After a decade and a half in which social infrastructure has been allowed to crumble, Labour is right to see bottom-up reform as part of the solution

In his 2018 book The Social Edge, the prominent public health researcher and author Anthony Costello writes that social trust and the conditions that allow it to flourish are a neglected feature in studies of human progress. Small-scale “sympathy groups”, he suggests, through cooperating and organising together over shared concerns, can be the building blocks of collective wellbeing. Empowering local communities works.

For years, politicians have rhetorically nodded to such thinking, while failing to provide the resources that would allow it to be translated into practice. Between 2010 and 2024, as a parade of Conservative ministers waxed lyrical on the virtues of localism, the governments they served presided over a bonfire of community assets on a shocking scale.