POLICYMAKERS pay sporadic lip service to the importance of community, but, meanwhile, communities decline as living entities and social practices. David Cameron’s Big Society policy, for example, attempted to delegate responsibility for the bulk of social goods to communities, without providing them with the means or powers to succeed.

As austerity measures reduced service provision and employment, welfare freezes and increased conditionality reduced purchasing power in many of our most vulnerable communities. Most of these communities had had welfare provision forcefully substituted for industrial activity during the 1970s and ’80s, and they have now seen their local authorities starved of resources and stripped of decision-making latitude.

Communities need to be able to build up not just capacity to make everyday life better, but genuine community assets. This is a particular priority for those communities outside London, the Home Counties, and the largest city centres which have come to be described as “left behind”.

These communities have been increasingly dominated by chain supermarkets, fast-food and franchise betting outlets, and pubs. Each of these entities has national and international procurement policies and centralises profits, meaning that, aside from wages, very little wealth is retained locally.

This had the effect of local economies’ resembling impoverished monocultures, bereft of the rich diversity capable of keeping and nurturing people and skills where they are needed and wanted.

The brain drain of young people drifting away from their loved ones to lives of precarious employment and multiple occupancy in metropolitan centres is tragic, and represents a callous rupturing of families and social networks. It also reflects the necessarily inefficient and damaging contribution that our economy makes to climate change by dismissing local investment.

IN OUR left-behind communities, the State remains the most important source of economic stimulus through limited public-sector employment, health and educational services, and welfare payments. Thus, the State can lead the way in building up community wealth.

The Preston model provides a precedent for how this could work. Under the Preston model, local-government bodies plus educational and health institutions were identified as anchor institutions, meaning that they were responsible for a large share of local spending. Yet they were spending most of this with national companies outside the region, and, moreover, were holding assets that were providing no benefit to the community.

Over a decade, these institutions changed their procurement to make it easy for smaller local enterprises to compete. They encouraged the formation of social enterprises and co-operatives, including local pension schemes and mutual financial institutions. They improved the jobs they provided, encouraged the widest possible use of the assets they held, and, in some cases, democratised the ownership and control of those resources.

While the Preston Model is not a panacea — many issues can be addressed only through the intervention of national government — it does illustrate how community wealth can be built without inward investment from outside, in ways other than through GDP growth. Many other local authorities are now committed to community wealth-building.

COMMUNITY wealth-building requires devolution to and rejuvenation of local government. It requires reversing the decades-long orthodoxy of the favoured method of procuring public services’ being outsourcing to large national or international corporations.

That outsourcing has often not produced value for money or greater efficiency, even narrowly defined. It is certainly not optimal from the point of view of community well-being. Concern for fair employment and just labour markets almost inevitably means that cleaning, catering, and support services in schools, hospitals, and leisure facilities are better provided through secure public-sector employment than by the private sector.

As we show in our book Act Now, activities of house-building, management, and maintenance are productively managed by councils and local co-operatives. Building up community wealth ought to underpin all public-sector activity and reform of governance.

This is an edited extract from Act Now: A vision for a better future and a new social contract by the Common Sense Policy Group, Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson, and Danny Dorling, published by Manchester University Press at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-5261-8076-6.