Stockport Green Party local candidate and GND Media podcast producer Andrew Glassford hosted a ‘Greens in Power’ event on 21 April 2026 to discuss local government strategy with Hugo Fearnley and Keir Milburn. This write-up highlights some of the many valuable insights from those conversations, ahead of the local elections on 7 May.
Conversations unfolding at a recent Stockport Green Party event offered revealing snapshots of an unprecedented political moment that’s damningly easy for the left to misread.
On the surface, it was about local government strategy: devolution deals, council budgets, and institutional reform. But it went deeper: growing recognition on the left that power in Britain is severely structurally constrained, and that any meaningful challenges to that constraint must begin locally.
Hugo Fearnley and Keir Milburn approached the issue from slightly different angles, but their diagnoses of our present converged neatly. Local government isn’t simply underperforming; it has been systematically reshaped over decades into a delivery mechanism for ideological austerity politics.
As Milburn put it, councils today inherit a “massive poison chalice”, tasked with maintaining services while operating with “around 20% less” spending power than in 2010. This all takes place within a system designed to dissipate responsibility downwards, whilst retaining power in central government.
This framing matters. It shifts debates away from managerial competence and towards political structure. The question is no longer why councils fail to deliver, but how they have been structurally set up to do so.
The system: designed to constrain
The UK’s model of governance remains highly centralised, even after successive waves of devolution.
Combined authorities – now covering roughly 60% of the UK population – sit uneasily above local councils, often with overlapping responsibilities and competing priorities. As Fearnley notes, this has created a “new layer” of regional government that is not fully integrated with the tier beneath it.
At the same time, the underlying inequalities between regions persist. Poorer health outcomes,lower wages, and weaker educational attainment continue to define large parts of northern England. The institutional architectures supposedly designed to address these disparities have, in practice, struggled to do so.
Part of the problem lies in the erosion of local capacity. Decades of (often wasteful) outsourcing and budget cuts have left councils, in Fearnley’s words, “bereft of … in-house skills” and increasingly risk-averse. This creates feedback loops: less capacity leads to more reliance on external actors, which further entrenches dependence and thereby limits innovation.
Milburn situates this within a broader political project. The rise of public-private partnerships and market mechanisms in public services, he argued, has not only shifted resources but reshaped behaviour. Councillors and officers are “trained … to see development from private capital’s perspective”, while citizens are encouraged to view each other as competitors, rather than obvious collaborators.
The cumulative effect is a form of “anti-democratic” conditioning, where collective problem-solving is replaced evermore by market logics.
Incremental changes within tight constraints
Despite these structural limits, the discussion highlighted areas where local authorities have been able to act, often by reframing existing priorities rather than securing new resources. One example from the North of Tyne Combined Authority illustrates this.
Faced with central government’s emphasis on job creation, Fearnley and colleagues under Jamie Driscoll’s mayorship argued for a partial reallocation of funds towards child poverty prevention. Their rationale was straightforward: “if the kids who are too hungry to learn today can’t access those jobs,” then job creation alone is clearly insufficient.
The resulting programme – offering welfare advice outside school gates – recovered over £1 million in unclaimed benefits within a year. In one case, a family received £13,000 in backdated support.
The broader context is striking: an estimated £1.33 billion in unclaimed benefits across the region. Often support is there, but it’s underutilised (contrary to tiresome sensationalism).
Similarly, changes to the adult education budget – focused on flexibility and accessibility – led to a 60% increase in enrolment, from 22,000 to 35,000 learners, without additional spending.
These examples were rightly framed as evidence of what can be achieved through “creative thinking” at the local level. However, they also underscored the limits of that approach. As Fearnley acknowledged, such interventions rely on genuine political will and remain inevitably constrained by the broader political system and context within which they operate.
Keir Milburn highlighted the Greens Organise faction’s emphasis on grassroots community mobilisation efforts in ‘re-commoning’ local political arenas – via Keir Milburn.
Limits to community capacity
One of the more instructive moments in the discussion came from a failed initiative: an attempt to establish a supply teacher cooperative to replace private agencies. The model was economically viable and politically aligned with broader authority-level goals of community wealth-building. But it did not materialise.
The reason was not lack of interest, but sheer lack of capacity. Teachers, already overstretched, were unable to take on the additional organisational burden.
This example highlights recurring tensions in left-wing approaches to localism. While community-led solutions are often presented as an alternative to market-based models, they can place significant demands on individuals already under pressure. Without institutional support, these initiatives risk remaining aspirational.
