We need to talk about Pride in Place

A friend who runs a grassroots group recently messaged about Pride of Place. She lives in one of the priority areas and had only just heard it was a thing due to her Ward Councillor posting on Facebook:

"Is it true that the Council has to choose the chair? From asking around they are already cherry picking! I.e. approaching CIC's with links to the Council asking them to apply. They are CIC's directed by council employees so they are just going to do what suits them!"

Whilst a drop in the ocean compared to the overall level of disinvestment in public services imposed in recent years, the £5 billion that’s apparently being invested into 339 neighbourhoods and towns around Britain, is nonetheless a significant chunk of money - but is this money in the right hands? 

In many places it already seems like money and power are being carved up before the people who actually live there and who are supposed to be benefiting have even heard about this new programme. 

Stories starting to emerge around Pride in Place are giving us the feeling that the government has only learned from a very limited range of experiences of what works in regeneration and community development. 

So why aren’t the lessons of years of work being applied to make the best of this opportunity? Why isn’t more of the money and decision-making power in the hands of the many community groups who are innovating to develop alternatives to failed policy and regeneration efforts of the past? 

Surely Pride of Place can only work if it really does transition away from the top-down prescriptions and forms of control that have done so much to erode trust in public life and public institutions. 

And if this programme is to have any chance of success, the forms of economic extraction that have led to the impoverishment of many of these target areas need to be more explicitly questioned and alternatives should form the basis of any new activity.

But perhaps most of all, this programme needs to feel like something that people in the target areas want to be involved with. However, to involve people the programme would have to reflect not just the needs and priorities of local people, but also the spirit, culture and pre-existing community ethos of the places concerned. Only then could the programme offer genuine ownership and control to those who live there, including the most trusted grassroots groups in each place.

So far we see no evidence of any of this. Instead, what we see is that there is already disquiet, from South Wales to the South coast of England, about the way that the Pride in Place programme is being set up and implemented. 

It’s our strong suspicion that these concerns, as well as others yet-to-be-publicised, are quite widely felt and are likely to grow as this programme unfolds. 

Rather than gloss over these issues we think something needs to be done to try and help amplify, connect and channel the voices at the grassroots who are so far not being heard, let alone listened to. This policy will not succeed unless there is an outlet and a constructive way of understanding and responding to these voices. 

That’s why we want to do something that can help to open up some more space for these discussions - to ensure that the decision-making concerning this supposedly community-based investment is in the right hands and this £5 billion is spent in the right ways.

In the weeks and months ahead we are going to try and collate more of the so-far-unheard stories of what’s happening in the target areas where the Pride of Place programme is being implemented.