Pride in Place or Pride and Prejudices?

The UK Government’s new Pride in Place Strategy promises to boost communities and local pride – but are old prejudices and political divides quietly shaping where and how that pride will be permitted to grow?

Announced at the end of September, the strategy has received a lot of publicity since its launch and has been especially widely welcomed by organisations working with communities and on place based initiatives in England. Its headline offer of £5bn worth of investment across the UK over ten years is a once-in-a-generation initiative unparalleled for the past two decades within similar programmes.

From the perspective of Building Communities Trust (BCT), which focuses on community led regeneration there is much to welcome in the strategy. Long term investment, the commitment to local determination of priorities, and the recognition of the importance of social infrastructure – these all chime with the lessons that our Invest Local programme in Wales and Big Local in England have learned over the last decade. We can of course also feel somewhat flattered that the targeting mechanism for Wales is Wales Community Assets Index (WCAI) which we published in September 2023.

The strategy’s overt aim is to empower communities to take control of improving their local areas – so far, so good. But beneath this, there lies a more a complex picture, a more overtly political purpose behind the programme, one inspired by the Broken Windows thesis and which risks pride turning into something closer to prejudice.

The thesis states that visible signs of physical decay cause disillusion and a loss of trust in existing governance, whereas when people see their neighbourhood revitalised and have a say in how this is done, this can reverse or at least halt that sense of decay. It’s a persuasive narrative and one that aligns with the Government’s desire to stem cynicism and halt the drift of political support towards Reform UK.

And while ambition is admirable, delivery is another matter, and there are inevitably a whole range of detailed challenges in delivering the programme, many of which are rooted in the way that central government works as superbly summarised by James Plunkett, and Pride in Place faces familiar hurdles.

One critical challenge omitted so far is the need to ensure local people genuinely understand the programme, for every i community member who gets involved, dozens will remain unaware and unengaged. If the programme is to genuinely create local pride, it requires a widespread understanding of what is being done, why and by whom – without clear and continuous communication, it runs the risk of becoming an ‘insider project’. We know from hard experience that this actually very hard to achieve and, given the Government’s underlying political aim for the programme, this is an issue they should be considering very carefully indeed. 

The other communication challenge is to ensure that the people running the programme are actually aware of all the lessons James Plunkett’s blog refers to; from what we have seen in some areas across Wales I’d say that awareness is patchy at best and at worst, almost none of them do (or don’t care).

Unsurprisingly, Pride in Place has not been universally welcomed in Wales. As an area of devolved policy, regeneration sits uneasily alongside direct UK Government spending and involvement.

I have mixed feelings about this; the strategy’s development in Whitehall inevitably means that policy lessons are very largely drawn from England, with relatively tokenistic inputs from the devolved nations. It also disconnects Pride in Place from Welsh Government regeneration efforts; underlined by the obvious sense within Welsh Government that this is not an area the UK Government should be involved in. In practice, this lack of alignment makes policy collaboration harder,which is politically understandable but decidedly unhelpful “on the ground”.

There is also the question of scale. The Wales Community Assets Index (WCAI) was based on identifying much smaller populations and communities than the 10,000 typically identified for Pride in Place areas. The risk is clear: the tool is highly likely to be misused as a targeting tool outside bigger cities; indeed, UK Government regeneration schemes seem to be remarkably good at omitting the smaller Welsh post-industrial settlements where so much poverty and deprivation is often found.

However on the flip side, the policy analysis behind Pride in Place is a lot richer and more sophisticated than anything that Welsh Government could produce. The vision pictured for genuine collaboration between local authorities and community organisations – playing to the complementary strengths of both – is very welcome, particularly in a regeneration context where that balance has been so elusive before. A lot of that is down to capacity and the numbers of civil servants working on policy, but it's also down to culture and the splitting of “regeneration” and “community” within Welsh Government – with the former defaulting to a “local government first” mindset – precisely the approach that Pride in Place rejects.

Still, scepticism lingers. Over the summer, Building Communities Trust (BCT) met with some 250 community based organisations at fifteen in person events and four online ones, to discuss their aspirations for the future ahead of next year’s Senedd elections.

The quality of relationships with the public sector came out as strongly negative and consistently poor. In large part this was due to poor or even non-existent communications, whereby neither side had the capacity to effectively engage with the other. And if stretched finances reduce collaboration (and they do in most places) they also lead to unplanned duplication and may lead some councils to see Pride in Place funding as an easy replacement for funds lost from central government (there are some signs of this in Neighbourhood Plans) - though this risk may be even bigger in England.

The other big challenge for a programme like Pride in Place will be sustainability. While long term investment in neighbourhood projects is welcome – and the programme has a healthy mix of revenue and capital funding – lasting impact depends on what follows this funding. Sustaining benefits will require community led models, social enterprises and a deliberate effort to integrate local partners including councils and health bodies, to maximise the use of resources. Furthermore, success will hinge on strong community voices to ensure the credibility and ensure that programmes address real concerns locally.

In theory, this should be easier in Wales than in England, a much smaller country with inevitably closer relations and “partnership working” enshrined in countless processes. In practice, current disconnects at both national government and (in some cases) local community level don’t give grounds for optimism.

There will certainly be areas where good council/community relations, effective listening and communications, and reasonable local capacity across partners help produce stronger communities, but without clearer national leadership this is unlikely to be widespread.

For Pride in Place to succeed in Wales, two things are essential: genuine cooperation between Cardiff and Whitehall to ensure regeneration strategies are genuinely in sync with each other and a clear emphasis from Welsh Government on the importance of community voices in developing local regeneration and ensuring that this is a common approach across the country as far as they can. Both are entirely achievable.

I’m just not holding my breath…