In the 18 August issue of The MJ, in the Whitehall Inside View column, political editor Mark Conrad highlighted the importance of the communities strand of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) remit following last month's riots.

As a former DCLG policy adviser I agree with his observations that communities policy has a much lower profile than that of local government. It was, and I'm sadly sure is still the case in other departments as well, that Whitehall has a blind spot when it comes to community or collective public action. Policies seem to only accept the existence of individuals (occasionally households) and organisations (businesses or public bodies), when we all know people often get together to do things, often explicitly for the public good.