Business Organisations, Local Dependence and the Politics of Urban Renewal in Britain

Throughout the 1980s, the British cities witnessed an expansion in local economic development policies, characterised by proactive local government developing wideranging strategies primarily in trying to attract internationally mobile capital (Keating, 1991, 1993; Valler, 1991). A combination of cutbacks in central state-directed spatial policies, the increased hypermobility of capital and ® scal retrenchment in local government, left many localities vulnerable to economic recession while, increasingly, local politicians began to identify private sector-led economic development strategies as a panacea for solving many of the protracted socio-economic problems left behind by industrial restructuring (Barnekov et al. 1989; Imrie and Thomas, 1993; Logan and Molotch, 1987). In particular, the 1980s saw a signi® cant transformation in the nature of local state governance, with the privatisation of large sectors of local state functions , including the contracting-out of cleaning, catering, transport and a host of related services (Cochrane, 1991, 1993;