Referring back to the New Economics Foundation’s (NEF) (2014) typology in Figure 5.1, local authorities can be seen to adapt to, challenge or imagine alternatives to austerity in ways which promote social justice. These methods expand the spectrum between complicit acquiescence and overt confrontation, and compel a more critical perspective about what LCC’s response entails. Indeed, councillors repeatedly make claims to LCC being an “anti- austerity council”113
and approaching austerity in a radical way; this is a seeming paradox given the scale of cuts that the council has overseen. Rather than viewing austerity urbanism as all-encompassing – remembering that emphasising the power of structural forces limits our agency and forecloses the possibilities for alternatives (Featherstone, 2012, Gibson-Graham, 2006) – this final section of the chapter goes beyond gloomy accounts of austerian realism to make a case for more nuanced interpretations of austerity-inspired urban entrepreneurialism. This acknowledges the agency of the local authority to develop its ‘power to’ produce more transformative visions for social change beyond the logics of capital (Holloway, 2002). As Cllr Steve Munby (2015: 35-36) has argued:
111 Interviews (various). See Cllr Steve Munby (2015). 112 Cllr Gary Millar, interview.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
132 It is an inconvenient truth that something rather surprising is happening in our big cities that have been decimated by spending cuts. They haven’t.
Unlike in Detroit (Peck, 2012), the lights have not gone out, and it is difficult to defend demoralising discourses in light of Liverpool’s recent economic revival. Munby (2015) opines that the economic upsurge of the post-industrial city has tempered the worst effects of the cuts, whilst also surmising that it is the smaller, former industrial towns which are most susceptible to British austerity urbanism. It is pertinent, therefore, to examine whether Liverpool is a fertile testing ground for thinking through social justice approaches to managing austerity-blighted cities. Alternatives are emerging elsewhere in the UK, and some examples include: creative forms of local economic development; regional infrastructure projects; diverse economies- style projects such as time-banking (NEF, 2014); the transfer of services to social enterprises and local communities; and strategic attempts to access more local philanthropy from big business (Jones et al., 2016). While the case for accelerated urban entrepreneurialism has been made, councillors argue that something more nuanced is taking place:
Within the Labour Party we need to look more about what Labour local government is doing. If you want to look at ways of developing alternatives to austerity, if you want to look at ways of how you do more with less, if you want to look at ways of how you promote economic growth in a fair and sustainable way, look to Labour local government.114
Indeed, Councillor Steve Munby’s (2015) piece is illustrative here. Invoking Gramsci – “the ‘old is dying’ while the ‘new is yet to be born’” (Munby, 2015: 37) – the Labour Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods argues that, in Liverpool, a new urban settlement is emerging in embryonic form. Moving beyond the New Public Sector Management approach launched by successive New Labour administrations, Munby states that LCC is creating new imaginative programmes based on problem-solving and devolving power to local communities, rather than the “old model’s toxic combination of targets and competition [which] was expensive, unpleasant to work in and unresponsive to people” (Munby, 2015: 37). Suggesting that there has been a paradigm shift away from the entrepreneurial council since the 1990s,115 this fresh
approach is claimed to bring services closer to communities and reduce management costs while, critically, contesting the notion of service users as ‘consumers’. Instead, they are implicated and responsibilised into the co-production and design of services (see Penny, 2016, for equivalents in Lambeth Borough Council). These new forms of hybrid partnership involve promoting relationships at ward level between residents, councillors and council contractors, and re-orienting LCC to being a “creative service provider”116 – indeed, the council’s effective
114 Cllr Nick Small, interview. 115 Cllr Steve Munby, interview. 116 Ibid.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
133 remunicipalisation of waste collection demonstrates the power of local authorities to contest the demands of austerity urbanism. Measures such as cutting pay are justified through an anti- managerial discourse, such as “the cuts must start at the top”117, whilst the handover of services
and buildings to communities, and generally doing “more with less”118
, echoes those discourses of ‘austerity as opportunity’ and is something that, “as radicals and as socialists, we should be perfectly comfortable with”.119
These initiatives, however, remain couched within, and even embrace, the neoliberal logics of cost-cutting which are contested by local grassroots actors (see Chapter 6). Read cynically, there are dangers at play: assets such as buildings are reframed as costs, and have been accompanied by redundancies, a rise in volunteering (unpaid work), and further encroachments into working conditions. Nevertheless, these initiatives could have potential. Compared with the mid-1980s Labour strategy, where “most cities were in a terrible state and public services were in ruins”, Munby (2015: 36) proposes that a dual approach of Invest to Earn, plus innovation in local authorities, is the route to the successful promotion of alternatives to austerity at the municipal scale.
