Pride in Place. Yes, but how?
The details will make all the difference
I’ve just arrived in Liverpool for my first Labour Conference with Kinship Works, so before the conference gets going in earnest, I thought I’d share a few reflections on the UK government’s major new investment in neighbourhoods, Pride in Place.
These reflections draw on a range of projects we have underway at Kinship Works, in particular an evidence-synthesis we’re running with support from Local Trust, distilling the lessons of the last 15 years of efforts to rebuild civic capacity and social capital. And a programme with JRF looking at the way the centre of government relates to the energy at the edges. (There’s some more info on both projects on our website.)
My headline reaction to Pride in Place is: ‘Yes! More of this please.’ Both in terms of the scale of the investment and the spirit with which this is being approached. I was also pleased to hear Keir Starmer underline the approach so clearly at Friday’s Global Progress summit:
This is money to be spent by local people, so they can choose what it is spent on.
At the same time — and this is an ‘and’, not a ‘but’ — the success of Pride in Place will depend on the details of delivery. We have learned a huge amount in the last 15–25 years about ways to rejuvenate neighbourhoods, so we know broadly what works and what doesn’t.
So, without trying to be comprehensive, here are a few reflections, first on Pride in Place as an initiative, and then on the wider operating environment, which I would argue is ultimately more important.
Pride of Place: How to go about it
It’s good to start with the basics: it is effective to give people money to improve their local neighbourhood with few strings attached.
Initiatives like Big Local led to meaningful improvements in outcomes, from mental health to crime, and to better engagement and more positivity. And bear in mind that these initiatives spent less money than Pride in Place, spread over a longer time period. We know this work was effective in large part because people felt a lot of ownership and discrection and could plan for the long-term. We also know, for Big Local specifically, that areas that spent the money quicker saw a bigger, earlier impact, which chimes with the idea that the money made a difference, and gives us a sense that the dosage and the rate of spending matters.
This is all to say that the government should have the courage of its convictions. Pride in Place should be situated as high as possible on Shirley Arnstein’s ladder of participation. This should not be about consulting, or even just about partnership, but about true community ownership.
Second, getting the governance right for work like this is tricky and important. One lesson from previous efforts is that you should fund activities and let governance grow naturally, rather than designing governance and imposing it. The governance then sticks around and proves useful to the community afterwards, even once the activity ends.
This reflects a fundamental insight about good governance — it is organic and relational, not formal and mechanical. When an approach to governance is drawn on paper, and imposed, it becomes performative.
This is a polite way of saying that overly formal or artificial governance is often a waste of time. In fact, it can be worse than this: bad governance can be a blocker, slowing down delivery, hindering the flow of intelligence, and making it harder for people to exercise, and feel, ownership. This insight is also supported by decades of academic research. It is the central lesson, for example, from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work — she showed that if governance looks tidy, it is probably unhealthy.
So the lesson here is to err away from requiring standardised new boards for Pride in Place, and instead take a more outcome-based approach: allow governance to grow in situ, as long as it reflects certain core principles.
Third, this same organic logic applies to the flow of funding. It is important to get money directly to communities, just as it is important to get water and fertiliser directly to the soil when gardening. This does not just mean getting money to Local Authorities.
The goal is to resource communities so that they can support a wide range of initiatives, at different levels of maturity. Some will be of significant size already. These can prosper and become integral to the wider ecosystem — for example, a thriving community-led development initiative can self-seed by inspiring other local initiatives. Funding can also help fragile, early community initiatives, where money will make all the difference. And there also need to be ways to seed and carefully nurture entirely new community intiatives where there are none.
The key is the gardening mentality: Pride in Place must not be about interventions, point solutions, projects, and scaling through replication. It’s about soil and nutrients; supporting strong social and civic conditions.
Fourth, evidence suggests that buildings and civic spaces matter a lot, so the government is right to prioritise this. This is partly for practical reasons — people need somewhere to meet, and space is one of the biggest costs to community collaboration, so a lack of civic spaces acts as a friction, or a tax, on civic life. Shared civic spaces also encourage collaboration between local organisations; I’ve visited many spaces that became shared hubs for charities, often during the pandemic. Sharing a space helps local charities get out of a competitive mindset into partnerships. Shared civic spaces can also give a porous, civic edge to public services — they are the perfect neutral, welcoming venue for running a preventative, holistic service.
Finally, buildings are emotionally and culturally resonant. They are the central characters in the stories we tell about neighbourhoods — whether stories of dilapidation and decline, or of hope and renewal. So the government is right to emphasise the look and feel of high streets.
There is one final point I’d add about buildings, learned from many wonderful visits to civic spaces: the way you renovate a space is very important. In the best examples of community regeneration I’ve seen, the work of renovation itself is one of the main ways social capital is restored. People collaborate to do the work — to raise funds, donate materials, sometimes to fight for the right to do it, and they may even collaborate to support the renovation work itself. In this way, people form relationships and feel pride and ownership in the result. So while there is, of course, a rather outmoded, ‘Big Society’ version of this— making people repair their own high streets — there are also many wonderful examples of communities truly taking the lead in redevelopment.
Fifth, don’t forget enabling institutions.
