Introducing WISERD Localities

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 trans- formed’, 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. 2 Martin Jones, Victoria Macfarlane and Scott Orford 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, illustrat- ing 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 subse- quently rich, regional studies. This book argues that the resulting, often hot- headed, localities debate threw this (metaphorical) baby out with the (much Introducing WISERD localities 3 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 fasci- nating 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, 4 Martin Jones, Victoria Macfarlane and Scott Orford 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 relation- ships 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 mecha- nisms 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 prob- lems they seek to solve. In short, according to the Williams Commission, the public sector is too crowded

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