated within the context of devolution and constitutional change, which has certainly been a lively arena in recent years, especially in the context of the national referendum for Scottish independence, held on 18 September 2014, and the resulting ‘devo-max’ or ‘devo-more’ agenda (increased fiscal and financial autonomy resulting from the ‘No’ vote) and the corresponding future(s) of the United Kingdom after the 2015 General Election. The territories of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England – armed with a parliament (Scotland) and elected assemblies (Wales, Northern Ireland and London) – have certainly provided the basis for doing things differently and, in some cases, better. In Wales, devolution has certainly been the biggest shake-up to the British and UK state apparatus in recent times. In the words of Vernon Bogdanor, echoing the quote above, we are witnessing ‘the most radical constitutional change this country has seen since the Great Reform Act of 1832’ (1999: 1). The Great Reform Act set in motion our modern democratic state. The Labour Party (1997–2010) and the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (2010–2015) see devolution and constitutional change as an act of state modernisation to safeguard the socio-economic and political future of this United Kingdom. Our interest in this book, though, is with Wales and its reconstituted social, economic and political geographies, which, as noted by the quote above taken from the Williams Commission, are currently the subject of much heated debate. For the journalist Simon Jenkins (2014: 27), the 15 years of Welsh devolution, since the rise of Labour, have ‘seen Wales transformed’, with the Cardiff Assembly going through four elections and three first ministers, and with the interesting question raised of whether ‘devolution has been good for Wales’ or if Wales has merely played a role in the wider devolution domino-effect, which culminated in the Scottish referendum events of 2014 and the dominance of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2015 General Election.

It is uncontested that Wales has a relatively short history of administrative devolution when compared to Scotland and Northern Ireland, if not England (see Osmond, 1978). Jenkins’s cutting analysis makes some of this clear:

After its conquest by Edward I in 1278, and its incorporation into England three centuries later by the Tudors, it had no governmental existence; it was 13 counties of ‘England and Wales’. In 1965, as a sop to Welsh sentiment, Harold Wilson set up a Welsh Office with its own secretary of state; I remember hearing it described as the ‘colonial office for Wales’. Then, in 1997, came Tony Blair’s grand appeasement of Scottish nationalism, the offer of a devolved parliament which dragged Wales reluctantly in its train. The previous four-to-one rejection of devolution was converted onto a referendum majority of 50.3% for a new Welsh assembly, on a meagre 50% turnout. It was the most nervous possible mandate for self-government.

(Jenkins 2014: 27)

Post-devolution Wales has accorded economic development a high political significance. Indeed, in the early days of devolution, Rhodri Morgan, when First Minister for Wales, famously argued that ‘the most important task for any government is to create the conditions in which the economy can prosper’ (Western Mail, 13 December 2001). Accordingly, the Welsh government’s Treforest offices in south Wales, which deal with the Economy, Science and Transport (EST) portfolio, display bold bilingual white-on-blue signage above the green reception entrance, which reads:

Yn helpu I greu’r amodau iawn ar gyfer cynyddu swyddi, twf a chyfoeth

Helping to create the right conditions for increasing jobs, growth and wealth

Thus instead of being seen as effectively the regional office of Whitehall, where policy-making was essentially driven from London, devolution has offered the opportunity of bringing political scrutiny and public direction to the institutions of economic development. For much of the life of the first Assembly (1997–2001), the First Minister also held the Economic Development portfolio, illustrating its political importance and reinforcing those ‘conditions’ noted above (Goodwin et al., 2012).

The research contained in this chapter, which is situated in, and seeks to contribute to, this shifting state/space landscape, has been led by the Wales Institute for Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (hereafter WISERD) Knowing Localities research team and contributed to by colleagues involved in each of the WISERD research programmes. During the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s, ‘locality’ was the spatial metaphor to describe and explain the shifting world of the sub-national state and emerging, and subsequently rich, regional studies. This book argues that the resulting, often hot-headed, localities debate threw this (metaphorical) baby out with the (much baggage) bathwater and it urges a ‘return to locality’ to enlighten devolution and regional studies in Wales, to inform understandings of the above, and also beyond Wales in advanced capitalism. This chapter provides the platform for establishing these claims.

Spatial governance and Wales

The consolidation of Wales as a regional/national space of social and economic governance, with increasingly sharp territorial definition since the introduction of devolved government in 1999, has refocused attention on the dynamics of spatial difference within Wales. Persistent uneven geographies of socio-economic performance, as well as seemingly entrenched geographies of political and cultural difference, suggest the existence of ‘locality effects’ within Wales and present challenges for the delivery of policy. However, the shape of Wales’s constituent localities is far from clear. Although Wales has a sub-regional tier of 22 local authorities, these have only been in existence since 1995, when they replaced a two-tier local government system established in 1974. Moreover, the administrative map is overlain and cross-cut by a plethora of other governmental bodies including health boards, police authorities, transport consortia and economic development partnerships – to name a few – that work to their own territorial remits. An attempt to produce a more nuanced and process-led representation of Wales’s internal geography was made with the Wales Spatial Plan in 2004 (updated in 2008), but subsequent efforts to align the initially ‘fuzzy’ boundaries of the Spatial Plan regions with the hard boundaries of local authority areas demonstrates the accretional power of fixed institutional geographies in shaping the representation of localities (Haughton et al., 2009; see also Chapter 2).

