500-06 NEIGHBOURHOODS AS THE FOCUS FOR CHANGE

Community Learning Development Resource 500 – 06

NEIGHBOURHOODS AS THE FOCUS FOR CHANGE

 

SUMMARY

Extract from: ‘The Safer and Stronger Communities Fund: The Neighbourhood Element – Implementation Guidance – Neighbourhood Renewal Unit July 2005)

 

1. The neighbourhood is the critical level at which local people engage and change is delivered on the ground. Central to the Government’s proposals for more neighbourhood engagement, set out in Citizen Engagement and Public Services: Why Neighbourhoods matter issued in January 2005, is the desire to develop responsive and customer-focused public services with opportunities for communities to influence and improve the delivery of public services. It sets out the Government’s enthusiasm to extend neighbourhood management, recognising that the form arrangements take must be appropriate to local circumstances, flexible to change and responsive to the needs and diversity of the community and its organisations.

 

2. The National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, which sets out the Government’s plans for delivering sustainable improvements in disadvantaged areas is premised on the centrality of the neighbourhood as the place for increasing community engagement and improving the effectiveness and responsiveness of services.

 

3. Whilst recognising that deprived neighbourhoods may not always have received their fair share of resources, the management and co-ordination of resources and services is often the more serious challenge.

 

4. Evidence and experience now indicates that there are certain key building blocks that should be put in place quickly to stabilise deprived neighbourhoods and lay the foundations in which other interventions have a better prospect of success. This includes taking practical measures to:

 

  • Improve liveability, encompassing crime; fear of crime; anti-social behaviour; physical environmental quality; housing management; basic leisure provision for young people;

 

  • Tackle poor public services to reduce educational underachievement, worklessness, poor health, teenage conceptions and offending;

 

  • Transform neighbourhoods through reconnecting them with housing and job markets where this is possible;

 

  • Empower local people, which is important in enabling local people to get involved and have a say in local decisions, and foster community cohesion;