Blog 3: Pride in Place (October 2025)

In late September 2025. the Government announced that up to £5 billion was to be invested in its new ‘Pride in Place’ programme.  The money is to go to 339 "overlooked" communities across the UK - the most disadvantaged communities in terms of both deprivation levels and social infrastructure - to spend on boosting high streets, parks and public spaces.  And, given the relatively small size of these communities, the sums involved are reasonably significant, with 169 areas getting £2 million a year every year for 10 years alongside the previously announced Plan for Neighbourhoods (Long Term Plan for Towns, as was) under which 75 deprived neighbourhoods across the UK were awarded £20 million each to deliver projects to improve “the physical and social infrastructure of their community and deliver tangible improvements to the everyday lives of these communities“. 

But on exactly what will this money it be spent and who will decide?  Therein lies the rub. The Government’s aspiration is that it will help to sustain community assets such as local pubs and libraries (isn’t the latter a statutory responsibility of the local authority?).  It will also give local communities more of a say on who can trade on their local high streets and shopping parades, by influencing councils to block "fake" barbers, as well as "unwanted" betting and vape shops.  As the Prime Minister put it: those who "know their communities best" will decide how the money will be spent.

So far, so good.  Who wouldn’t like to see local communities be able to tackle vandalism, install a children’s play area on some green space, make sure their community centre has heating that works and that street lighting can guide them safely home?

But what if the people who "know their communities best" are the people currently erecting flags on bridges over roads and on lampposts?  What if they demand that every shop in their local area has to be painted with the cross of St George (and they’ll use taxpayers’ money to do it)?  What if they say ‘yes please’ to another vape shop but ‘no thank you’ to a halal butcher that wants to set up to serve the local Muslim community?  And make no mistake, many of the areas set to get this funding have indeed been providing a significant boost to the Chinese flag-making industry of late.

As yet, there is scant detail on exactly how the new elements of the programme will operate and it is to be hoped that safeguards are in place to avoid contentious issues and ensure that all local people are given a voice.  If this works out well it could indeed help to meet the Government’s aspirations for revitalised local communities that feel seen and have a renewed sense of pride in the places in which they live.  But in the febrile atmosphere being experienced in many neighbourhoods at present, there is a danger that this could go horribly wrong. Let’s hope not.

Blog 2: Strategic Errors (September 2025)

The Modern Industrial Strategy, Local Growth Plans, Economic Development Strategies… who doesn’t love a strategy?  The trouble is, they can be both enormously helpful and enormously unhelpful. Let me explain.

Ideally, local, regional and national strategies would fit inside each other like Russian dolls.  In practice, trying to get them to do so is more like trying to force a wet tent back into its carrying case on a particularly windy day.  Nationally important sectors might not be that important regionally and certainly not locally.  This is especially the case in under-performing areas which, if they had those sectors as mainstays of their economy, would not be under-performing… 

So, trying to align sub-national strategies with national strategies can be problematic and even a little deflating.  Some combined/mayoral authorities have got round this tricky issue by publishing their Local Growth Plans in advance of the Modern Industrial Strategy. Clever.

But what should go into an economic development strategy/growth plan and, more particularly, how can the ambitions they set out be justified?

Recently, the estimable Tom Bridges posted (on LinkedIn) a reminder of the ODPM’s "Guide to Improving the Economic Evidence Base supporting Regional Economic and Spatial Strategies" first published in 2005 and which he and other Arup colleagues had put together.  It set out five areas for improving the economic evidence base:

-            Better understanding of causal factors and drivers of change.

-            Using longitudinal evidence to better understand long-run structural trends and future scenarios.

-            Better and more transparent interpretation of data analysis and modelling.

-            A more robust approach to market-testing, to improve understanding and questioning of the economic implications of adopting specific policy positions on the scale, type and location of development.

-            Better integration and synthesis of thematic, sector-based, and spatially-focused evidence to strengthen understanding of linkages and inter-relationships between policies.

Respectfully, I would add the following:

-            The need to consider the reliability/robustness of certain evidence. Some data lags are very unhelpful; some data are skewed by external events or shocks, such as the Covid pandemic; and some data are based on small sample sizes, especially at the local level.

-            The willingness to accept that some evidence might be telling you things you'd rather not hear (and confronting that).  You might be weak in areas in which you’d like to be strong; the terribly unsexy but terribly important Foundation Economy might account for a large percentage of jobs etc.

-            The need to balance optimism and pragmatism.  Not everywhere is going to be a world centre for AI, so don’t pretend that’s a realistic ambition where there is no evidence to back it up.

