Why place matters more than ever
The local election results were not simply a difficult night for established parties. They were a warning about place.
Across England, more than 5,000 seats were contested across 136 councils. Reform gained more than 1,300 council seats and 13 councils, Labour lost more than 1,200 seats and more than 30 councils, while the Conservatives also suffered heavy losses. The Liberal Democrats and Greens made significant gains too. More than 40 councils changed hands.
The result was not one clean national swing, but something more complex: voters moving in different directions, often shaped by local frustration, local identity and local trust.
This matters because place is increasingly where politics is being felt most sharply. People do not experience policy through a White Paper. They experience it through the bus that does not arrive, the job that feels out of reach, the town centre that has lost business, the course that does not connect to local employers, or the health barrier that stops someone getting into work.
For organisations and Westminster, this should change the question. It is no longer enough to ask how a proposal fits with national policy. The sharper question is how it lands in places like Wolverhampton, Redcar, Edinburgh, Barnsley, Bradford, or Greater Manchester. What does it do for local people? Who has shaped it? Which partners are involved? What evidence sits behind it?
The Purpose Coalition has been looking at this for some time. Through Purpose Labs, it has built a model that brings together universities, colleges, employers, and public service leaders to understand how expectations around work, wellbeing, and opportunity are changing. That work now operates through a network of more than 20 universities and colleges, generating real-world insight from students, patients, and communities.
Purpose Lab Place takes that model further. Rather than treating place as a backdrop, it makes place the starting point. It brings MPs, students, employers, educators, civic leaders, and local organisations into structured conversations about the barriers people face in their own communities, and about the practical responses that could help remove them.
Last year, The Purpose Coalition began piloting this approach through Constituency Assemblies in Wolverhampton North East with Sureena Brackenridge MP and in Edinburgh South West with Dr Scott Arthur MP. These sessions were designed to bring community insight directly into policy conversations, with findings captured and analysed alongside local data to identify patterns and practical responses.
This year, that work is moving from pilot to programme. The first session takes place this week in Wolverhampton again with Sureena Brackenridge MP, followed by Redcar with the Rt Hon Anna Turley MP, Cabinet Minster, Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Redcar, and then further work with Dr Scott Arthur MP in Edinburgh.
The point is not to create another consultation exercise. Too often, consultation asks people to respond to proposals once the real decisions have already been made. Purpose Lab Place starts earlier. It asks what people are experiencing, where systems are failing to connect, and what employers, educators, public services, and politicians can do together that they cannot do alone.
This is also why the rise of “Manchesterism” is so significant. Andy Burnham has described it as a model that seeks to deliver economic progress alongside social progress, rooted in devolution and local control. Centre for Cities has highlighted the Bee Network, the Good Growth Fund, and Greater Manchester’s wider place-first approach as examples of how devolved leadership can make policy feel more relevant to everyday life.
Greater Manchester’s Good Employment Charter shows the same principle in practice. It has worked with employers and partners to raise standards around secure work, flexible work, pay, recruitment, people management and health and wellbeing. By 2025, it had almost 1,000 supporters and more than 150 members, with Acas involved as a founding Charter Board member.
The lesson is not that every place should copy Manchester. It is that successful place-based work requires a coalition: political leadership, employer commitment, civic trust, local evidence and a willingness to act on what people say.
That is where the next phase of politics is heading. The local election results showed a country that is impatient with promises and increasingly sceptical of national messages that do not translate into visible local change. For businesses, universities, and other organisations, the opportunity is to show that they understand the places they operate in, and that they are prepared to help shape practical answers.
Place matters because trust is local before it is national. Opportunity is local before it is statistical. And delivery is judged not by the strength of a press release, but by whether people can see change in the communities they call home.
