At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

The Financial Reality of the British State: From Westminster to the Town Hall

Part Seven: Ashfield, The Example

Ashfield. Nottinghamshire coalfield country, between Mansfield and Nottingham, hard against the M1.

A longer history

Coal has shaped this part of Nottinghamshire since well before living memory. Mining in the area goes back to at least the early nineteenth century, and by the mid-1800s the Nottinghamshire coalfield was one of the more productive in the country, expanding steadily as new shafts were sunk through the second half of the century and into the twentieth. Annesley Colliery, the pit to the south of what’s now Ashfield’s centre, opened in 1865. By the time of nationalisation in 1947, there were 49 working collieries across Nottinghamshire. Employment in and around the pits shaped not just household income but the physical layout of the towns — housing built for miners, working men’s clubs, cricket teams attached to individual collieries (Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, the England fast bowlers, both worked at and played for Annesley Colliery before their county careers).

The contraction, when it came, took about forty years and accelerated sharply in the last decade of it. Nottinghamshire went from 49 pits at nationalisation to a handful by the early 1990s, and the run of final closures came in a cluster: Calverton in 1999, Annesley (by then merged with the neighbouring Bentinck seam) in January 2000, Clipstone in 2003, Harworth in 2006, and Welbeck, the last one in the county, in 2010. Annesley’s closure in 2000 ended the working life of the pit nearest Ashfield itself, and it had by then become the oldest continuously working colliery in Nottinghamshire. The 1984–85 miners’ strike sits inside this longer contraction rather than at its start or its end — a decisive and bitterly contested moment in a process that was already underway before it and continued for a quarter of a century after it. Reckoned from 1984, that strike is now over forty years in the past.

What has happened to the land, the labour, and the capital since is not simple absence. The physical sites have mostly been repurposed — Silverhill Colliery is now managed woodland used for running and walking; other former pit sites have become housing or business parks. The labour has moved into different sectors rather than out of work altogether for most people, though not without cost: manufacturing remains present but reduced, warehousing and distribution have grown substantially given the area’s position by the M1, and health and social care — driven by an ageing population and, as later sections cover, a working-age population with above-average rates of long-term ill health — has become the single largest employer in the area. And capital has moved too, not vanished: Sherwood Business Park alone now hosts over seventy businesses across manufacturing, energy, logistics and services, and the district council has a five-year capital programme running past £100 million, covering a new automated distribution and manufacturing centre, a robotics centre, and several town centre projects. None of this is a full replacement for what was lost in wages or in the kind of secure, unionised, skilled work mining represented. But it is also not correctly described as nothing having replaced it. The sections that follow look at what has, in more detail, and at what it has and hasn’t managed to do.

James Graham, the playwright whose work on this period (Sherwood, in particular) prompted the research that this piece draws on, was born in Mansfield and grew up in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, inside this same contraction, as a child in the 1980s and 1990s. That connection is the reason this place was chosen as the series’ ground-level case study rather than any other former coalfield constituency — not because his account of it settles anything, but because it gave us a specific, well-documented door into asking what the numbers actually say.

Not quite sortition. Not quite random. But an example chosen precisely because we had no preformed idea of what we would find here — nothing beyond what a playwright had already chosen to dramatise.

The numbers, and what they don’t say

Any account of Ashfield’s current economic position runs immediately into a problem of definition. The figures come from different administrative bodies that don’t map onto each other. Ashfield is a parliamentary constituency, a separate local government district, and a set of wards inside Nottinghamshire county — three different institutions, three different boundaries, and the statistics available at each level don’t always agree in scope or in recency. What follows draws mainly on the parliamentary constituency and district figures, since those are where the most current and most granular data sits, with the county-level institutional detail covered separately in the following section.

On employment: in the year ending December 2023, 64.4% of Ashfield residents aged 16 to 64 were in work, against a UK figure of around 74.8%. Unemployment stood at 4.9%, against a national rate of 3.8%. Economic inactivity — people neither working nor looking for work — affected 31.3% of the working-age population, against a UK inactivity rate of around 21%. The available breakdown attributes a significant part of that gap to long-term ill health rather than to unwillingness to work. The distinction between “won’t work” and “can’t work for health reasons” carries a great deal of political weight locally, and the data itself does not support treating the two as interchangeable.