-            Just be yourself. That doesn't mean you can’t evolve into something different, but don’t pretend you’re something that you’re not. There’s a lot to be said for authenticity.

And if that isn’t sufficiently uncomfortable, try this for size: economic development strategies ought to more fully recognise social and environmental factors.  For example, I’ve written economic development strategies for areas where levels of economic inactivity are uncomfortably high, driven mainly by long-term sickness and people having caring responsibilities.  If you want those people to be available for work, you’ll need to make substantial investments in public health, the NHS, childcare and social care.  Putting on training courses and offering them help with their CVs isn’t really going to cut it. And do you really want to build along the Lincolnshire/Norfolk coast (and some other places besides) given expectations of rising sea levels within the next 25 years?

Blog 1: Joyz-n-the-Hood (August 2025)

In its report “The Anatomy of Mission Critical Neighbourhoods” (May 2025), the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods outlined the key challenges facing some of the most disadvantaged places in England and the near 1 million people living in them.  In these ‘mission critical neighbourhoods’:

  • Half of adults are economically inactive.

  • 40% of working-age people have no qualifications – more than double the national average.

  • Gross Value Added (GVA) per working age person is 40% lower than for all neighbourhoods.

  • Means tested welfare spending is more than double the national average.

In response, the Commission called for a targeted programme of investment and support for these places. And so say all of me.

Indeed, many of those who have had the misfortune of being in the same room as me at some point over the past year, will likely have heard me reminiscing wistfully about area-based regeneration.  Under the last Labour Government, there was an awful lot of it: Deprived Area Fund, Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders, Local Enterprise Growth Initiative, Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, New Deal for Communities, Sure Start, Working Neighbourhoods Fund and probably others I’ve long since forgotten about.  Having been involved in the evaluation of examples of all of them, I am well aware that not every one was perfect – far from it in some cases – but the decision to pull back from all forms of area-based regeneration in 2010 was a wanton act of socio-economic vandalism. 

Since then, the third sector has done what the third sector does (tried desperately to fill gaps in service provision), with many local authorities also doing their best in the context of savage budget cuts.  The Regional Growth Fund and Local Growth Fund both seemed to have somewhat patchy records and neither had any interest in neighbourhoods.  More recently, some Police and Crime Commissioners have stepped in, recognising that prevention is far better than cure and investing in projects at local level that seek to address the root causes of violent crime. 

In a belated attempt to look like it was remotely interested in left behind places, Conservative Governments introduced the Levelling Up Fund and UK Shared Prosperity Fund; the former barely gave a nod towards socio-economic issues whilst resources for the latter were paltry in comparison with the European Structural and Investment Funds (ERDF and ESF) it notionally sought to replace.  And then a weird thing happened: the Long Term Plan for Towns was announced.  Out of the blue, 75 towns were each allocated £20 million they hadn’t asked for, to spend on projects they hadn’t thought of.  But before they could do anything very much, along came a General Election, prompting fears that these unexpected gifts might be snatched away.

By remarkable coincidence, the same 75 towns now feature in the Plan for Neighbourhoods. (Go to the website and you’ll see a rather crude copy and paste from some old New Deal for Communities documents, attempting to reframe the programme).  However, what hasn’t changed is the skewing of resources that demand three quarters of these budgets be spent on capital investments. And, as we all know, sustained service provision requires a long-term commitment to adequate revenue funding.

The concern was that this might be all there was to the current Labour Government’s approach to tackling the multiplicity of socio-economic challenges at neighbourhood level, especially given warnings about the dire state of the public finances. But no, much else has been brewing and we are about to get drunk on the prospect of significant and sustained investment in our most deprived communities.

The Chancellor’s Spending Review (June 2025) included some genuinely significant announcements:

  • A commitment to improving 350 deprived communities, by investing in community cohesion, regeneration and improvements to the public realm.

  • 25 ‘trailblazer neighbourhoods’ (20 in England, 1 in Northern Ireland, 2 in Scotland and 2 in Wales) will each receive up to £20 million over the next decade for investment in community-led projects to “support improvements people can see on their doorstep”.

  • A £240 million capital investment in a Growth Mission Fund (2026‑27 to 2029‑30) in projects that facilitate job creation and the economic regeneration of local communities

Of course, the angel will be in the detail, but perhaps I might make one small request of those designing these initiatives?  Could you perhaps have a read of some of the evaluations of similar previous programmes? You might even have a chat with some old economic development professionals who may be able to offer some useful insights into ‘what works’ (and what doesn’t work).  Indeed, some are so passionate about this stuff that they’d happily do so voluntarily…