In brief

Rich Bell is an adviser to the Relationships Project and is currently working with the team to build the Relational Practice Academy. He also co-authored an article published in Heywood Quarterly last week exploring the role of relationships in modern government.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister made what might – in any other week – have been recognised as a rather significant speech.

In it, he announced that the government’s flagship Pride in Place regeneration programme would be expanded into forty new neighbourhoods. This represents an additional £800 million investment on top of the £5 billion already committed to the delivery of the programme over the coming decade. He also expressed the animating rationale for Pride in Place more lucidly and forcefully than he, and perhaps any member of the government, had previously.

Speaking about how his government is taking action to ‘[rebuild] our public services, [invest] in community infrastructure, [open] new nurseries, breakfast clubs, health centres right across the country’, Keir Starmer argued that this investment should be understood as ‘a means, not an end.’ It is, he continued, ‘about power, as well as pounds and pence.’

After a week in which the unveiling of a shadow power structure – enabling the pursuit of lurid greed by a select few – dominated the headlines, the case for meaningfully redistributing power has never been more stark or more vital. A hard and profound truth has been shaken into focus.

It is only regrettable that – for all the agonising over mission and milestones – the nation’s gaze was diverted when the PM produced a statement of purpose capable of anchoring his government’s wider agenda. This is the mission that this moment demands – and, while Pride in Place alone isn’t sufficient to achieve it, it is undoubtedly a substantial step in the right direction.

Photo by Jim Petkiewicz on Unsplash

At least on paper, this is a scheme with community control at its heart. Decisions about how each area’s £20 million allocation will be spent are due to be made by Neighbourhood Boards composed of community and civil society representatives as well as the local MP, councillors, and public service leaders. And the government has made it clear that it expects the programme to be fully community‑led by the end of its third year of delivery.

There are some worrying reports that, in some places, the reality of decision-making isn’t living up to the government’s rhetoric. But, even where the programme is functioning as intended, its success will hinge upon relationships strong enough to support genuine collaboration — relationships that, in many cases, are undeveloped or do not yet exist.

Whenever you introduce a new funding stream into a community that has been deprived of investment, there will inevitably be competition. All 284 Pride in Place areas have been selected because they rank as among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in the country, and Neighbourhood Boards will need to carefully balance the often conflicting interests of the different parts of the communities they serve as well as those of their local social sectors.

Many Pride in Place areas are, furthermore, the site of entrenched community tensions. Some have experienced violent disorder in recent years. Neighbourhood Boards in these places will need to address underlying mistrust and build cross-community ties as the sturdy foundation for wider renewal.

It’s likely too that almost all of these bodies will need to bridge differences in outlook, language, culture, and working style between local public sector and community representatives if they are to work together well.

This is why, in developing our plans for the Relational Practice Academy, we are actively exploring a skills development programme shaped specifically for Neighbourhood Boards. This programme would support Board members to develop core relational capabilities such as building trust within contexts of social difference and power imbalance; fostering psychological safety; and harnessing conflict as fuel for change. (If you are a member of a Neighbourhood Board and are interested in this work, please do contact me at rich@relationshipsproject.org.)

It’s also true that the government has set out three core objectives for Neighbourhood Boards – the first: building ‘strong relationships and a collective sense of belonging’. Pride in Place is the first major regeneration scheme, stretching right back to the first Wilson government’s Community Development Projects, to explicitly acknowledge and foreground the importance of social connection in this manner.

Implicit in this is a long overdue but deeply welcome recognition of the conditions under which communities and places renew.

Effective regeneration is about more than short term spending on the built environment. Effective peacebuilding is about more than the absence of violence. Both are about the networks of relationships that nurture feelings of trust and togetherness and habits of solidarity within communities – that are the stuff of community.

In fact, it is not possible to respond effectively either to local conflict or to the opportunity of regeneration without taking both head-on.

Sociologists use the phrase ‘collective efficacy’ to describe the manner in which social ties are ‘activated or converted’ into action towards shared goals – solving problems together, providing mutual aid, or improving the quality of local life. Through both its method and its objectives, this is what Pride in Place is aimed at building; but, to do so at any level of scale, it will need to overcome some mighty social currents.

Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash

In a rather beautiful podcast released last week – in which he interviews the expert on social gathering Priya Parker – the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein commented of contemporary America that ‘we’ve lost the skills, not to be in a gathering that we control, but in one that we don’t.’ Are we confident that these are skills that we still hold on this side of the Atlantic? Because, by its very nature, active participation not just in grassroots democracy but in wider community life requires us to relinquish a degree of control. As this excellent piece published last month put it, ‘accepting friction’ is ‘the price of admission’ to reciprocal bonds of neighbourliness and belonging – one we are increasingly unwilling to pay. Indeed, as another exceptionally well-argued recent article outlines, the story of the collapse of the associational and civic spheres was written through countless everyday choices yielding ‘connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.’

If the government is serious not just about delivering on the promise of Pride in Place but about fulfilling the Prime Minister’s vision of ‘communities, backed by the state, fired up by pride, taking responsibility for the renewal of this great nation’, it needs to take that challenge deadly seriously.

Regrowing the relational muscles that once underpinned our collective power but have atrophied through the loss of associational spaces and what the Harvard political scientist Professor Robert Putnam describes as the ‘privatisation of leisure time’ will be no easy feat.

This should certainly mean helping people to protect and sustain the places in which they already come together – and to build new institutions through which they might make decisions about their communities together or simply meet, mix, and connect in ways that go with the grain of twenty-first century life.

It should also mean directly supporting people to develop the core skills and capabilities that enable us to form bonds of trust and understanding, navigate conflicting values effectively, and spot and seize on opportunities to strengthen social connection in our areas – the skills and capabilities that make the work of weaving community in a diverse society possible.

This is a task to which we are committed to driving forward through our work with others on the Relational Practice Academy.

We believe it is no exaggeration to say it is among the tasks of our time – and that, one way or another, the proof will be in Pride in Place.

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