Introduction

The last 20 years have certainly witnessed a creeping ‘welfare localism’ in advanced capitalism across the globe (compare Whitworth, 2016; King and Le Gales, 2017; Flint, 2019; Jessop, 2018). In short, national states have actively sought to reduce commitments to integrated welfare entitlements and redistributive urban and regional policies in favour of supply-side neoliberal initiatives intended to promote technological innovation, labour market flexibility, lean management and endogenous growth. The quotation above is taken from the Social Security Advisory Committee's insightful review into the localisation of social security policy in Great Britain. This documents a creeping localisation agenda over a period of 20 years, covering the areas of decentralisation, de-concentration, devolution and subsidiarity. The Social Security Advisory Committee (2015: 8, emphasis added) sees ‘localism and localisation as general terms that relate to those policies, schemes or funds that are developed and/or delivered via local institutions or agencies, to meet the needs of citizens living in a particular locality’. Underpinning GB government policy has been the argument that previous attempts at promoting social development had been too centralised and there is a need to curtail top-down initiatives that had ignored the varying needs of different areas.

Indicate of this, the Coalition Government of 2010–15, and the Conservative Government from May 2015 to 2017, has purported to offer a radically different approach to economic and social development policy. To give one example, the rollout of Universal Credit (UC) involving merging benefits and a tapering system linked to in-work benefits and wages designed to ‘make work pay’ involves a more disciplinary and conditional welfare system through a tougher claimant regime in which sanctions are an integral feature.