Localism Bill

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords, I declare a peculiar interest which is that I do not have any interests to declare; I am simply a citizen and a ratepayer of Camden. I will not detain your Lordships long but I am interested in the idea of localism. People have struggled to define it, which I find quite interesting because it just means what we have all been doing. I thought that I would add, anecdotally, some stories that might indicate how I will be judging this Bill as it goes through.

We have struggled in Camden for well nigh a decade to keep local libraries open. We planned our meetings together and the word got round on the street and in the shops. We had meetings, made plans, invaded the council meetings and took them over. We organised a scheme whereby all the pushchairs and wheelchairs in the borough invaded the council chamber. That was quite impressive, because those were the users—the people who wanted their libraries to be local and not to have to travel, as the council wanted us to do, to some glitzy, vanity-project library which nobody could reach. We have prevailed and we go on prevailing. In the face of the current cuts, we are once more on the warpath. This is localism as we experience it in Camden.

On another occasion, the rumour went round—it was a good street rumour from the parents of children at the schools and the people in the shops—that Starbucks was going to move in on one of the properties on our street, which prides itself on having highly idiosyncratic and individual shops. We knew that we did not want a chain. We met and made plans. Some of us put a bit of money in the kitty. We lobbied the local papers, we put up posters and we frightened Starbucks away. Starbucks let it be known in the local press that it certainly did not want to go where it was not wanted—incidentally, there are Starbucks branches not very far from our street. This is localism. It had no referendums and no structure. It had no top-down plans to organise us. We organised ourselves, which seems to me to be the essence of localism.

Just in case your Lordships think, “Yes, well, Camden; that's all very nimby”, I have to tell you two things. The mums with the pushchairs and the old people in their wheelchairs were not nimby. In any community, it always takes certain vocal people to get things organised. Your Lordships will recognise that. However, once that is under way other people come on board, so we were broadly understood to be representative of the community. Also, once we had got rid of Starbucks we had a call from Richmond saying, “How did you pull it off? We want to do the same thing”. There is already a broad, grass-roots willingness to pitch in. I am not sure whether the passing of Bills with systems, with forums or with structures being offered to us by them over there is what true localism is about, so I shall be monitoring this Bill for every clause which appears to be top-down and does not play along with the bottom-up, grass-roots sense of this country.