On what people actually do for work now, the picture has moved well past coal without arriving at anything single-industry in its place. The three largest sources of employment as of 2024 are hospital activities, warehousing and storage, and general medical practice — meaning the NHS and adjacent care work on one side, and logistics on the other, have become the area’s largest employers by a clear margin. Manufacturing persists at a meaningfully lower share than in the mining era but has not disappeared; construction, retail and wholesale, and transport and storage all register as substantial sectors as well. Ashfield’s business base is not thin: the district counts over 3,000 registered businesses and thirteen business parks, and its economy is estimated at roughly £3.5 billion in gross output, a small fraction of the national total but not a negligible one for a district of its size.

On pay, the gap is real and has been widening rather than closing. Average annual earnings in Ashfield stand at roughly £29,600, around 16% below the England-wide average of approximately £35,100 — placing Ashfield 138th of 164 non-metropolitan districts in England when ranked by average pay. Wage growth in Ashfield has been running at just over 4% a year, against an England-wide growth rate closer to 5.75%, meaning the gap in cash terms is not stable but slowly increasing. The gender pay gap locally is wider than the national figure as well, with average female earnings around £24,200 against average male earnings of roughly £32,900. None of these figures describe a place in freefall — average pay is well above subsistence, employment has grown modestly over the past five years, and the business base is real rather than hollowed out — but they do describe a place earning less, for the same hours worked, than most of the rest of the country, in an economy still adjusting to what replaced an industry that once set the local wage floor directly.

The numbers above can flatten into a single caricature if read carelessly. An inactivity rate of 31%, higher than the national average, is still by definition a minority of the working-age population. Most working-age adults in Ashfield are in employment, and the largest single occupational category, health professionals, includes some of the better-paid roles in the local economy, projected to keep growing faster than most other job categories over the rest of the decade. The area contains a normal cross-section of working lives — nurses, warehouse operatives, teachers, tradespeople, shop workers, managers — and the specific, serious problems concentrated in a minority of the population should not be read as a description of everyone who lives there.

That minority is nonetheless the point. The gap between Ashfield’s inactivity rate and the national one is in the region of ten percentage points — something like one in ten working-age residents who, on the national pattern, would otherwise be in work. That is not a rounding error in a local statistics table. It is a substantial number of individual lives in which ill health, discouragement, or a lack of opportunity has closed off paid work, and a substantial loss to the town in wages that would otherwise be earned and spent locally. The frame that matters here is not decline — Ashfield is not a place in freefall — but waste: potential going unused, and for many of the people living inside that gap, the specific indignity of being written about, nationally, as a problem to be solved rather than as people whose circumstances a functioning economy failed to accommodate.

Three institutions, one place

The account of Ashfield’s finances and governance has to start by naming who actually controls what, because the answer is split three ways and none of the three splits cleanly along lines a resident would guess from daily experience.

Ashfield District Council runs day-to-day services: housing, planning, waste collection, leisure, town centre management, business support. It is controlled by Ashfield Independents, a genuinely local party rather than a national one. Its finances have been, by most available measures, well managed: council tax was frozen for 2025/26, following a Local Government Association report praising the council’s financial position and reserves, and the district is running a five-year, £100-million-plus capital programme covering a new automated distribution and manufacturing centre, a robotics centre, a science discovery centre and planetarium, and multiple town centre regeneration projects.

Nottinghamshire County Council runs the larger-ticket services: social care, education, and the roads. It has been controlled by Reform UK since May 2025, when the party took 41 of 66 seats on the back of just over 41% of the county-wide vote. Its first budget under Reform, set in January 2026, required roughly £44 million in savings over three years, concentrated on highways and adult social care — the council’s own language describes these as efficiencies rather than cuts, a distinction residents are free to judge for themselves against the scale of the number.

The two institutions do not share resources or, particularly, credit. Of every pound collected in council tax in Ashfield, the district keeps roughly 9 pence; the county takes about 75 pence; the remainder splits between the police and fire authorities. The council actually running a surplus and investing in new infrastructure is not the council residents mean when they talk about “the council” cutting services — that’s the other one, and the confusion this produces about who is responsible for what is not incidental to how the politics plays out locally.

A third layer sits above both, and is in the process of erasing the other two. Central government confirmed in mid-July 2026 that Nottinghamshire’s nine existing councils — Ashfield, the county, and seven others — will be abolished and replaced with two new unitary authorities, following the same Local Government Reorganisation process running across much of England. Shadow elections are expected in May 2027, with the new authorities taking over in April 2028. Whichever institution is currently managing something well or badly in Ashfield, on current timetables, will not exist as a distinct body of accountability within three years.