Milburn’s response is to argue for new forms of partnership that combine state support with community participation – what he terms “public-common partnerships.”
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An abstract diagram of the Public Common Partnership organisational structure – via Keir Milburn.
Reframing ownership and control
Public-common partnerships were presented as structural alternatives to extractive and often wholly unproductive public-private partnerships.
Rather than relying on private capital to unlock investment, they seek to mobilise the “knowledge, resources and energy” of local communities, in collaboration with public institutions and workers.
The model centres on shared ownership and democratic control, particularly over how financial surpluses are used. In practice, this involves the creation of “common associations” – local bodies through which residents can participate meaningfully in decision-making that affects them and their families.
One case study discussed was the Latin Village market in Tottenham, where a long-running anti-gentrification campaign led to development of community-led plans for the site. The proposed structure included a three-way partnership between traders, a public authority, and a community body responsible for allocating surplus funds.
Financial modelling suggests that such an asset could generate £2.3 million within three years of redevelopment – funds that would be reinvested locally rather than extracted. Milburn spoke of parallels with Barcelona’s community-run Can Batalla.
Milburn’s argument is that this approach not only retains wealth within communities, which is vital, but also rebuilds genuine democratic engagement. By involving residents directly in decision-making, it seeks to reverse what he described as a 40-year process of “training people away from democratic sensibilities.”
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Another case study discussed was the Wards Corner Community Benefit Society planned in Harringay where London’s Greens expect possible council control on 7 May – via Keir Milburn.
Next steps in power?
The broader political context is significant. The Green Party’s recent electoral gains have raised expectations about its potential role in local government especially. However, both speakers cautioned that electoral success alone is insufficient.
Milburn noted:
Winning an election is just the first stage.
The challenge lies in translating that hard-won mandate into structural changes within institutions that are de facto resistant to them – “the day after the revolution,” as Milburn paraphrased Lenin.
This includes navigating internal party dynamics for starters. As Fearnley pointed out, political parties are inherently coalitional, and increased support brings increased scrutiny. (Greens know this as well as anyone right now, as Britain’s right-wing press doubles down on its incessant smear campaign.)
The key, Fearnley suggested, is not complete ideological alignment. It’s instead a focus on asking:
What can we win together?
Both speakers implicitly recognised that local action must be linked to national change. The constraints facing councils – budget rules, centralised funding, regulatory frameworks, etc. – cannot be fully addressed at the local level.
Any attempt to “escape the trap” will therefore require broader political mobilisation.
Test time for the left
This discussion was not a fully formed blueprint, but it nevertheless offered overlapping strategies: incremental reform within existing structures, experimentation with new institutional models, and longer-term efforts to shift the slanted balance of power.
Whether these approaches can be scaled, of course, remains an open question.
The examples cited are often context-specific and dependent on particular conditions. Simultaneously, they offer counter-narratives to the idea that local government is inherently limited to managing decline. But the stakes couldn’t be higher.
With trust in political institutions at low levels – Fearnley cites figures suggesting only around 10% of people trust major parties to do what they promise voters – the ability to demonstrate tangible change at the local level could have profound wider implications.
In that sense, local government is not just a site of service delivery, but a potential arena for significant and necessary political renewal. The question is whether the current generation of councillors and activists can navigate the constraints they’ll necessarily inherit, whilst also building the capacity to transform them.
If they can, the implications will extend far beyond council chambers. If they cannot, the risk is that local government will continue to function as intended: a buffer between centralised power and local dissatisfaction, absorbing pressure without resolving it.
Dr. Keir Milburn is a writer, researcher, and consultant. He has a background as an academic in political economy and organisational theory. He authored the widely acclaimed book, Generation Left and is an internationally recognised expert on economic democracy, the commons and Public-Common Partnerships. His most recent book, Radical Abundance, was co-written with Kai Heron and Bertie Russel.
Hugo Fearnley is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University, investigating perspectives on social welfare policy and how it relates to health outcomes. This involves engagement with policymakers to explore differences in approaches in different geographic and cultural contexts. The project builds on previous work in policy as Mayor Jamie Driscoll’s Political Adviser in the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
Andrew Glassford is a freelance audio engineer and theatre worker, member of Red Co-op and a founder of the the Retrofit Get in Project, helping theatre workers affected by the covid-19 pandemic with reskilling into jobs retrofitting homes. He’s standing as a candidate on 7 May in Stockport’s Davenport & Cale Green ward.
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Extra context added because this headline is wildly misleading.