How does government best ensure that delivery agencies achieve their objectives in neighbourhood renewal?
One way is to improve the conceptual understanding of the problem and likely impact of various responses (what some call a ‘theory of change’ approach). The other main way is to provide a set of formal targets. My view is that Government and others have put targets before improved conceptual understanding but, to make matters worse, the target and performance management framework has also been wrong.The story goes something like this. The Index of Multiple Deprivation came out and measures deprivation along a number of classic lines – health, education, crime etc. This is based on what can be measured at the national level but quickly becomes the organising framework for the Policy Action Teams and the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy. The targets were based on whole population measures for the relevant spatial scales (e.g. local authority educational attainment results, unemployment counts for neighbourhoods). This was done for understandable reasons, for the strategy was supposed to be ambitious and create transformational change of whole cities, districts, towns and neighbourhoods.
Significant money is found and distributed to local partnerships on the basis of ‘improving’ these measures. Lo and behold, partnerships fund activity that seemingly will tackle the problems in that theme – more police to tackle crime, more advisers to tackle worklessness, more smoking cessation workers to tackle poor health and so on.
However, neighbourhoods don’t work like that so the funding has not realised the promises made. Lack of progress is seen as a failure of the activity or the partnership, or vice versa.
I don’t think anybody can pretend to know all the complex dynamics that affect peoples’ lives but we do know they are fundamentally driven by housing, labour and education markets with cultural and community capital also playing a key role – if anything changes in mainstream services may be one of the less strong influencing factors.
In my view, one fundamental challenge to the NSNR was that the measures attached to it were not sensitive enough to the impact of the actions it funded or influenced. This piece attempts to offer a more practical view in terms of how to structure and measure activity at the neighbourhood level in the future, learning from my experience of the NDC programme.
High levels of worklessness and poor health are structural problems that cannot be solved at the neighbourhood level alone – the targets and performance framework should be more focused on the added value that the neighbourhood approach can provide.
Although we haven’t discovered a magic bullet for transforming deprived areas, I think there is enough experience to create a more useful framework for guiding work on the ground, and measuring its impact:
· A spatial vision for physical development that makes the most of local assets and delivers real benefits for local people. Measures could focus on the quality of land use, urban design and public realm, and the distribution of land ownership.
· A focus on improving access for all services, making sure they are responsive and taken up by those that need them most. Measures could focus on quality of access arrangements, levels of take-up amongst disadvantaged groups and follow-through.
· A focus on building local community infrastructure and capacity of individuals to participate and drive change that is locally distinctive. Measures could focus levels of social capital and health of the local voluntary sector.
· High quality community facilities, located in the right place and shared between different services and community groups for maximum use. Measures could focus on the quality of local provision and levels of usage.
· Neighbourhood alliances to provide the momentum for change, join up services and sectors, broker local issues and to ensure the neighbourhood is well connected to important local authority and other strategies. Measures on extent of partnership working, business involvement and strength of governance links to higher levels.
This could provides the ‘bones’ of a new framework that makes sense to practitioners and gives local areas the best chance of success, in the sense of activities and benefits that can only be delivered and realised at the very local level. Appropriate measures could then start to tell us which neighbourhoods were making most of resources to create positive change, perhaps despite countervailing structural forces. Only when we have better theoretical and practical evidence about the impact of interventions in the neighbourhood, can we make a stronger case for a specific ‘neighbourhood policy’.
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