The resurgence of neighbourhood working at the local government level

New research for Local Trust and 3ni, the national network for neighbourhood improvement, shows that neighbourhood working is once again being recognised by local authorities as an effective way to address disadvantage. Here Ben Lee, Director at Shared Intelligence, explores the findings from their report: Neighbourhoods in action: Achieving big results by working hyper-locally.

There are countless streets across the country where for every bus stop you pass, life expectancy increases or decreases depending on your direction of travel.

Anyone living in these areas will tell you this form of disadvantage and inequality is deeply entrenched (students of Charles Booth’s maps will know how old these patterns truly are).

The 1997 general election heralded intense focus and investment in neighbourhood interventions and evaluation evidence shows it was​ finally beginning to break the cycle. But after barely a decade the gaze of public policy shifted to cities and regions.

By the time the global financial crisis hit, ‘soft’ interventions in communities and neighbourhoods had already lost out to more serious-sounding ‘hard’ interventions in regional infrastructure and city economies.

But our new research for Local Trust shows renewed energy behind applying neighbourhood-based programmes to tackle deep-seated inequality.

In 32 out of 34 local authorities we spoke to directly, we found some form of neighbourhood working being directed at their most disadvantaged wards – our survey confirms a similar picture in other places.

We heard examples of neighbourhood working again being recognised as an effective – perhaps the only effective – remedy for addressing disadvantage in communities hit by the quadruple whammy of austerity, then COVID-19, and now inflation and automation.

A different approach to neighbourhood working

The types of approaches we identified over the summer of 2024 differ in two important ways from the version of neighbourhood working resulting from top-down policy levers in the early 2000s.

They differ in their diversity of working methods and lead agencies, and they differ in terms of financial environment – most are having to make very little go a very long way. We also found the NHS playing a lead role driven by priorities to tackle the wider determinants of health inequality.

As a consequence, this generation of neighbourhood interventions is more site-specific and more sensitive to local context. The examples we found also show, through a combination of financial necessity and genuine ethos, a greater desire to treat residents as equal partners coupled with humility about the capabilities of the local state.

Big Local and neighbourhood initiatives

Local Trust works on long time frames. It was created in 2012 when many communities felt forgotten by the local and national state; not deprived enough to be targeted by neighbourhood renewal, but lacking the assets and capacity to benefit from economic growth.

The solution offered to those communities by Big Local was resident-led change, backed by inputs of community development expertise and a comparatively modest investment of £1million over ten years.

More than a decade on and with Big Local entering its final phase, this research shows the world outside of Big Local is much more aligned to its values and approach than it was in 2012.

The challenge now is to encourage others to absorb the learning the Big Local programme can offer.

Can we create a supportive environment for the current wave of neighbourhood initiatives which celebrates the diversity of approaches and encourages curiosity and learning across different disciplines from community development, through community safety and housing, to public health?

Read the full report from 3ni, Local Trust and Shared Intelligence – Neighbourhoods in action: Achieving big results by working hyper-locally.