A fourth layer, national rather than local, has changed more abruptly than any of the others. Kirkby-in-Ashfield — James Graham’s own hometown — has been named among the first 75 places to receive government Pride in Place funding, worth up to £20 million over a decade, plus a further £1.5 million from the associated Impact Fund. And the government awarding that money is now led by a different prime minister than the one who announced it: Andy Burnham took office on 20 July 2026, a matter of days before this was written, replacing Keir Starmer.

None of this is a case of confused or negligent government. It’s the ordinary condition of English local government at this moment: money and responsibility genuinely split across four tiers, each with its own electoral mandate and its own timetable, one of them about to be dissolved, none of them fully answerable to the people whose daily lives depend on the sum of all four working sensibly together. Whatever Ashfield’s residents make of any individual decision — the potholes, the flags, the social care waiting list, the £20 million regeneration grant — very few of them are voting for, or against, the institution actually holding the relevant lever.

The politics, briefly

Lee Anderson has represented Ashfield since 2019, first as a Conservative and, since 2024, for Reform UK, having defected in early 2024 after the Conservative whip was withdrawn over comments he made about the Mayor of London. He won the seat comfortably in the 2024 general election. Before politics he worked as a coal miner himself, then as a Labour party organiser and local councillor, before moving rightward across three parties inside a decade — a trajectory his critics read as opportunism and his supporters read as a man whose actual views simply moved with a large part of his constituency’s. He is now both Reform’s Chief Whip and its Party Chairman, and was ejected from the House of Commons chamber in April 2026 after accusing the Prime Minister of the day of lying over the Mandelson vetting affair. Whatever else is true of him, he is not a marginal or accidental figure inside his party; he is one of its most senior and most visible.

Reform’s actual record in local government, in Nottinghamshire, is now a year old rather than a promise. The party took control of the county council in May 2025 with 41 of 66 seats on 41% of the vote, and its first budget, set in January 2026, required around £44 million in savings over three years, falling hardest on highways and adult social care. Council leader Mick Barton has described the reductions as efficiencies. Money has, at the same time, been visibly redirected toward roads resurfacing and, more contentiously, toward flying the Union and County flags from council buildings — a decision that drew criticism as symbolic spending at a moment of service cuts, and defence from the council as a low-cost gesture of pride rather than a meaningful diversion of funds. A separate episode saw the council briefly attempt to restrict press access to meetings, before reversing the decision under legal challenge. None of this amounts to a verdict on Reform in government generally, on the basis of one council for one year. It is, however, the specific and checkable record this specific council has produced so far, and it is the record Ashfield’s residents are living inside now, distinct from — and in the district’s case, considerably better managed than — Reform’s own national reputation would suggest to someone reading about it from outside.

The national government against which all of this now sits has changed hands abruptly and recently. Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026, having won the Makerfield by-election and the subsequent Labour leadership contest, and having previously spent close to a decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester — a background in metro devolution rather than in Westminster, which is itself a notable departure for the office. What his government will actually do for a seat like Ashfield is not yet established by a track record, since the record is days old at the time of writing. What can be said is that Kirkby-in-Ashfield has already been named among the first 75 places nationally to receive Pride in Place funding, worth up to £20 million over ten years — a commitment made before the change of prime minister, under the government Burnham now leads, and one of the few concrete facts available about what national policy currently intends for this specific place.

Graham’s own political instinct, across Sherwood and elsewhere, has generally been not to resolve this kind of material into a verdict — to let a Tory voter, a Labour voter, and someone who has simply stopped voting sit in the same room without the play telling the audience which of them is right. That refusal to resolve is not a dodge; it’s arguably the more honest response to a place where, as the previous section showed, the actual lines of accountability are genuinely difficult for even an engaged observer to trace. A Reform county council can point at potholes it says the last administration left behind. A Labour government can point at Reform’s cuts. An Ashfield Independent-run district can point out, accurately, that it isn’t responsible for either. Every one of these claims can be true and checkable at the same time, and a voter trying to assign blame or credit correctly is not being lazy or misled so much as asked to do something the structure itself makes close to impossible.

What’s already happening, mostly unnoticed

The version of Ashfield visible in national coverage is Reform’s county council, Lee Anderson, and a small set of contested decisions. A different, quieter Ashfield exists underneath that one, doing something closer to what the later part of this piece will argue for — and it has been operating for at least two years without waiting for anyone’s permission to call it that.

