ICON’s Interim Report, Think Neighbourhoods, has at its core a simple message.
Policy makers need to understand the power of neighbourhoods. They need to think neighbourhoods.
In our visits around the country, we have heard time and time again how ideas which look good on paper here in Westminster, fail to cut through on the ground.
Often this is because we take for granted the ability of people and places to mobilise around the state’s objectives. We assume that they trust the state, that they understand how to navigate it and that they have the support of people around them to make the changes that can transform their lives.
Critical to that ability to mobilise is the social capital available to people – the relationships, values and norms that they have and the support that they receive.
Social capital is weaker in some of our neighbourhoods for a number of reasons. Demographic change. Technological change. Social change. Economic change.
Yet during a period of economic and social instability where we needed the resilience of our neighbourhoods, we have seen the state retreat from them.
The years since the financial crisis and the period of austerity that followed it have been like moving from a sunny meadow to an artic tundra for the state. And as an automatic reflex, the state has sought to preserve its own ‘vital organs’, core public services, keeping money and resources flowing to those parts of the system it believes are essential for survival at the expense of other priorities, such as social infrastructure.
This is understandable, but our report shows that it has come at a cost.
We have seen investment and support for social infrastructure – the places and spaces that are the factories of social capital – continuously eroded. Institutions and activities that fostered and sustained our social relationships have disappeared.
This is not simply our assessment. As we show in the report, this is what we have heard in our visits, in our polling and our focus groups where we have listened to the public directly.
Policy makers may think that this loss is unfortunate, but it is not “mission critical”.
Our report shows that it is.
Through the help of Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) we have taken publicly available data on the government’s five missions and mapped it onto a neighbourhood level – populations of around one and half thousand people.
What we have found is that those places where social infrastructure is weakest, what some call the “doubly disadvantaged”, that are more likely to be furthest behind the government’s mission objectives.
Delivering services, creating jobs and spreading opportunity has been made harder and more expensive because these neighbourhoods lack a supportive environment to flourish.
In the past, we’ve hoped that economic growth and public investment would ‘trickle down’ to these neighbourhoods and turn them around. But our research shows that it has not.
We have found the mission challenges in the same places that would have been identified nearly twenty or thirty years ago. Deindustrialised towns and villages in the Midlands and North. Coastal communities. The fringes of our major cities.
We call these the “mission critical neighbourhoods” because without making progress on them, we believe that the government will fail to deliver the decade of national renewal that it is seeking to achieve. These are the places where multiple mission challenges cluster. Problems overlap and create negative feedback loops that make it incredibly difficult to make progress.
Of course, neighbourhoods everywhere are important. We need public services, civil society and businesses in every place to think neighbourhoods and recalibrate the way that they work to support the ability of people on the ground to mobilise and transform the places they live.
At a time when resources are limited and the scale of the challenges are vast, some prioritisation for additional support is inevitable. Being unable to do everything is not an excuse to do nothing.
But crucially, this is not simply about a call for more money. Yes, there will need to be investment, particularly in social infrastructure.
Yet, the state is already spending tens of billions of pounds delivering public services in these neighbourhoods. In many cases, the state is likely to be the largest spender by far. But impact and results have not always followed.
Instead of building up neighbourhoods and giving them agency, the state far too often bypasses them or seeks to treat people as isolated individuals. As one person said in one of our visits, instead of recognising our interdependence, the state treats us as if we are completely independent.
However, this report is not a counsel of despair, it’s a call for action.
In the past we have been able to build the capacity and agency of neighbourhoods, through programmes such as the New Deal for Communities.
We must not give to fatalism and take neighbourhoods as a given, something that the state must ‘work around’. That way lies growing political disaffection and alienation.
We must rediscover our confidence to transform them.
The good news is that people remain optimistic about their neighbourhoods, they know things can be better, they want the tools to make change possible. We know that are hundreds of people and organisations that are already thinking neighbourhoods, running projects and activities that are unleashing the power of local people. We know that we have a supportive Minister and support across government and across the political spectrum.
As ICON takes forward its work, we hope we can all continue to work together to put neighbourhoods back at the centre of policy making.
We were pleased that ICON has been able to work with government in making an important first step in this regard, through the new Plan for Neighbourhoods, which we were pleased to input our initial research and evidence. But this can only be a down-payment on a much broader agenda.
As we work towards our final report at the end of this year, I hope you will join us in our journey to convince everyone to think neighbourhoods.
This is adapted from Andrew’s presentation of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhood’s Interim Report on 5th March 2025 which you can rewatch on LinkedIn.