We are meeting today in surroundings that remind us of our nation’s incredible history, stretching back thousands of years.
But I want to talk to you about our more recent story.
Trust in politics is at an all-time low. Time and again, people have voted for change, time and again change never came. [Political content removed.]
If our present system had the answers, then our country wouldn’t be in the state we find it in today. The status quo just doesn’t work for too many people. They feel locked out of prosperity, locked out of power, and locked out of the future.
So we have to do things differently, but first we have to understand what’s gone wrong.
Power in this country is centralised in far too few hands. We are one of the most centralised countries in the developed world, and that’s led to regional inequalities so great that we have some of the poorest regions in Europe right here in one of Europe’s richest countries.
That’s why this Government is pursuing the most radical programme of devolution in our history, reorganising local government and bringing in new regional mayors to get power out of Whitehall.
But power is over-centralised locally as well. People living in council housing estates complain their homes are not managed well, with poorly managed repairs services and badly maintained buildings, but no one listens.
Parents are terrified for their kids’ futures with currently one in six young people not in employment, education or training.
Older people worry that the social care crisis means they’ll never get the support they need to live independently for longer.
The challenges we face are too big for the state to manage on its own whether it’s at the national or local level.
Where we see hope is where communities have found ways to help shape the answer for themselves.
Now back when I was a councillor, I helped a housing estate in Brixton set up a residents’ management organisation where their housing managers report into an elected residents’ board. Services have improved dramatically ever since.
I saw community groups – churches, businesses, the voluntary sector, young people themselves – come together to make a huge impact in reducing violent youth offending when the council opened up its funding and spaces to their ideas.
And I saw a dying food market brought back to life when a social enterprise brought together businesses, owners and the council and opened up empty units to start-up businesses on low or no rent for the first few months of their existence.
This kind of community-led change is happening right across the country.
Our Future in Grimsby is supporting the local community to drive the regeneration of their home town, with the football club acting as the community anchor organisation.
Camden’s Centre of Relational Practice is putting human relationships right at the heart of service transformation.
Juno is a programme transforming care for looked-after children in Liverpool because they shape the services for themselves.
All of this is about strengthening communities and putting service users first.
It’s about shifting power down and out.
Communities are full of insights, ideas and creativity that can help shape a better world. The era of the top-down state has come to an end. We need a new vision of the state that’s built around people and the communities that they are part of.
What comes next must be so radical it will reshape the way government works for good.
We must integrate services more closely at the local level so that they work better for communities. We must pool budgets so they can be reprioritised based on local priorities – not priorities imposed from outside. And we must give communities the resources and support they need to play a bigger role in taking the decisions that affect them.
This is how we build community power, and I know it’s something nearly all of you here today have championed for years. But now you have a government that’s on your side.
Here’s what that looks like.
Our Pride in Place programme provides up to £20 million each to nearly 300 of the poorest communities in the country – but it’s local people, not politicians, who decide how every penny of that money gets spent.
We are setting up Community Power Pilots across the country. In 25 neighbourhoods we are inviting councils, community groups, residents and local service users to come forward with their own ideas to improve or even run them.
We have set aside £15m for the first wave of pilots, and I’m working closely with ministers right across government to welcome the most exciting new ideas for supporting young people, making communities safer, improving social housing, upgrading parks and green spaces, or whatever else the communities want to do to rip up the rule book.
We are introducing Place-Based Budget pilots to test how far de-ringfenced, pooled budgets can break down Whitehall silos and give places the power to experiment in how they deliver better services. Total Place is back!
I want communities to take more power for themselves. A new £60 million Community Right to Buy Fund will support groups to take over and run pubs, clubs, community centres and sports halls.
This builds on the community right to buy, which we have already put into law so communities have the first right of refusal when community spaces come up for sale.
And there’s much further we can go in extending outcomes-focused commissioning as the default way we take decisions. Supporting local service users to define what they want to achieve, the intervention to make it happen, and even the organisation who will provide it.
This opens up the space dramatically to new cross-sector partnerships and collaboration, and to finding new and better ways to support people that respect the relationships that sustain them and the place they belong to.
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By opening up power in the way I’ve described, we build bridges that bring people together to seek the common good, and build the relationships that can face down the hatred and the division.
As part of our new Right to Manage, more social housing residents will be able to take control of the management of their own homes if their current landlord is letting them down, just like that estate in Brixton did.
People like me who are lucky enough to own our own home get to choose who does any repairs and how they’re done – that same dignity must be extended to social housing tenants too.
That’s in addition to our Social Housing Innovation Fund, which has funded 20 projects working to give tenants a bigger say.
And I want to see housing association tenants benefit from this too, so we are opening a consultation to listen to ideas on how to best make that happen.
In this room today are many friends and colleagues from local government – you are heroes on the frontline and essential partners in this work.
The best local authorities are already empowering communities – I want to support you and I want to learn from you.
But right now, too much of councils’ budgets is being syphoned off by private equity firms and corporate investors.
It is quite frankly outrageous that in children’s accommodation, the 15 biggest providers make an average operating profit of £45,000 for every child.
It’s pushing councils to the brink financially.
I won’t let this continue, and the Government stands ready to impose local profit caps to end exploitative profiteering of this kind.
It’s similar with temporary accommodation, where councils and taxpayers are being fleeced while families are forced into wholly inadequate housing.
It will end the system where different parts of the public sector compete for the same housing, driving up costs for housing vulnerable people.
The only people who benefit from this are profiteering landlords – and we will bring that to an end.
We live in a country crying out for change. We don’t just need a new page in our national story – it’s time to start writing a whole new book.
Change so bold and ambitious it shakes the ground beneath our feet.
You are the people who have been fighting for change, whether that’s in local government, in business, in policy or in the third sector.
The people leading this work have had to battle against the system for too long.
Battling to reclaim empty buildings from delinquent owners to turn them into something of value for the community.
Battling to provide mental health services in a holistic way while being drowned in risk registers and bureaucratic reporting requirements.
Battling to find funding to support essential activities while seeing money wasted all around you on priorities that are not those your community chose.
Imagine how much more powerful your work would be if the system ran with you, not against you.
That is our agenda.
To break the status quo and remake our public services and the local state around communities.
To push power back to the frontline.
To build change you can feel in every community up and down this country.
If this is a revolution, then you are the revolutionaries.
Together we will rebuild our country by putting our communities in control.
Thank you.