These institutional geographies entered the central stage of political and economic analysis during 2013 and 2014. In April 2013 the Williams Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery (chaired by Sir Paul Williams, a former Chief Executive of the NHS) was accordingly established by the First Minister for Wales and ‘tasked with examining all aspects of governance and delivery in the devolved public sector in Wales’. Rather than simplify the governance and understanding of public policy, devolution appears to have created much confusion and instilled over time what Jessop (2000) calls ‘governance complexity’. In Wales, the effects of recession and austerity on public sector budgets have brought this to a head. By April 2013, the institutional landscape of Wales was evidenced by a littering of nearly 953 public bodies dealing with a range of economic and social concerns. These institutions have a complicated geography and occupy a number of spatial scales – national, regional, local, sub-local – and their interrelationships are far from clear. The Williams Commission sought to address this and their 347-page report is a fascinating account of this state of play after 15 years of relative autonomy from the shackles of Westminster and Whitehall. Following eight months of exhaustive analysis with policy-makers and the public through stakeholder engagement, they concluded that Wales seems to be in a position where (Welsh Government, 2014: 254):

• the design and structure of the public sector entails over-complex relationships between too many organisations, some of which are too small;
• it creates and sustains significant weaknesses in governance, performance management and organisational culture, or at least carries a significant risk of doing so;
• those weaknesses are mutually reinforcing and difficult to break from within;
• the consequence is poor and patchy performance because delivery mechanisms improve too slowly and inconsistently, and because there is no ‘visible hand’ driving improvement;
• strategic dialogue around reform of the system is sporadic and does not support the necessary shift towards co-production and prevention; and
• national policy initiatives may inadvertently compound the underlying problems they seek to solve.

In short, according to the Williams Commission, the public sector is too crowded and too complex to cope with the severe pressures that will continue to be placed on it. There are too many public organisations, and their interrelationships are too complex. This is true both of formal structures and their interrelationships, and less formal partnerships and collaborative arrangements; many public organisations in Wales are too small. While some of them may perform well (and some large organisations may perform badly), the smaller ones are suggested to face multiple and severe risks to governance and delivery which are likely to get worse in the medium term; many organisations are slow to respond to pressure for change.

The Williams Commission has offered 62 wide-ranging recommendations to address this. At a high level, aiming to ‘break the cycle at every point’ the report states:

Firstly, we propose that the complexity of the public sector is reduced by simplifying accountability, removing duplications, streamlining partnerships, making much better and more selective use of collaboration, and maximising the synergy between organisations, including service delivery and ‘back-office’ functions; second we propose that the capacity of local authorities is increased by mergers between those that exist now. That will combat the problems of small scale, and facilitate service integration and partnership working; third, we propose a range of measures to strengthen governance, scrutiny and accountability. Fourth, we propose new and more coherent approaches to leadership, to recruit the best, develop the leaders that we have and identify their successors. We also suggest that organisational cultures should be united around a shared, collaborative and citizen-centred set of public service values rather than narrow organisational objectives.

(Welsh Government, 2014: 259, emphasis added)

Recommendation two has understandably brought with it much excitement from players within the local state (see Welsh Local Government Association, 2014), as attention is focused on the ‘spatially selective’ realignment of local authorities, last reorganised two decades ago. The report recommends the new councils should be within current health board and police force areas and also not cross the geographical areas governing eligibility for EU aid. The report suggests, as a minimum, that the following local authorities should merge:

• Isle of Anglesey and Gwynedd
• Conwy and Denbighshire
• Flintshire and Wrexham
• Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire
• Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend
• Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil
• Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan
• Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly and Torfaen
• Monmouthshire and Newport.

With Carmarthenshire, Powys and Swansea unchanged, this would yield 12 authorities. Using these mergers as ‘building blocks’ for the interlinking of changes to the systems, processes and cultures of the public sector, the report argues that there were other viable possibilities resulting in 11 or ten local authorities. Swansea could merge with Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend to form a single local authority, giving 11 local authorities in total. With Ceredigion effectively being recast as the ‘new-Dyfed’ (the administrative county of west Wales between 1974 and 1996), comments such as those below have been commonplace during 2014:

SUPERSTAR Elton John sang mournfully about the Circle of Life in the smash-hit musical The Lion King, but here in mid-Wales we have our own Circle of Strife roaring on. It is all down to yet another reorganisation of local government demanded by Wales’s First Minister, Carwyn Jones. Years ago, big was beautiful and there was one giant county council, Dyfed, covering Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. But then in 1996, it was decided that small was beautiful, and the area was split back into three more manageable and hyper-local pieces. But now it appears that big is beautiful again and the number of councils in Wales faces being roughly halved from its current total of 22. If an all-encompassing Dyfed council is reborn, or a joint Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire council, there will be massive consequences for staff and services at Ceredigion County Council. And it has been warned that a Dyfed council would be particularly ‘disastrous’ for Aberystwyth, which could end up as just a far-flung outpost of a new south Wales-centred council. Now is the time for the circle to be squared once and for all so that people of Ceredigion do not suffer.

(Editorial, Cambrian News, 22 January 2014)

One could take issue with the principle and indeed costs of yet another round of local government rest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword: overview of WISERD
• List of contributors
• 1 Introducing WISERD localities
• 2 Reframing the devolved policy landscape in Wales
• 3 Wales: a statistical perspective
• 4 The Heads of the Valleys
• 5 East, west and the bit in the middle: localities in north Wales
• 6 Locating the mid Wales economy
• 7 New localities in action and reaction
• Index