Preston City Council

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  • Jan.31.2018: In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control. Small cities trailing big histories rank among the flotsam of 21st-century capitalism. With a big enough dowry (subsidies, free roads, cheap labour), they might catch the eye of a passing multinational bearing some dubious inward investment. A distribution warehouse, say, with poverty-pay jobs, or a high-street killer of a retail park. But the city council no longer plays that game. The answer each time has to do with #Matthew Brown. the transformative moment came as Brown worked with a Manchester-based consultancy, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), on how to harness public services. Public services are something Preston has a lot of. These public bodies account for thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in spending. Yet calculations in 2013 showed that a mere fraction – one quid for each £20 spent – stayed in Preston. Much of the rest was going to building firms headquartered in London, say, or to global catering companies. Brown’s team persuaded six of the public bodies on their doorstep to commit to spending locally wherever possible. It sounded commonsensical; yet it defied procurement convention, which trades cost against quality and rarely thinks about the environment or society. Contracts too impossibly large for local firms are broken into bite-size chunks. The Guardian, Aditua Chakrabortty