To this end, local authorities can evidently manage austerity in more or less progressive ways. For example, Barnet Borough Council (Conservative) was dubbed the ‘EasyCouncil’ following plans to allow its citizens to pay extra for additional council services, in ways which disrupted long-held principles of universalism (Whitfield, 2012). While LCC has not countenanced setting an illegal budget, it has established mechanisms to pursue social justice that exist beyond the cuts. This suggests a more far-reaching strategy than local anti-austerity groups give credit for (Chapter 6), and includes a Fairness Commission, whose priorities are the adoption of a living wage by the council, and the use of public-sector procurement to encourage local employment, develop social enterprise, and improve working conditions. This is allied to the Liverpool Social Charter (2015) which commits business signatories to a series of key principles and responsibilities in acting in the collective interests of the city (such as being green, supporting local communities, and prioritising the local economy). LCC is also developing a Liverpool Fair City Mark, which ranks businesses (gold, silver, bronze) in terms of their commitments to responsible business (apprenticeships, good terms and conditions, paying corporation tax).120 Other examples include a Play Healthy Scheme which recognises
the long-term outcomes and savings that can be accrued through preventative spending for children, alongside a Landlord Licensing Scheme and an ‘Advice on Prescription’121
initiative.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.
120 Cllr Jane Corbett, interview.
121 Liverpool Advice on Prescription Programme (APP) allows GPs to prescribe appointments to
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
134 These measures seek to reframe social spending as an investment rather than a cost (see NEF, 2014) and, in doing so, uphold non-market values and deploy alternative conceptions of the common good in ways which disrupt the neoliberal logics of austerity urbanism. This is also espoused through LCC’s commitment to proportionate universalism,122
which seeks to maintain the geographic distribution of services according to the principles of welfare universalism.
Therefore, it can be argued that LCC is doing as much as could be expected of it in difficult circumstances. The approach adopted is about managing the conflicting pressures of austerity urbanism, amid a commitment to economic growth, whilst developing a capacity to promote social justice within a competitive neoliberal environment. The chapter proposed that accelerated urban entrepreneurialism does not – in isolation – constitute a credible alternative, but this has been combined with mechanisms which halt the encroachment of neoliberal logics into all facets of urban governance, a counter-balance that councillors recognise is sometimes contradictory but nonetheless represents the most progressive option available.123 As detailed in 5.4.2, the council has not always built productive relationships with those who seek to contest this framework. The mayor in particular has embodied a brash and aggressive persona all too familiar to Liverpudlian politics (Chapter 2). LCC could arguably engage with communities in a more bottom-up, less paternalistic and managerial manner, which might open up new forms of dialogue to engage citizens in a radically different way. This could be coupled with a diverse economies perspective which emphasises residents’ ‘power to’, in ways which could further undermine (rather than facilitate) austerity implementation (see NEF, 2014). This might also be inspired by the emerging ‘new municipal movement’. In Spain, four of the five biggest cities are currently governed by anti-austerity coalitions that emerged from the
Indignados movement and its associated solidarity networks (Davies, 2017a), and gains have
also been made in places as diverse as Naples, Valparaíso and Beirut. These developments have begun to realise more radical forms of co-production and commoning, and have sought to advance new ways of democratising local government through rethinking how power is built, transformed, and distributed (Russell and Reyes, 2017). While these movements are still nascent, they nonetheless highlight how radical possibilities for anti-austerity struggle may exist at the municipal scale, and show how power can be built from the bottom-up.
Described by Cllr Frank Hont as “a brilliant scheme and “a win-win” (interview). See South Liverpool CAB (2017).
122 Cllr Jane Corbett, interview. 123 Interviews (various).
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
135 5.6 Conclusions
This chapter adopted the conceptual framework of austerity urbanism to examine how LCC has responded to fiscal retrenchment. The chapter opened by making a case against dominant structuralist accounts which have portrayed cities as meekly implementing austerity measures uncontested (see Peck, 2012, 2016). LCC does utilise techno-managerialist discourses and displays some tendencies relating to ‘austerian realism’ (Davies and Blanco, 2017), but more nuanced processes are taking place. Forwarding poststructuralist interpretations, the chapter observed how the politics of austerity are discursively and materially ‘pulled down’ by LCC and (re)framed in place-specific ways. It is therefore suggested that austerity urbanism is a highly situated process that depends upon local institutional and non-institutional actors actively re-producing or contesting austerity logics within place-frames in order to craft legitimacy at the municipal scale. The chapter has provided several insights by interpreting austerity urbanism in Liverpool through a geographical lens (Fuller and West, 2017). First, there is an active (re)politicisation of austerity in Liverpool, where the Labour council has adopted a rhetorically antagonistic-strategically cooperative relationship with successive Conservative-led central governments. Secondly, austerity is being embraced by the municipal left as a transformative catalyst for social change in ways that represent a shift in local government discourse. Thirdly, austerity urbanism relies upon making fresh appeals for place- making and mobilising place-based political identities to legitimate retrenchment. Fourthly, such claims to place are also central to cultivating consensus at the local scale. Finally, local authorities incontrovertibly retain the agency to pursue social justice, where Invest to Earn is accompanied by more nuanced strategies which can seek to disrupt the functioning of austerity urbanism within a given city. These strategies suggest potential for creating alternatives to austerity locally, albeit severe constraints still exist. The novel contribution of this chapter is to show that situated analyses are clearly productive in de-emphasising the all-encompassing logics of neoliberalism and determining the possibilities (and limits) for progressive direction in the current conjuncture, where austerity discourses are never fully coherent and hegemony is never complete (Hall, 1998; Newman, 2014). This means that one must extend the vocabulary of what might necessarily be considered ‘anti-austerity’, and to take seriously those voices from below which articulate alternative paths of direction. It is to those that this thesis now turns.
136