The clearest example sits in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, where £19.5 million was allocated in 2024 under the Long Term Plan for Towns programme, later folded into the government’s Pride in Place scheme. What happened with that money is not, on the evidence available, a case of officials deciding and residents finding out afterwards. Over 340 residents and businesses completed a questionnaire in May 2024 on how it should be spent; a second survey the following month, completed by more than 400 people, asked them to rank the resulting shortlist by expected benefit. The body overseeing this — first called the Kirkby Town Board, now the Kirkby Neighbourhood Board — took that feedback and built a project list from it, covering housing, skills, health, and education. None of this is sortition in the strict sense of randomly selected citizens; it’s closer to conventional consultation, done at reasonably serious scale for a town of Kirkby’s size. But the underlying instinct — put the question to the people who live there and build the answer from what comes back, rather than deciding centrally and presenting it as finished — is the same instinct sortition formalises further.

The money itself illustrates the other half of the argument. The £19.5 million programme was paused and sent back to central government for review after the 2024 surveys had already been run, sitting in limbo before being relaunched with revised priorities. Two years of local deliberative work therefore proceeded on a funding stream that was not, in that period, actually secure. This is the institutional structure from the earlier beat showing its effect directly: a genuinely participatory local process, doing real work, made contingent on a central government decision it had no power over and limited visibility into. The people running the consultation were not the people who could guarantee the money existed at the end of it.

Underneath the Neighbourhood Board sits a further layer that rarely gets named at all: Ashfield Voluntary Action, the district’s umbrella body for its voluntary and community sector, running a Health and Wellbeing Centre in Kirkby and a small social enterprise, Ashfield Community Enterprise, employing volunteers to make and sell goods with the proceeds going back into local support work. Smaller Pride in Place grant rounds now run through the same infrastructure — £62,000 for community cohesion projects, £20,000 specifically for learning and skills, both administered locally through the Neighbourhood Board rather than distributed from Whitehall by formula. These are not large sums against a £44 million county-level savings requirement. They are, however, real money, genuinely locally directed, and almost entirely absent from how Ashfield gets discussed outside Ashfield.

Why this stays invisible is not a mystery. None of it produces a clean argument for either side of the national political fight. It doesn’t confirm that Reform is failing residents, since none of it runs through the Reform-controlled county tier at all. It doesn’t confirm that central government is delivering, since the £19.5 million was itself paused before it was relaunched. A resident-run survey process and a volunteer-staffed craft enterprise are not, in the ordinary sense, news — they lack the shape of conflict that coverage of Ashfield otherwise organises itself around, and precisely because it isn’t organised around blame or grievance, it doesn’t fit anywhere in the story as currently told.

Elsewhere, in comparable places, the same pattern has produced results over a longer run than Kirkby’s has yet had. Lochgelly in Fife, once named Scotland’s most-improved town, got there through sixteen years of sustained partnership between the council, a local development trust and community groups — not a single intervention, but a long institutional habit of working together. Barnsley’s town centre turnaround took a stalled 2002 masterplan and rebuilt it around what residents had actually asked for in consultation — a historic market and a public square — rather than the grander scheme originally proposed. Neither is a miracle; both took the better part of two decades. What they share with what’s happening in Kirkby now is scale mismatched to patience: small, locally-run, consultation-based work that only pays off if it’s allowed to run for long enough, and is funded securely enough, to do so.

What might actually help

Sortition, in its full civic-lottery form — randomly selected residents, given time, information and a facilitated space to work through a genuine question — has not been tried in Ashfield. But it is worth being precise about what it actually asks for, because the word itself invites misreading. It does not mean handing decisions to amateurs instead of experts, and it does not mean replacing elected representatives. It means, in practice, a room of people who did not choose to be in a public argument being given the space to work out what they’d actually prioritise, together, once they have the same information in front of them — which is close to what the Kirkby Neighbourhood Board’s residents did across two surveys in 2024, informally and at smaller scale. The formal version simply builds in what that process had to improvise: proper representativeness, dedicated time, and independent facilitation, so the answer reflects the town rather than whoever happened to have a free evening to fill in a questionnaire.

