This month, at New Local's Stronger Things conference, alongside hundreds of local authority officers and leaders from across the country, I had the privilege of listening to Debi and Lisa from the Northwood estate in Kirby talk about life in their community. They spoke with passion about how their group of committed local residents came together, many as a result of participating in the Local Trust supported Big Local programme. Working in partnership with their neighbours and the local authority they are determined to tackle deprivation and wider social challenges across their area.
In two weeks' time we are likely to see a new government sweep into power. Alongside a renewed national vision for our country, that new administration needs to prioritise action to address the challenges facing communities like Northwood. Because without a clear agenda for addressing the complex needs of our most disadvantaged and left behind neighbourhoods, in partnership with local government and local people, it will struggle to deliver on its key manifesto and mission priorities.
Many of the key domestic challenges facing that incoming government – health, education, opportunity, crime and pressures on public services and budgets – are often not evenly spread across the country but concentrated in particular places.
Research commissioned from Oxford University spin-out Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) in 2018, and refreshed and updated last year, highlights the extent to which some areas are doubly disadvantaged, with both the highest levels of deprivation, and the weakest social infrastructure. It is these areas that have been allowed to fall behind the rest of the country.
Like Northwood, they are often located on the periphery of post-industrial towns and cities in the North and Midlands, suffer from worse health, higher vulnerability to rising fuel costs, a lack of opportunity, higher crime and struggling local economies. Their challenges are often complex and multi-faceted, requiring coordinated action across both central and local government to address them. And – as last year's Preventative State report from Demos showed – these are often the same places that make the greatest calls on already over-stretched local public services.
We know that thriving neighbourhoods don't emerge out of the blue. We also know that where communities have been marginalised and neglected, they can take time to turn around. Short term initiatives don't work, and siloed approaches often fail to get to the bottom of problems. Sometimes expensively, when they focus exclusively on addressing the symptoms rather than the causes of neighbourhood decline.
This is why Local Trust is calling on the next government to set up a dedicated Neighbourhoods Unit which would bring together policy makers from across government and the wider public sector, including local government.
It would develop place-based approaches to addressing the needs of our doubly disadvantaged communities. Sitting in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities or the Cabinet Office, it should promote and support action across the different tiers of government and sectors to address communities' needs and aspirations. It should work to break down departmental and organisational silos, collect and disseminate evidence of what works, and support capacity building for communities and the public sector. This would be a vital foundation to achieving the long-term transformational change our most disadvantaged communities so urgently need.
One of the early schemes the Neighbourhoods Unit could support would be the review and upgrading of current proposals for the long-promised Community Wealth Fund. This has the potential to target dormant assets over the long term to provide essential investment to develop community capacity and sustain and improve local civic infrastructure, at no additional cost to the public purse.
It won't be the first time new ministers come into government facing similar challenges. The day after another change election – back in May 1997 – a new Prime Minister ventured out onto the Aylesbury Estate to set out his priorities, highlighting how many of the issues he had pledged to tackle, including education performance, crime, health and opportunity, were both complex and interlinked, and concentrated in particular places. That lead to the creation of the Social Exclusion Task Force – whose 'National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal' celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary last year.
In writing that strategy, the task force brought together experts and analysts from across Whitehall and beyond, setting out a vision which harnessed the power of both central and local government to turn things around. The resultant New Deal for Communities remains uniquely successful in having been evaluated as having both represented value for money and hit nearly all the original targets set for it.
We are in different times now, and different solutions may be needed, but the principles that underpinned its design – clear leadership from within a new government, cross-Whitehall working, partnership with local authorities and a long-term commitment to delivery – may provide a useful guide for new Ministers as they consider how to implement mission ambitions and manifesto promises.
Matt Leach is chief executive of Local Trust
To read Local Trust's full manifesto A New Neighbourhood Policy and its new research on the case for neighbourhood interventions visit www.localtrust.org.uk
