This is an edited version of FJ’s speech at the opening panel at the municipalist summit Fearless Cities, which took place 2-3 November 2024 in Sheffield. The summit, which we co-organised with Opus Independents, Citizen Network, Care Full and Steve Rushton, aimed to consolidate a movement in Britain for claiming community assets, building communities and creating new forms of democratic decision-making, as well as to find our place in the global ‘municipalist’ movement that works on those themes. The programme consisted of four strands: Neighbourhoods of Care; Reimagining the Commons; Rethinking Governance & Local Democracy; and Municipalist Futures. Research for Action organised the strand on governance and democracy, and this post sets out why.  We will be releasing some more content from the gathering in Sheffield very soon! 


We at Research for Action focus on local democracy; specifically on accountability and governance. These are both connected to wider democracy processes. For example, a citizen debt audit isn’t just technical exercise; it is a way to create new relationships and understandings of accountability, and a way to explore new ways of public interaction.  

Our work has long touched on the possibilities of municipalism. We have been part of the European Municipalist Network and inspired by the democratic experiments going on in different cities such as Naples, Zagreb and Barcelona. With Fearless Cities we wanted to ask: how do the possibilities provided by municipalist ideas and practices fit with the current realities of local government and local public services in the UK?

Local government in the UK has undergone significant transformations in recent decades: a shift from the public to the private; from distributed to centralised power; from accountable to concealed; and from unified and coherent to fragmented and overly complex.

The overall picture is bleak – most obviously after 14 years of austerity and the deliberate starvation of funding that has resulted in the immediate crisis in service provision experienced by so many people, whether on housing lists or awaiting repairs to their homes, or in schools and social care.  There has been a ‘hollowing out’ of local government: a reduction in the size; a loss of staff capacity, expertise and infrastructure; and importantly, a reduced scope and ambition for the sector. It is almost as if councils are only spoken of in terms of what they don’t do, or what they do badly.

This links to democracy, as privatisation and models like PFI (Private Finance Initiative) have created significant barriers to transparency. These bodies can evade accountability legislation by hiding behind claims of commercial confidentiality.

In addition, there has been an increased centralisation of power into larger areas and fewer hands: this is especially prominent in England where local government is also tiered and very complex. English councils have grown in size since the 1970s, with far larger average populations than European countries. There has also been a reduction in the number of councillors due to reorganisations of local government.

However, we also see many good ideas for changing governance or making new models of democratic governance – and we wanted to show both sides of the coin. We are excited to learn from the democratic initiatives that will be discussed, such as reversing privatisation and bringing utilities, or buses, into public ownership. Co-operatives and co-operation are increasingly on the agenda of councils. We are also a worker co-op and firmly believe that democratic control and ownership of workplaces and housing is a key part of this democratisation agenda: cooperation requires a specific way of doing governance and an accountability relationship between people and institutions.

Most importantly, we want to see a wholesale rethinking of what local democracy is for and how local government is organised; what is the public good, what is in the public interest. We need a new story that we tell ourselves about what local government can and should be, one that resembles the pride we hold in the NHS.

We need to work together to ask the big questions and formulate the vision and the demands that have been missing in this sector for a long time. We look forward to doing it with you.
We need to work together to ask the big questions and formulate the vision and the demands that have been missing in this sector for a long time. We look forward to doing it with you.


(Image: Reece Thompson)