Andy Burnham’s own record gestures toward the same instinct without naming it as such. A decade running Greater Manchester through combined-authority devolution is, structurally, an argument that decisions land better closer to the people they affect, made by someone who has now moved from proving that at city-region scale to holding the office that decides how much further it goes. Nothing in the days since 20 July confirms absolutely what his government will actually do with that instinct nationally, though bus fare caps, targeted business rate cuts and cutting VAT on electricity bills signal intent and the pushback on “who pays” or “too small to make a difference” is predictable. The instinct itself is not foreign to what’s already happening in Kirkby — a Neighbourhood Board, a voluntary sector doing quiet redistributive work through a craft enterprise, residents surveyed twice on a shortlist rather than told what the shortlist was. Scaling that up, formalising it, and — this is the part that actually costs something — funding it as a settled commitment rather than a programme that gets paused for a Whitehall review midway through, would be a continuation of a habit already visible on the ground, not an import from a seminar room.

There is a plainer way of putting what the earlier institutional beat and this one both point toward. Local government in Ashfield, whatever else can be said about the county’s cuts or the flags, mostly gets on with fixing potholes and running leisure centres without asking whether the resident in front of it voted for Reform, Labour, or nobody. The voluntary sector infrastructure covered above does not ask either. What breaks this down is not the town itself; it’s the layer above it — a funding relationship with the centre that arrives in bursts, gets paused for review, and requires places like Ashfield to keep re-proving their case rather than being trusted to hold a long-term settlement and be judged on what they do with it. A civic lottery process, properly resourced and genuinely empowered to direct real money rather than advise on a shortlist someone else compiled, would formalise the town’s own existing practice of working things out face to face rather than at a distance. What it cannot do on its own is fix the funding relationship above it. Both need to change together, or the more patient, less visible version of Ashfield stays exactly as invisible as it currently is — outlasted, every time, by whichever national argument is loudest that month.

A closing note

Ashfield does not need anyone from outside it to explain what has happened here. That includes us. We chose it because a playwright led us there. We have no connection with it. We have never been there. We are the very London-centric commentators who are worst placed to judge. But we have tried to act in good faith. If we are wrong or have mis-represented then we can only apologise.

The people who live in Kirkby-in-Ashfield know which pit their grandfather worked, which street the club stood on, what the wages bought and what they didn’t. They know the potholes on their own road better than any council report does, and they know, better than any national columnist, whether the flags flying outside County Hall changed anything about their own week. What this piece has tried to do is not tell them their own place back to them. It has tried to do something narrower and, we hope, more useful: to write down, in one place, the numbers and the institutions that usually stay scattered — a county here, a district there, a ministry somewhere else entirely — so that the actual shape of the problem, and the actual shape of what’s already working, can be seen at the same time.

What that shape shows is not a place in crisis, and it is not a place that has been abandoned. It is a place carrying a specific, measurable, genuinely difficult burden — roughly one resident in ten who, on the national pattern, would be in work and isn’t, for reasons that are mostly about health rather than about will — inside an institutional arrangement so fragmented that even a careful reader needs several paragraphs to work out who is actually responsible for any single decision. And it is, at the same time, a place where people have already been quietly doing the patient, unglamorous work of asking each other what’s needed and building toward it, in rooms too small to make the news, with money that arrives in bursts and sometimes gets paused mid-flow by a government review it has no say over.

Both of those things are true simultaneously, and neither cancels the other out. That, more than any single statistic in the piece, is the actual argument: that a place can be doing everything right at the scale it controls, and still be failed by an arrangement above it that was never designed with anyone’s daily life as its first consideration. The people running the Kirkby Neighbourhood Board did not choose the funding settlement above them. Lee Anderson did not design the council-tax split that leaves the district with 9 pence in the pound. Nobody in Ashfield voted for the local government reorganisation that will, on current timetables, dissolve most of what’s described in this piece within three years.

What’s owed to a place like this is not sympathy, and it is not blame directed at whichever party currently holds the county. It is something more specific: the same patience and the same seriousness that Kirkby’s own residents have already shown, extended upward, by people who don’t have to live with the consequences of getting it wrong. A funding settlement that lasts longer than an electoral cycle. A structure simple enough that a resident can actually find out who to ask. And, eventually, the kind of decision-making — closer to a jury than to a shouting match — that lets the people who will actually live with a choice have a real hand in making it. None of that is beyond the capacity of a wealthy country. It has simply not, yet, been treated as worth doing properly, in a place that has already shown it knows how.

It needs dignity, recognised, reckoned, and reinvigorated.