The new English Devolution White Paper delivered on one of Labour's key pledges — to make decentralised government the default for English cities and regions.  

The devolution agenda, along with the announcements about 10-year Local Growth Plans and new industrial strategy developed with local leaders, show that place-based policy-making is being taken seriously and not only in terms of tackling long-standing regional inequalities. Prosperity and prosperous places are phrases appearing more frequently in political speeches and policy briefings.  

If devolution is to succeed in creating prosperous places, local leaders and national government will need better ways of understanding what a good life looks like in different places and for different people, and the obstacles to achieving it.  

If the point of devolution is to hand power to those living in an area, then creating a local knowledge infrastructure that from the outset gives citizens and communities a central role in setting priorities and sharing challenges will be fundamental. 

Prosperity in super-diverse east London is not the same as prosperity in the former coalfields of England's northeast, the Midlands, or on the Kent coastline.  Aspirations and challenges are place-specific, shaped by industrial and social histories, as well as contemporary economic conditions.

Given the extreme pressure on local government budgets and services, leaders of devolved authorities will need to find new solutions to longstanding problems. Understanding what prosperity looks and feels like for different communities, and how living in a place can limit or enhance life chances, will be critical for setting out new pathways to deliver meaningful change.

Research in east London shows how new insights emerge when local communities get to define prosperity, and when citizen social scientists – residents trained to work as researchers in their neighbourhoods – are leading the investigation.

People identified livelihood security as the foundation of prosperity, with genuinely affordable housing, good quality work, food and energy security, affordable childcare, digital inclusion, and public transport as the essentials that constitute a secure livelihood.  

These might seem like the basics that having a job would address, but follow-up research shows high levels of insecurity affecting people regardless of their employment status or income. London's skewed housing market, the impacts of job losses linked to the docklands closure, the rise of the gig economy, were all deeply felt and keenly observed structural effects on everyday life, made worse by gender, ethnic, and age-related inequalities.

This is a challenge to conventional measures of prosperity - economic growth, wealth, employment, and rising incomes.  

For anyone working with communities, the idea that understanding lived experiences will generate a different kind of evidence for policymaking is nothing new.  

Citizen science is one approach. There are many other examples of community-led, community-based research around the country. The challenge in a new landscape of devolved authorities is to make this the default way of working.

If the point of devolution is to hand power to those living in an area, then creating a local knowledge infrastructure that from the outset gives citizens and communities a central role in setting priorities and sharing challenges will be fundamental. 

Policy-makers won't be the only ones to gain from a more inclusive and local data-driven approach. Community-based organisations, like food banks or finance and debt advisors, are at the frontline of providing support to communities. They could benefit from having access to data that would allow them to work alongside local authorities to develop their ‘community power' and hold decisionmakers to account.

There are still plenty of questions around exactly how devolution will work. But if it is to live up to its goals, local leaders will need to work with citizens, business, universities, and other partners, to develop place-specific evidence to shape future pathways to prosperity.

 

Saffron Woodcraft is principal research fellow and director of social policy at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity