SEEDS: The Later Years

By Ines Newman

In 1992 I took over the SEEDS co-ordinator post when Sarah Bisset-Scott left to set up an economic development unit for Luton. Previously, I had been the SEEDS link officer while sharing the job of Head of Economic Development at Harlow Council with Anne Bonsor. Together we oversaw a team of five officers including a full-time co-op support officer who had been a founder member of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement.

Harlow Council had managed to escape the cap on rates that had been introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1986/7. However, in April 1992 the District Council was capped at £11m – its budget having been around £22m. At the time, the SEEDS co-ordinator post was vacant. This presented an opportunity for the Economic Development team at Harlow; taking SEEDS in-house meant that the budget would subsidise half the jobs in the unit preventing any redundancies, while enabling the team to continue its focus on strategic issues of economic development, albeit beyond Harlow.

When I took over SEEDS it was running a deficit. Local authorities were financially tightly constrained and there was a very hostile central government framework. Margaret Thatcher resigned in November 1990 following the Poll Tax riots and John Major succeeded her. Gradually the situation for local councils improved. The Single Regeneration Budget came into operation in April 1994 designed to encourage partnership work in regeneration in deprived areas. European Funds provided the basis for innovative action. They were almost doubled to ECU 142 billion for the period 1994-1999 compared to the previous five years. The ten Integrated Government Regional Offices announced in November 1993 started to provide the regional institutional framework for which SEEDS had campaigned. Throughout this period, Robin remained a key advisor to SEEDS guiding the research studies it undertook and providing inspiration.

By the time of its 10th anniversary in 1996, SEEDS had grown from 8 full members to 28 full and affiliate members and 10 additional local authorities who had sponsored particular reports. By 1998 membership had increased slightly to 30 with 15 other authorities and trade unions involved in sponsorship. The 10th Anniversary Report ‘Re-Making the Regional Economy: Celebrating Achievement; Shaping New Policies for the South East’ argued that SEEDS’s success lay in the strong coherent approach to local economic development, that Robin had established, increasingly gaining wider acceptance.

“SEEDS seeks economic development within the context of sustainability (development that satisfies the needs of the present without jeopardising future generations) and a reduction of social exclusion (the disconnection and marginalisation of individuals from society resulting from structural and social change).”

It also argued that the SEEDS process depended on ‘bottom up’ economic strategy enabling local authorities to combine resources and expertise to tackle common economic and environmental problems and learn from each other. The anniversary report was published at the end of 1996 together with 62 case studies of innovative good practice written by local authorities about: sector work; environment and the quality of life; transport and telecommunications; and labour market, training and anti-poverty work within local authorities. The commitment to a ‘bottom up ‘process was also evident in the ‘Quality of Life’ best practice workshops in the affiliated local authorities in 1993. These resulted in 15 reports on topics from the neighbourhood approach to Town Centre strategies and from anti-poverty strategies to working with the voluntary sector.

Sectoral research had been fundamental to the London Industrial Strategy and remained central to SEEDS. Between 1992 and 2000, SEEDS commissioned sector research studies on:

• The financial sector (A reversal of fortune?  Financial services and the southeast of England. Andrew Leyshon, Nigel Thrift, Marion Justice, 1993);

• The pharmaceutical sector (Health and Wealth? The development of the pharmaceutical industry in the South East, focusing on the Hertfordshire sub-region.  Michael Breheny, Douglas Hart, Jeremy Howells, 1993);

• The engineering sector (The engineering industry in South East England: towards a regional strategy, Andrew Mair and Mike Geddes, 1993)

• The airport industry (Flight path to prosperity? The impact of airports in the South East on their local economies, Reece Andrew and Roger Bailey, 1994)

• The telecommunications industry (Electronic highways: directory of telecommunications companies in the South East, Mark Cox, Rod Spires and David Wylson, 1994)

• The defence industry (Defence, research & development and diversification, Keith Hartley editor, 1995)

• Inward investment (Mobile investment in the South East and Eastern Regions: trends, opportunities and issues, Chris Tillett, 1995)

• Privatised utilities (Private company, public interest? The policy implications of privatised utilities in the South East, Christine Allen, 1996 and Privatised utilities and regional management, Simon Marvin, Stephen Graham and Simon Guy, 1996)

• Research and technology (Research and technological development in South East Britain, Jeremy Howells, 1997)

• The care sector (‘A Good Job in Care?’ A practical approach to localising the equalities agenda for improvements to employment in Health and Social Care, Diane Gowland and Mick Taylor, 1999)

From 1993 – 1995 Robin Murray went to Ontario, Canada as a Special Adviser to the Minister of Economic Development and Trade where his work focussed on community economic development (CED) and where he used many of the sectoral, regional and social enterprise ideas from SEEDS and the GLC. This inevitably reduced his involvement in SEEDS. At this point, Mike Geddes was brought in as a second programme advisor from the local economic policy unit at South Bank University. He worked with the SEEDS team to refocus its work on social inclusion, building on the original South-South Divide report. In 1994 SEEDS published ‘Poles Apart’ which analysed the growing inequality in the region. Poles Apart was written by Maria Cutler and Hazel Ward both of whom were joint Harlow Council and SEEDS officers. The work on Poles Apart led to more work on Labour Market issues. In 1995 SEEDS published Towards full employment? The role of local strategies and initiatives, written by Mike Geddes with support from me and Dominic Hurley.

In 1996 SEEDS published a research report, Youth volunteer & peer support project. With the support of Bob Cutts who was working in Milton Keynes, SEEDS applied successfully for some European YouthStart funds. SEEDS led a joint project with the Netherlands and Finland on tackling youth unemployment through youth volunteering. Sue Frost from the voluntary sector in Hertfordshire was taken on to lead this programme. The project was called the VOCAL project and led to real change among the partners with youth volunteering projects set up and youth leadership training funded. The final report was published in 2000 under Anne Bonsor’s leadership (VOCAL: Volunteering Opportunities Community Action Leadership. YouthStart 1997-2000). It showed how SEEDS could move from research to implementation. When the Labour Government was elected in 1997, they introduced the New Deal for Employment of Young People. SEEDS published a first steps guide by Anne Bonsor in 1997 as the policy was being agreed followed by a fuller report on best practice the following year.

The campaign for regional government was always central to the work of SEEDS. In 1995 it published A regional development organisation for the Eastern Region: options appraisal working paper, by Chris Tillett and Brett Jacob. In 1996 in the 10th Anniversary report SEEDS argued for a new agenda for the South East. By now Robin was back in the UK and in his chapter (written with Adrian Atkinson) on Environment and Development, he argued for the development of a stronger organisation of regional interests to tackle the environmental issues that went beyond local authority boundaries. Such regional institutions must, he said, be able to deal with resource management and environmental issues to develop a regional sustainable development strategy.

Stephen Marks wrote the chapter on ‘The Regional Dimension’, quoting Robin Murray’s 1991 paper on Local Space: Europe and the New Regionalism and his 1989 paper from Bologna to Basildon. SEEDS called for regional government which could deal with the core functions relating to economic development including strategic land planning, regional environment and waste management issues, tourist boards, transport planning, business support services, training and labour market planning and co-ordination of European policy. SEEDS argued for directly elected regional assemblies and in particular, that boundary issues should be dealt with in a ‘bottom up’ way, allowing groups such as the Thames Valley Regional Assembly and the South East Regional Forum to emerge, rather than being imposed by central government for their own convenience.  SEEDS also called for co-ordination arrangements between the regional bodies in the SERPLAN area. Some of this case was reinforced in the 1999 SEEDS publication, Building a world class region: an economic strategy for the South East of England.

On this front, SEEDS won a victory but lost the battle. London was focussed on creating the GLA and the London Mayor and did not want to get distracted by discussing co-ordination across the South East. The London Labour Party was concerned about a powerful South East regional body surrounding London, particularly as this was likely to be Conservative controlled in contrast to a Labour London. Political forces in London therefore campaigned for the Government to impose two regional bodies around London- the South East and the Eastern Region. The Eastern Region involved 3 additional counties who had not been involved in SEEDS and the South East, as a two thirds doughnut, made no sense economically or geographically. The decision to set up Regional Development Agencies in 1998 with only indirect democratic accountability was a further set back. The final blow was losing the referendum on the North East Regional Assembly in 2004. So although the creation of regional development agencies and the indirectly elected regional assemblies can be regarded as one of SEEDS’s greatest achievements, demonstrating a general acceptance of the case that SEEDS had been making for regional government to co-ordinate policy for economic development at regional level, the institutional framework that was created led to the failure of the experiment. There was no democratic support built up for regional government and far from pursuing the SEEDS objectives of bottom up economic strategy and a more equal and sustainable growth of the region, the RDAs were focussed primarily on support for business interests in the region which in 2010 enabled their abolition and the abolition of the regional assemblies and their replacement by regional business partnerships (Local Enterprise Partnerships) to be relatively uncontested.

The failure to deliver bottom up regional government spelt the end of SEEDS. I left in March 1999. Anne Bonsor finished off the VOCAL project. She commissioned an update of the South-South Divide by Anne Green in 2000 and a sector study on the cultural sector (The role of the Cultural Sector in the Local Economy, edited by Anne Bonsor, 2001). When Best Value came into force in April 2000, following the Local Government Act 1999, Anne ran a series of workshops among SEEDS authorities on best practice and a series of working papers were published in 2001. Finally, SEEDS was involved in an EU funded Interreg New Towns programme with Scotland, England, Wales, France, Netherlands and Belgium which ended up proposing a European New Towns Platform. The ENTP - The European New Towns and Pilot Cities Platform was founded in 2001 and ran until January 2016. The organization was a network of up to 32 members and 10 partners from 11 European countries. The members were local governments from European New Towns whereas partners were research centres.

Robin remained involved in SEEDS to the end offering advice and always being a very popular charismatic speaker at the AGMs. Anne Bonsor concludes:

“I do have memories of Robin Murray as being a very committed and eloquent member of SEEDS always brimming with ideas and suggestions at meetings and full of humorous anecdotes - often relating to vegetables - I remember in particular his description of food boxes in Canada and the winter of the cabbage. He invited us to a meeting at his house as well and was a great host making us all feel very welcome in his home.”  

The SEEDS Legacy

SEEDS had a significant impact. When it was set up in 1986, local economic development hardly existed in the South East outside London. At the most it was seen as an adjunct to planning. SEEDS enabled the ideas pioneered in London, not just to outlive the GLC, but to grow and flourish in a wider platform. It embedded a research and sector based research framework for local economic development building on Robin’s London Industrial Strategy. Its research framed the work of the RDAs across the regions.

Its bottom up approach helped to spread best practice across a very wide area. This approach was to inform future best practice working across local government and was adopted by organisations such as SEEDS’s sister organisation the Centre for Local Economic Strategy (CLES) in Manchester; the local government Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA- abolished in 2010); the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU); and particularly, the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE).These organisations, along with SEEDS, have spread innovative work informed by the values that underpinned SEEDS and made a significant difference to local government effectiveness in tackling inequality, youth unemployment and sustainability. 

As argued above, SEEDS did contribute in a major way to the climate of opinion, which led to the setting up of Regional Development Agencies and Regional Assemblies in 1998 and support for the concept of ‘Europe of the Regions’. John Prescott, the Secretary of State for Environment, Transport and the Regions, was responsible for regional development agencies and regional assemblies. He had worked with SEEDS and Robin while he was in opposition. He understood the arguments for regional government. It is interesting to note that Prescott’s attempt to establish directly elected regional government ran into opposition from those right-wing elements who believed in a small state and who then used the general disaffection in areas that have suffered massive de-industrialisation to squash progressive policy development. Dominic Cummings, later a strategist for the Brexit vote and a special advisor to Boris Johnson, was a key figure in the successful campaign against a North-East Regional Assembly in 2004. 

Despite this set back, SEEDS work can be seen as part of a movement arguing for economic democratisation. This remains relevant today as LEPs fail to deliver and City Mayors do nothing for areas such as the South East and East of England and within their cities often focus on investment to benefit business interest rather than on the more balanced growth that SEEDS advocated. The 2019 Labour Party manifesto called for regional banks governed by boards made up of key stakeholders such as local chambers of commerce, trades unions and councillors; a local transformational fund in each region; a regional voice through an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions; regional government offices and a voice for the regions in Whitehall; and a Constitutional Convention to discuss how nations and regions can best relate to each other and how a Labour Government can best put power in the hands of the people. The ideas of SEEDS remain very much alive.   

SEEDS was also important in influencing the 1997 incoming Labour Government’s policies on anti-poverty and social inclusion. Findings from the South-South Divide pointed to the emergence of inequalities alongside affluence and the need for this to be addressed. This issue is now even more important as inequality grows.

More than anything SEEDS was part of helping forge new ideas which are much more mainstream today including sustainable development, zero waste and the concept of creating jobs through the caring professions, cultural industries and leisure opportunities as well as the Green New Deal. In terms of environmental thinking, this very much shaped the work which Robin went on to do personally. Robin has a proud legacy.

Affiliates, Members and Sponsors of SEEDS in 1998

Members

• Crawley Borough Council

• Harlow District Council

• Luton Unitary Council

• Stevenage Borough Council

• Watford Borough Council

• Wycombe District Council

Affiliates

• Basildon District Council

• Braintree District Council

• Brighton and Hove Unitary Council

• Dacorum Borough Council

• Dartford Borough Council

• Dover District Council

• Eastleigh Borough Council

• Essex County Council

• Kent TEC

• London Rivers Association

• Maidstone Borough Council

• Milton Keynes Borough Council

• North Herts District Council

• Reading Borough Council

• Rushmoor Borough Council

• Sevenoaks district Council

• Slough Borough Council

• South Beds District Council

• South Coast Metropole (Poole, Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Isle of Wight)

• Southend Borough Council

• St Albans District Council

• Welwyn Hatfield Council

• West London TEC

Additional Sponsors: Past and Present

• Bedfordshire County Council

• East Sussex County Council

• Epsom and Ewell Borough Council

• Essex TEC

• LGMB

• LPAC

• Oxfordshire County Council

• Sussex Chamber of Commerce, Training and Enterprise

• Swindon Unitary Council

• UNISON

• West Sussex County Council

• Wiltshire County Council

• Wiltshire TEC
  

December 2019