It’s time to refocus on neighbourhood renewal
The 25-year-old National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal has many lessons for those tasked with regenerating ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods today
GOVERNANCE & STRATEGY
Image: Local Trust
Matt Leach
CEO, Local Trust
Matt Leach
CEO, Local Trust
Issue 69 | December 2023
This autumn marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of “Bringing Britain Together – a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal”. Published a year after New Labour came into power, this milestone report by the Social Exclusion Unit heralded more than a decade of sustained investment aimed at addressing concentrations of need in some of our most deprived communities.
Fast-forward to today and we have extensive data showing the extent to which many key social outcomes score significantly lower in areas that are both deprived and lacking in social infrastructure. This is an issue that is likely to be highlighted further this autumn in the forthcoming report of the year-long inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group for ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods. It is clear there is a strong case for a return to some of the policy principles that informed the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal and the New Deal for Communities programme that launched shortly afterwards.
Image: Local Trust
Tackling deprivation
The New Deal for Communities (NDC) was arguably the last major policy initiative by any government that recognised the importance of addressing the challenges facing deprived communities through action and investment at a neighbourhood level, while also harnessing the potential of local people to take the lead in delivering that change. It is a programme that has been either maligned or ignored in the decade or so since it wound up. But the time is well overdue for a reappraisal.
Uniquely for a programme of its scale, when the final evaluation of the NDC was published, the conclusion was that the programme represented both good value for money and achieved considerable positive change, with benefiting neighbourhoods often transformed over the decade of the programme relative to other localities. This doesn’t mean that every NDC was perfect, or that every aspect of the programme was a success.
Even at its height, the NDC only ever represented around 10% of public funds going into its target areas. But, taken as a whole, independent evaluation shows it to have largely delivered what it set out to achieve in most of the neighbourhoods it focused on, while making good use of available public funds.
Learning the lessons
One of the reasons underpinning the relative success of National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal was that it was founded on an understanding that many of the biggest challenges facing the then incoming Labour government – notably around achieving its ambitions around education, skills, crime, health and housing – were often concentrated in particular neighbourhoods.
The strategy recognised that it wasn’t enough to address social problems in those areas piecemeal, instead they needed to be dealt with together, with national and local government collaborating with local communities to tackle them.
The NDC recognised from the outset that solutions parachuted in from outside, without the engagement of local communities, and with no one in charge of pulling together at a local level, were likely to fail.
Thinking ‘Big’
Those principles – of neighbourhood-focused, long-term funding and community leadership – are very similar to those that underpinned the Big Local programme at its outset. Since 2012, delivering the biggest-ever single endowment from a Lottery provider, Local Trust has supported 150 deprived communities around the country to come together to address problems and improve their local neighbourhoods.
We’ve provided a decade of support to build the confidence and capacity of local people in Big Local areas to establish their own initiatives and institutions, take the big decisions where needed, and pull together to tackle shared challenges and find their own solutions. And, as we’ve evaluated and learnt from our own work, we’ve seen just how much can be achieved by taking that approach.
That learning, and the insight gained from it, has underpinned the successful cross-sectoral campaign for a Community Wealth Fund. But, looking back over the last decade, we have seen limited wider evidence of a neighbourhood-based approach to addressing major social problems being taken by either of the two main political parties.
With an election approaching, and the opportunity for both main parties to set out their agendas in manifestos that will shape our politics for at least the next half decade, it is time to revisit important learning from the past. Perhaps it is time for a new National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal?
“We’ve provided a decade of support to build the confidence and capacity of local people in Big Local areas to establish their own initiatives and institutions, take the big decisions where needed, and pull together to tackle shared challenges.”