It’s right to push money directly into neighbourhoods — please let’s minimise quangos. But it’s also true that there is energy at the edges partly thanks to networks/platform organisations like Platform Places, Stir to Action, Place Matters, and others. So we should make sure there is enough resource in the system for these enabling institutions.
The civic technology movement is part of this wider, enabling infrastructure. (See, for example, Library of Things). Platforms can make it easy for people to do things locally: set up a toy library, or a swapshop for kids’ clothes, or a repair cafe. (NB: I’m using the word ‘platform’ here in its broad sense: it doesn’t just mean a technology; it also includes things like service/design patterns, and a team to support people.) I would argue that this kind of neighbourhood-enabling civic technology deserves its own strategy and investment. Why not have DCMS and CLG work together to set up a Civic Technology Fund to support work like this?
Sixth, leadership matters — and again it deserves investment. It’s been interesting to hear people mention the New Deal for Communities a lot this week. These earlier programmes had their faults — they sat low on Arnstein’s ladder of participation — but one upside was that they helped to create a generation of leaders skilled in local regeneration. Pride in Place and other contemporary regeneration initiatives could do the same, but it would be better if this was done in an intentional way. There should be direct investment in development for community leaders — training, convenings, codifying the key disciplines, and helping professions to mature. Again, this expertise already exists in the sector, so it’s not about central provision. It’s about funding people out in the system.
I’ll end this section with an important nuance to all of the above. The people who will know best what is needed — from technology to training — will be people doing the work in neighbourhoods. So infrastructural work is not so much about central government doing the work directly. It’s more about making sure this work doesn’t get forgotten. For example, government can fund gatherings of community leaders to help people identify shared needs and develop shared plans to solve them.
The operating environment
I’ll wrap up with some wider reflections on the overall operating environment, which I think is more important than any individual intiative like Pride in Place, however well it is run.
The painful truth is that people have been trying to work in the ways Pride in Place has in mind for decades, and our governing institutions have made this work grindingly difficult.
This is not because bureaucrats are evil and intent on killing local initiatives. It is because the bones of our public institutions are bureaucratic and mechanistic. This applies to the system’s deepest ideas — what good looks like, how risk should be managed, what it means to scale impact, etc — and to the mechanisms and processes that embody these ideas: accountability, evidence standards, governance, etc.
The canonical example of a bureuacratic relationship between the centre and the edges in neighbourhoods goes something like this:
A community leader has to fill out a 100-page business case to apply for funding for a one year project, working to a specification that was written by a civil servant in London, who is themselves trying to please a Minister who will be gone by Christmas, leaving then nine months to setup and deliver the project once the money finally arrives, after which they will be required to run an evaluation to tell the civil servant if the ‘intervention worked’ and can be rolled out.
This is not apocryphal. Indeed I think it’s fair to say that it is pretty much the norm for how things are done by Whitehall, and how they have been done for decades. I spoke to one community leader recently who has been running a brilliant local organisation for 30 years, and has survived for the entire 30 years on one year funding agreements of this kind.
Pride of Place is a response to the pent up frustration these approaches have caused, and also to their long record of failure — driving waste and risk through the system.
This makes Pride of Place welcome. But it also means that if the government buys the need for this initiative, it should also do the hard work to change the system that created the need for it.
I won’t try to unpack that effort here, because it’s a huge topic in its own right. I’ll just end by saying that we know a lot about how to do this wider work of making our institutions of government less bureaucratic.
To give one example, we need to modernise the way we approach accountability for both officials and politicians. We need to move away from people feeling the heat to come up with answers, or to deliver pre-specified outputs, and move towards the kind of outcome-based accountability that is now standard in contemporary organisations.
To give another example, we need to broaden the approaches to evidence that the Treasury sees as legitimate, so that we can gain a more rounded view of the power of community work. Again, we know how to do this. We can design and run institutions and systems so that they are more capable of learning (e.g. see Human Learning Systems, or Test & Learn, and iterative design methods (e.g. prototyping)). And we can use a broader suite of evaluation methods (e.g. see Theory-based Evaluation and the recent upgrade to the HMT evaluation bible, the Magenta Book).
Those are just two examples of a broader agenda that is increasingly urgent. If we are going to have any hope of progressing this wider work, and supporting vibrant neighbourhoods well beyond Pride in Place, we will need powerful institutions like the Treasury to own their role in having created this system, and play their part in reforming it.
Those are just some reflections. We have a big week ahead at Kinship Works and I’ll be saying more about many of these topics. Watch this space in particular for:
A request for input to help guide the evidence synthesis we’re running. We’ll be asking: what are the big things you’d like to know from 15 years of efforts to rebuild civic capacity and social capital?
The launch of a project with JRF, The Centre for the Edge, which I teed up when I announced Kinship Works earlier this week. This work starts from the premise that a key role of the centre is to support the energy at the edges, and asks — in granular detail — how to go about this.
To keep in touch with both of these initiatives, and with our wider work, you can follow Kinship Works on LinkedIn and Blue Sky and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Thanks for reading. As ever, this is all shared in the spirit of thinking in the open. For more in a similar spirit, you can read my recent posts: How to save bureaucracy from itself, Are policies like medicines?, and The Energy at the Edges. And for my wider work, you can follow on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.