spending money locally probably won’t save local economies…

'buy local' and the Totally Locally campaign is based on a very compelling and emotive idea – if we value our local shops, facilities (and therefore our local economy in which these things exist and operate), then we should support them by using them: “buy local”, and spend with local retailers rather than distant online stores such as amazon… after all, money makes the world go round, so the more we can keep locally, the more our local community can keep things going around for the benefit of us all?

But there’s a small wrinkle in this idea which means that ‘buy local’ may never really have the transformative effect on our local communities we dream of: scale.

The Totally Locally campaign is focussed on getting us as consumers to make choices about where we buy our stuff from. That’s the retail element of the economy. And collectively we spend about £378bn a year buying stuff in it. Sounds a lot, but the UK government spends about £754bn a year. There are also the various service and manufacturing and construction industries, agriculture, and so on – all of whom are also spending money that has implications for our local economy… implications like:

• if/how people are employed, and so able to have money to spend
• who owns the properties that shops rent, and we live in, (usually landlords aren’t locally based)
• the extent to which we have options about where we bank, sign up to phone contracts, access health care and other services…

So you see, I’m not convinced that getting more of us to buy locally as consumers will have the transformative effect we all dream of, as there’s lots of ways in which money gets spent that we can’t keep local, and the spending decisions being made by others that dwarf the impact we can create by choosing to do so…

HOWEVER… what if the idea of Totally Locally started to target businesses in the same way is does to us as consumers? What if as well as encouraging us as individuals to buy local, we started to encourage each other to buy local when it comes to purchasing decisions in our various places of work as well - using the local stationary store instead of placing an order with Viking; going to a local insurance broker on the high street instead of using a price comparison website for our employer liability insurances? We could lever so much more money into our local economies, making them even stronger and more resilient…

But how to create such encouragement and celebrate it? Well, Totally Locally already makes various awards of recognition, but what if it started an award to businesses who manage to source the most of their purchases from other local businesses? As a local enterprise, I’ve been tracking the extent to which I’m able to procure goods and services for my businesses from with the local economy (which I count as being a 10-mile radius around where I live in Todmorden) – over the last 10 years, this has been 29% of all my spending(which given I travel throughout the UK to deliver my services to clients seems pretty good). 

Anyone able to top that?