You may not know it, and it often does not feel like it, but in at least one political sphere we are living through something of a golden age for the Labour party. At a local level, and across whole swaths of the country, Labour is in power and thriving, blessed with an outstanding generation of civic community leaders who know what it takes to both win elections and govern in style.

We should count our lucky stars for this. Because so many of the great social challenges a 2020 Labour government will face after 10 years of Tory rule – reducing inequality, spreading prosperity to ‘left behind’ communities, rebuilding the public realm – are already being tackled by our local representatives. And whether it is Norwich’s energy switching scheme, Nottingham’s young people’s jobs fund, or Manchester’s integrated health and social care, they are finding a way – in the teeth of Tory austerity – to deliver progressive outcomes. So while those of us in Westminster must vigorously oppose yet another round of eye-watering cuts to local authorities – once more distributed with a vindictive partisanship – we must also show some humility and listen to our local leaders about the nature of modern statecraft.

That is just what Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson were doing at the LGA Labour conference last weekend. And in the broader parliamentary Labour party there is a growing awareness of the need to listen and support our town hall colleagues. But as we reform our party for a more decentralised era of democracy, perhaps it is time to look at ways of decentralising our own internal structures too.

For a start, we could give councillors and local parties much more power to define their own campaigning objectives. Currently, our dominant campaign culture still reflects the outmoded, ‘command and control’ methods of the 1990s. Far too often local parties feel browbeaten into pursuing national messages that have very little purchase within their communities. This has to stop. Labour councillors and local organisers know their beat better than anyone – and their electoral success is testament to that. It is therefore high time to tap into their local insight and find a way of using it to shape our campaign strategies.

This campaigning culture perhaps highlights a broader challenge the Labour party faces in responding to a new ‘localist’ impulse within politics. Tentatively, the divergence of English and Scottish political sensibilities during the election has awoken us to the fact that different parts of the country have different democratic aspirations. And clearly the same is true of the communities we represent – the needs of Stoke-on-Trent are very different from those of Stoke Newington.

All of which is of course the bread and butter of devolved local government – the ability to respond to different community needs is, in essence, its whole purpose. And evidence increasingly shows that a more decentralised approach to government delivers stronger growth, more investment in human capital, better educational outcomes, higher wellbeing and less regional inequality (which is hardly surprising when you consider the immobile, unresponsive, arbitrarily organised silo-ism of Whitehall). However, almost none of this is captured by our party’s internal political culture. For example, why do we spend five days at party conference debating universal national objectives and next to no time reflecting on the different approaches to child poverty adopted by various Labour councils across the country?

Perhaps some of this is down to legitimate concerns about financing. We need to be very clear that any Labour devolution agenda must be balanced alongside the need to spread wealth from richer areas to poorer ones. Balancing the need to devolve power with the need for redistribution in my view represents the biggest challenge for Labour’s communities agenda. But equally Labour should accept that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to policymaking is increasingly out of touch with the growing democratic desire for power to be wielded by local people. But, worse, it could even be holding back our battle against inequality.

An optimistic, decentralised, democratically confident Labour party would encourage, both in campaigning and policymaking, a thousand Labour council-led strategies to bloom. Every day our civic leaders take decisions, in incredibly difficult circumstances, which shape the fate of working people in their communities. At a national level this wealth of experience has been badly neglected in recent years. This has to change: we need to open our ears. After all, as James Lewis, deputy leader of Leeds city council, said at this weekend’s Progress LGA Labour conference fringe event put it: [locally] ‘We are radical, we are credible and we win elections – what more could the Labour party want?’

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Tristram Hunt MP is member of parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central. He tweets @TristramHuntMP

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Listen again to:

Blueprint for government: What should Labour learn from its civic leaders? at Labour Local Government Conference 2016
1-2pm, Saturday 6 February 2016
Room 1, East Midlands Conference Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RJ

Sarah Hayward Leader, London borough of Camden
Sharon Taylor Leader, Stevenage borough council
James Lewis Deputy leader, Leeds city council
Reply: Steve Reed MP Shadow minister for local government
Chair: Tristram Hunt MP Chair, parliamentary Labour party departmental committee for communities and local government

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Photo: Qasim Massey