SOCIAL FABRIC
If Ministers are serious about levelling up in the long term, they need to build local capacity that can endure – and help local people take back control of their communities. The Government should use neighbourhoods – the most effective organising unit in society – to drive regeneration in the places that need it most, working with local communities to build new institutions, invest for the long term and better use local assets.
Regeneration schemes have been attempted by every government of every stripe in the last fifty years in successive attempts to turn left behind lagging places.
From Wilson’s Urban Aid programme to Thatcher’s Urban Development Corporations to Blair’s New Deal for Communities (NDC) and the current Government’s Levelling Up Programme, billions have been spent and considerable political will has been expended. Yet for all that activity there has been remarkably little policy focus in Whitehall on understanding what works best in improving outcomes in the most challenging communities in the UK – and how successful approaches can be scaled more broadly to communities everywhere. That task is the subject of this paper.
Looking at previous regeneration initiatives in this country and abroad, and find that the most successful schemes focused on smaller geographic areas such as neighbourhoods, invested in community capacity over the long-term, and helped communities take ownership of local assets.
Our analysis of previous regeneration schemes finds that:
Too often, government funding streams are centralised, competitive funds, rather than a true devolution of power and responsibility. This has a number of effects:
The risk is that even if the funding has a positive impact in the short-term, it is unlikely to build capacity in the places that need to be levelled up the most to drive longer term improvement.
There is also, despite five decades of successive interventions, a weak evidence base about what interventions are most effective at turning around different places. This is exacerbated by a lack of consistent data at a granular enough level to test different policies robustly.
We argue that the Government should take steps to ensure neighbourhoods can take a more active role in supporting local regeneration through the levelling up agenda, through:
Too often, government funding streams are centralised, competitive funds, rather than a true devolution of power and responsibility. This has a number of effects:
The risk is that even if the funding has a positive impact in the short-term, it is unlikely to build capacity in the places that need to be levelled up the most to drive longer term improvement.
There is also, despite five decades of successive interventions, a weak evidence base about what interventions are most effective at turning around different places. This is exacerbated by a lack of consistent data at a granular enough level to test different policies robustly.
We argue that the Government should take steps to ensure neighbourhoods can take a more active role in supporting local regeneration through the levelling up agenda, through:
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